Part 5/5 of Olympic Events: Women's Soccer (footbol)

As my Olympic experience came to a close, I was able to attend one last event. The semi-final soccer match between Japan and France held in the historic Wembley Park. If you may remember from my past posts, I attended and was given a tour of Wembley about 5 weeks prior to this experience. So, naturally I compared the stadium pre-gameday to what I was seeing during the chaos of 80,000 fans filling the seats (or at least what I thought). I'll take you through some of my memories. 

At the Tube Station!

To get to Wembley Park, you must take the infamous Tube outside the city center. So, with only few people actually driving to the game, each tube that pulls up to the arena is wall-to-wall busy with fans. Luckily I decided to get to the game a little bit early and found the station just filling up. As I turned the corner out of the station and onto the gorgeous promenade walking up to the newly-refurbished Wembley Park I saw what could only be described as a literal sea of people.

Surprisingly, the lines moved fast. 

After fighting through the immense amount of humans lining the promenade, squeezing through security, and up five floors to my seats I discovered the breathtaking view of not only a gorgeous stadium, but a stadium filled with the world's spectators.

They may seem like crappy seats, but we were able to see everything extremely clear.

The flags of the participating nations in soccer at the Olympics.

 As I foreshadowed earlier, I expected the stadium to be completely full. However due to sponsors and corporations with tickets allotted to them by LOCOG (the organizing committee for the Olympics), no one showed up. Yes, 70,000 spectators is still astonishing, but to see sections of the stadium simply empty due to lack of interest through sponsors easily frustrated those in London and from the rest of the world. This issue actually became a very controversial subject that headlined many local London newspapers.

Start of the 2nd half.

After cheering for a good game, Japan went on to win 2-1. France completely outplayed the Japanese, but when the opportunity was in front of them, they failed to capitalize...exhibited brilliantly in a penalty kick missed because of poor aim, not due to a goalie stopping the ball. Japan went on to the finals to play the U.S. in the largest attended women's soccer game in the history of the world. I guess those sponsors all of a sudden became interested once the U.S. was involved.

On the way out we decided to take a train and head to The Hard Rock Cafe to watch the U.S. Semifinal game versus Canada. This game ended up being lauded as one of the best matches in the history of Women's Soccer with the U.S. team winning 4-3 in extra time.

The women's soccer experience was not my favorite event to attend, but I believe this is solely due to the reason of my other events being something completely new and interesting to me. As much as I love soccer (which honestly, I do) I had a hard time finding a team to root for and so I ended up cheering with some locals for Team GB (Great Britain)....but as they like to call it: Team Garlic Bread. In the next couple days I will be able to summarize my trip and my closing remarks for my next step in my future.