CHELSEA CHELSEA !!!

Last night I braved a 2 hour jam just to get to Shah Alam stadium for the Chelsea match.

Yes I left KL City at 7.00PM and I reached the stadium only at 9.00PM. And when I did, I had the hardest time trying to find some people that I was supposed to give my Heineken sponsored tickets to.

Why?

Well because we all happily agreed
"I'll call you when I get there then we meet up".

Only to find that the phone lines were jammed when we got there, probably because there were just waaayyy too many people there at one spot.

Parking there was tough too.

After going round and round I couldn't find a place and I happened to notice that most people started double-parking.
Hence I decided that it was a situation where you either double-parked or BE double-parked...

I came back later that night that in spite of me double-parking someone, I myself got triple-parked so the person I double-parked got quadruple-parked.

Yes, there were 4 layers or cars!
By the time I got settled down and found Abby to pass her the tickets, I had already missed the entire first half of the match but it didn't seem like I was the only one.

There were a lot of other people there going in during half-time which must mean to me that everyone was stuck in the jam going there as well.

Some more just before we were about to go in, the bloggers I were with did the typical thing...

"Come come take picture take picture"
And we took that badly taken picture by KY.

Woi KY!

We eventually rushed inside the stadium and struggled to get a seat before the second half started.

I have to say this about my first LIVE football experience. The view is a lot better on TV thanks to guys like this who get to stand so near the field with camera lenses so huge you could probably see through walls with them.

But the thing about a LIVE match is... the 40,000-strong crowd and the way everyone cheered.My gosh.. it's like you've never heard anything like that before, 40,000 people in a go screaming or sighing.
I sat and watched the match for a while. From where I was seated, I couldn't recognize who was who on the field but one thing really impressed me.

Now everyone before the match was under the impression that before the match, Chelsea was going to beat the Malaysian team so bad there wasn't even any hope. Yet, in the crowd that I was in I saw some very hard-core Malaysian supporters (and also some hard-core Man Utd fans that looked really out of place where they were).

These were people who were so into the game and supporting the Malaysian team so much they cheered really loudly at any attempt any of the Malaysian players had at scoring a goal. Made me feel proud for a minute there, that our general Malaysian crowd, is still very patriotic.

Only funny thing there is that they threw away our water bottles but allowed everyone in the crowd to keep their ciggys to smoke so the crowd was like a freakin chimney and Sam who was sitting on my left was extremely agitated by the smoke.
Though she didn't really show it in this pic.

Seated on my right was Audrey who wasn't exactly cheering away.

We left the match 5 minutes before full-time to avoid the leaving crowd and some of us headed off to McDs in Subang for supper.

At supper were Eri, Cindy from MDG, Kenny, Ringo and KY too.

We sat at McDs and chatted till the wee hours of the morning which was when I said
"Okay guys.. time to go.... I need to work tomorrow morning".

And bloggers being bloggers.. *sigh*

Our exit took half an hour because everyone kept going
"Wait wait take picture take picture!!!"

I have to thank Heineken a million times for sponsoring us the wonderful tickets for this great experience.

Thanks Heineken. I shall drink more BEER!!!