Football

By football I mean soccer. During this most recent weekend, I was able to go to the Uganda national football team’s match against Benin. This game was Uganda’s last chance to qualify for the 2010 World Cup. I’ve been told that Uganda needed to win by at least five goals to qualify, and others have said that they simply needed to win while Angola needed to draw with or lose to Niger in order to qualify. Unfortunately, neither scenario came to pass. While Uganda did beat Benin 2 – 1, Angola won against Niger 3 – 1. Thus, Uganda’s hopes of qualifying for the next World Cup are no more. But, it was a very exciting game, and a win at home which was fun to experience. And boy, did we have great seats! (by we I mean myself and the gaggle of other foreigners I went to the game with) We opted for the slightly more expensive tickets, which were 20,000 Ush rather than 10,000 ($12 versus $6), in an effort to minimize our chances of being robbed. We got to the game about two hours before kick off, and found seats right on the midfield line, in the shade, and right in front of some nice looking couches which looked like they were there to seat someone of high political status. It turned out that the fancy couches were there for a former Ugandan president, Godfrey Binaisa. Binaisa was president for about eight months shortly after Idi Amin was exiled. Another thing which made the whole experience even more fun was that I was handed a plastic horn/bugle/trumpet loud noisemaker type thing on my way into the stadium. I was blasting away on that thing until I just about passed out. In the end it was a great day. Uganda won, no one in our party was robbed, and we made it home to Jinja without any difficulty.