We went and checked out a bit of J-soccer on Sunday. Our local side Vegalta Sendai's home stadium is only 10 minutes' walk from our place, and the team is well known for having super-supportive fans. Vegalta were playing Consadole Sapporo, from Hokkaido, and after a Sapporo team beat Sendai's baseball team, the Rakuten Golden Eagles, the night before, the crowd were hungry for a little payback.
In fact, the crowd were very nearly the best thing about the experience. The wall of yellow-shirted fans sang, chanted, waved giant flags and whirled their scarves around non-stop for 90 minutes, singing altered versions of "Take Me Home, Country Roads", "Blitzkrieg Bop", "I Was Made For Loving You" and "We're Not Gonna Take It", complete with chroeographed hand actions. Brilliant.
Vegalta won 1-0 thanks to a nice touch from super substitute Yakahara Takayuki, although both teams blew several great opportunities to score. Still, lots of chances means an exciting game, and we won, so we were pretty happy.
Highlights are on Youtube! (Is there nothing the internet can't do?)
Vegalta are sitting in second place on the J-League second division table, with the top three teams to be promoted to div one automatically at the end of the season (with only four games still to play). With West Ham currently wallowing in the depths of the English Premiership table, at least I'm supporting one successful team...
2 comments:
Awesome. Would have loved to seen and heard this!! An altered version of Blitzkrieg Bop, sports stadium style!!
They mostly just shout "Sen! dai! let's go!" a lot. No verses, sadly.
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