First-Time Experience at an European Football Match - landed at the wrong stands

You go to see your first soccer match in a stadium with live audience and you land up in the wrong stands. what a pity. It happened to me.

Bulgaria Vs Cyprus , 6:00 pm , 1st April , National Stadium Sofia... and we had heard the Manchester United Ace - Mr Dimitar Berbatov is also going to be there we decided to but the tickets. There was a Cypriote in our office and we decided to support his team ( our first mistake to support the visitors). We got our tickets for the games for Gate - 20 meant for the Cypriotes.

Reaching the Stadium at 6 was another story, i would skip that , office day , lots of traffic , cab blocked to go near the stadium etc etc. we finally manage to reach at 6:30. The Cyprus guy had already left with another friend so we were 3 of us. we somehow managed to find gate 20 and showed our tickets and entered shouting Come-on Cyrus .... Buck up... bravo Cyprus.. and when we looked around we saw everyone was staring at us. They were all wearing the Bulgarian Flag. I thought what the heck happened. I quickly called up my Cypriote collegue and he confirmed that the visitors had been moved to gate 24 due to unprecedented crowd. We were scared to death.

Just have a look at the pic in the left. The small crowd cordoned by multiple layers of policing and buffer zone are the visitors. People in Europe take their football game very seriously. We quickly realized the situation and started laughing and shouted .. Bravo Bulgaria... buck up Bulgaria.. and voila Bulgaria scored at that very moment. huh God saved us. The Excitement of the crowd can be seen in the below video. They would have killed us if Cyprus would have scored.

For the rest of the match we just smiled and clicked some photos uploaded at orkut and facebook. It was a damn scary Experience and Berbatov was injured so he didnt even play.

I came to know about a tradition in which the hosts create a fire and smoke near the visitors goal-keeper so as to obstruct his view. It was a great experience overall. We had gone to cheer cyprus but ended up cheering for Bulgaria. For the record score was 2-0. It was actually good that Bulgaria won or else i would not have come out alive.

We headed for a pub after the match and my cyprus collegue was able to join us after 1 hour. when we called him he had this to say. "The police is not allowing us to leave. They are saying after the stadium is clear of all Bulgarian fans and the streets look empty only then it is safe for you to leave. it might take us more than an hour to join u". You can imagine what situation i was in.