This was my first trip to the Prince Turki bin Abdul Aziz Stadium, home to second tier Al-Riyadh. After picking up some drinks and snacks from a supermarket opposite I wandered into the main stadium only to be directed to the practice ground that was tagged on to one end. I was fine with that though as it meant that I’d be able to tick off the auxiliary pitch and then return to the stadium proper for a future first team fixture.
The game was taking place on a grass pitch with three rows of seats along one side. At the time I arrived there were only a handful of people there, possibly because of the lack of shade. As the game progressed the crowd swelled to around two hundred. Order was maintained by a few stewards and seven policemen, which struck me as a little excessive.
A couple of families sat down near me but were soon moved to the other end of the seating leaving my area as one for men only. This was my first experience of enforced segregation and it seemed over the top. If the families had been uncomfortable where they were then they could easily have instigated a move themselves.
Just as some welcome cloud cover arrived midway through the first half, Sudair opened the scoring. I didn’t see the move finished off as a big bloke was climbing over the back of a seat between me and the far goal, but the subsequent celebrations revealed that a fair proportion of the attendees were supporting the visitors.
The second half was quite fractious with lots of niggly fouls, plenty of injury faking and a few flare-ups between the players that seemed more for effect than to settle any particular grievance. The actions of the players served to fire up the crowd with some of the Sudair fans on the receiving end of a warning from a steward for standing and chanting.
Al-Riyadh pressed hard for an equalizer but with two minutes to go Sudair broke clear and their striker tucked his chance away to clinch the win. Hopefully I’ll be back for a game at the main stadium before long.
I’d planned to go to two games this day, but on arriving at the Prince Faisal bin Fahd ground near to where I’m staying I got the now familiar knockback with the news that no matter what my app said, the game in question was somewhere else.
That meant I had far too much time before the evening match and so I had a look for something to do along the route. I settled for a visit to the Kingdom Tower, which is actually very tall buildings linked by a walkway at the top.
At the bottom is a hotel and three floors of shops and food outlets. A couple of lifts took me close to a hundred floors up into the air where I paid fifteen quid to access the walkway. The fella selling the ticket warned me that a sandstorm meant that the views were crap, but what do you do? I was there and unlikely to go back so a crap view was better than no view.
Everything was beige, or more accurately, sand coloured. That seems to be a theme anyway in Riyadh where there is little variation in building colour. I could see for a mile or so but on a clear day there would have been much better views.
After taking advantage of the food court, I caught a cab to the Irqah stadium for a second division (third tier) match between Al-Shoaib and Al-Ansar. It was a small ground with an artificial pitch and four rows of seating along one side. Sadly, there was a fence between the seats and the pitch and with fences also cordoning off the entrance from the dressing rooms it meant that when the action was taking place in some areas at the other end of the pitch I had to watch through three separate fences.
It was very cold. I know I should expect that in the evening in Saudi Arabia, but I still can’t seem to grasp that it won’t be red hot all the time. As I was only in a tee-shirt I cast envious glances at the tracky tops discarded by the players after the warm up. Surely they could have spared one of them. As so often happens I was given a couple of bottles of water, which was very kind, but I’d much rather have had the opportunity to buy a coffee.
There weren’t too many fans there. A couple of old blokes, some squad players and the odd family member made up most of the crowd. A small group of ultras with six drums between them created an atmosphere that felt a little over the top for the fixture. Maybe all that drumming was just to keep warm.
It was a fairly even game. Al-Shoaib went a goal up in the first half and hung on for the points. At the next evening match I’ll be taking a jumper.
With the exception of the one age-group game, all of my fixtures in Saudi Arabia so far have been between top-tier Saudi Pro-League sides or else Super Cup games featuring foreign clubs. I’ve been using the Goalzz website to try and find something a little further down their pyramid and it threw up a game in the Second Division, which is actually the third tier.
The game was listed as being at the Prince Faisel bin Fahd Stadium near to where I’m staying and whilst I’d have preferred to tick off a new ground, I was happy enough with the prospect of seeing a game that needed just a ten-minute walk to get there.
I’d expected the fixture to take place on the practice pitch where I’d seen an Under-17 match a week earlier, but there was nothing going on there. I continued around the perimeter to the main entrance and, after nodding confidently at the security guard, made my way inside. He called me back almost immediately and asked where I was going. He knew nothing about a football game, but with it being third tier I hadn’t really expected that he would.
There was another fella there too, sat in his car, and the guard mentioned that he was also there for a non-existent football fixture. By this time I was starting to grasp that there really wasn’t anything going on at the stadium and it looked as if I was in for a quiet afternoon.
Fortunately, the bloke in the car had an inkling as to what had happened and he confirmed that the game was at a different location to the one that Goalzz had advised. With the security guard translating, we established that the distance was too far to walk and that I should hop in to the car.
We set off for the new location with the language barrier limiting our conversation to exchanging our nationalities and confirming that we both thought that football was good. Every now and then he would make a call and after some coaching from whoever he was speaking to in Arabic, he would tell me in English that we would soon be at the ground.
Twenty minutes and around twenty kilometres later we spotted the floodlights and he pulled into the car park of the Al-Diriyah Sporting Club. There weren’t any spaces close to the entrance gate and so my new Saudi friend temporarily stopped right outside the entrance to let me out before finding somewhere to leave the car. I gestured that I’d see him inside and left him to it. That was the last that I saw of him.
All I can conclude is that between them, he and the security guard had decided that I should see the game at the correct stadium and he had volunteered to drive me there. Quite why he didn’t want to see it himself, I’ve no idea. It was an incredibly generous action. If I’d realized that was what he was doing I’d have thanked him a lot more profusely than I did and offered him some petrol money. I’ve found the Saudi people that I’ve met so far to be largely very kind and helpful. I’m not sure many people would drive what may have been a forty-kilometre round trip to help a stranger who didn’t even speak his language.
Once inside I sat down on a raised area along the side of the pitch. It seemed as if I was in the section reserved for visitors Al-Sadd and in addition to a handful of fans at least two of their coaching staff were in there, perhaps as an overspill from the bench.
Home side Al-Draih were in maroon, with Al-Sadd in a grey kit. Whilst I’d missed the first twenty-five minutes, I hadn’t missed any goals. Nobody came close to breaking the deadlock in the remainder of the first half and it was still goalless at the break.
At half-time I went to look for the toilets. I try to be fairly careful where I wander into over here as I don’t want to disrupt anyone praying and it’s not always easy to initially spot the difference between the prayer rooms and the toilets. I found the right place though and in the absence of any urinals headed into one of the cubicles.
A lot of the toilets have bowls but this one was a more traditional hole in the ground. As I was only having a slash I was fine with that. I wouldn’t want to use one for a crap though other than in emergencies as I’m not really supple enough for squatting these days. I was mid-flow before I noticed the overhead shower and the shampoo bottle in the corner. Bugger. I was pissing in a shower. I must admit it is something that I may have done before, but it’s the first time I’ve done it fully clothed. If anyone realized what I was up to they were polite enough not to mention it.
In the second half I moved around a bit, firstly to the three steps of terracing behind one of the goals. The terracing ran around three sides of the ground, with the other side having the section from which I’d watched in the first half. That side also had an equivalent section for the home fans and a posh covered stand in the middle for people who no doubt rarely piss in the shower.
I spent a short time in with the Al-Draih fans but their drums and chanting through a microphone and amp soon had me headed back to the relative calm of the away section.
Not a great deal happened on the pitch until ten minutes from time when a home corner was acrobatically turned in at the near post. That lead to some top-level timewasting from Al-Draih, particularly from their goalie and trainer who jogged at slower than walking pace whenever he was called upon.
The situation infuriated the Al-Sadd bench, who took it in turns to berate the officials as if they had a rota. The players were little better with lots of dissent and some manhandling of the ref. There was just the one goal in it at the end and the visitors were still objecting as I headed out to look for a taxi to take me back into town.
Trail of the Lion King 