Trail of the Lion King

Our latest weekend trip found us in Macau. It’s a destination that appears to exist for the purpose of providing somewhere handy for the nearby Chinese to gamble. I’m fairly sure that very few of them booked their trip primarily to take in a local third division game of football.

Jen and I had been to Macau before, a few years ago, and she’d also been before we met. Each time the place has been busier as more plane loads of visitors arrive from mainland China and the day trippers pop across from Hong Kong.

As we were staying overnight I’d hoped that the streets would empty later on as some folks caught their ferry home and others headed for the casinos, but it seemed equally hectic whatever the time of day.

The game was early afternoon and as it looked like rain Jen was happy not to bother going. In the end though it was merely overcast and breezy which I reckon is just about perfect weather for this part of the world.

My taxi driver overshot the Macau University of Science and Technology Stadium and so I had to backtrack to the ground on foot and missed the first ten minutes.

I was initially directed back out of the entrance that had delivered me to the side of the pitch and I re-entered a little further along and took a seat upstairs in the main stand. There was a grass pitch with a running track and the stadium was surrounded by skyscrapers.

It wasn’t a bad ground for a third division game. Can you even believe Macau has three divisions? The place amounts to less than twelve square miles. There was just the one stand and just the two spectators, me and a girl that I assumed was keeping an eye on her boyfriend for ninety minutes. I hoped that, whichever one he was, he would get himself sent off so that she’d clear off and I could be the only person in attendance.

Play was quite pedestrian with Papatudo happy to stroke the ball around at the back and opponents Artilheiros equally content to wait until their territory was threatened before paying much attention. The home side looked at lot older with some of their players probably well into their forties. I’d guess that most of them were of Portuguese ancestry whilst the visitors appeared much younger and probably from a Chinese background.

The old blokes took the lead seventeen minutes in when a long shot that bounced a couple of times eluded the Artilheiros goalie who, no doubt anticipating a somewhat more forceful effort, had already completed his dive before the ball skipped over him and into the net.

I hadn’t noticed that the away team didn’t have any subs in the dugout until one turned up after half an hour. A second reserve appeared just as half-time approached. Perhaps they’d thought it was a three o’clock kick-off.

Artilheiros should have equalised a minute before the break, but the elderly Portuguese keeper pulled off a save, that to be frank, he didn’t look anything like agile enough to do.

The girl who had been watching her boyfriend cleared off at half-time leaving me as the only spectator. How good is that? Both teams now had substitutes to go with their managers. There were half a dozen ball boys dotted around the running track and two coppers guarding the entrance below me. We even had a fourth official. And yet, just the one spectator, me. I often feel a bit special and at that moment, just for a while, I suppose I was.

A few minutes into the second half my current brand of specialness came to an end as a couple wandered in and took seats to my right. They didn’t seem to have much interest in the game and had probably earmarked the ground as somewhere with a little more privacy for a snog than at their parents houses.

The original girl returned a few minutes later with a cup of coffee dangling in a polythene bag and caused me to wonder how well the players would cope with pressure of having four pairs of eyes on them. Not very well was the answer, or at least it was in the case of Papatudo as a defensive lapse allowed Artilheiros to equalise with a nicely taken half-volley.

The weight of expectation arising from the big attendance told further on the hour when one of the visiting strikers waltzed past an over-ambitious offside trap and knocked the ball in off the post.

It was looking desperate for the Portuguese and their frustration showed as one of them had a shot directly from the restart. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that ploy work in five a side, never mind a proper game. Plan C involved them warming up their subs, two of whom might very well have been in their fifties and the other, whilst perhaps being of an age that you’d expect a footballer to be, didn’t seem overly comfortable with a ball at his feet. It didn’t look promising for the home side.

With twenty minutes left the crowd swelled to six as another couple joined the existing one. I presumed that they all knew each other as they had around a thousand empty seats to choose from.

The additional support made all the difference as shortly after their arrival the home defender who had ballsed up for the first Artilheiros goal managed to stab the ball home in a goalmouth scramble. All the subs got onto the pitch in the final few minutes, as you’d hope they would do, but there were no more goals and the game finished two each.

The brief spell during which I was the lone spectator wasn’t the only noteworthy aspect of the game. The stadium was the three hundredth different ground that I’ve watched a ‘proper’ game at. ‘Proper’ is subjective for ground hoppers. In my world a ground counts if it’s hosting an eleven a side game of football with a ref and two linesman. I’m not fussed about the fourth official as they didn’t exist when I started watching football. I could probably forgive a missing corner flag or two as well.

It’s taken forty-four years to reach this stage, with the first hundred grounds taking thirty-four years, the second a further six years and the last ton coming in just four. For what it’s worth, it has spanned forty-one different countries and with games in front of crowds that ranged from close to a hundred thousand down to, on this one occasion, just me.