Well as some of you may know I was going to Olympic Football on Thursday and so to hear of the madness of showing South Korean flag for North Korea does not make us look good. It has been said since it was London who supplied the video (it wasn't done by scottish officials), but it was still Glasgow it happenned in. For the record I saw no graphics like that in Hampden when listing the teams for the 2 games and as you can see I had a big screen quite near me.
So my day, I left home in Auchinleck at 850 bus (even though it was a few minutes late). We got to Buchanan Bus Station 1025, I found out where the shuttle bus was (the other end of station) and walked down. We stopped at gates and got told by a very nice man just to wait to get in quee. I thought there would have been another way to get to quee, the other stairs around platform 14/15 for example. We got to back of quee quite quickly and only had to wait a few minutes while the steward entertained us. A real great man. There was #london2012 signage there. We finally got moved onto those stops and got on bus quickly. It was filling buses (free) and letting them go (I expect locog are paying for these buses). We left about 10.45 and took us about 30 minutes to get to drop off point.
We walked along to park and passed the fast food vans (remember how much liquid you could take in, 100ml) so just overtook them. The got the security checks. Put my stuff in a clear plastic bag, got patted down by Strathclyde Police and then put stuff back in my pockets and headed into ground. It was about 11.25. There was lots of Stewards outside directing people to get to stadium as well.
I got up to where I was sitting g5 and row v. I thought I was going to be quite high up, I wasnt, only about 20+ rows from front for my £20 ticket (which I bought). Before when I got to Hampden I went for a Hampden Pie, Pringles and juice and got that for £6.20. I expected that to be worse but there was no quees.
Then we got towards our games. Honduras vs Morocco was a great game. end to end stuff at times I thought. There was 1 of the goalkeepers that had the bruce grobellars about them. It was a very entertaining game. the worst bit was when my phone rang after a goal and with all the noise I wasn't going to answer it. I phoned him back after the first game. You will see above I took a number of photos of that game. It was harder in 2nd game. I didn't go for food inbetween the games but the quees looked terrible. I had tweeted
Sweenyness who was down other end of hampden and he did not like quees.
We got to the Spain vs Japan game and I expected Spain to win, but there was just lots of passing, it was Japan who scored and then Spain got a man sent off and couldn't recover. I would also say japan didn't shove everyone forward when they got the lead, atleast 4/5 still sitting back when doing forward moves. I still thought Japan would score more from the chances they got, but didn't really see Spain doing it, but it was the other end of the pitch.
So well done to Japan and that will be a good group, more interest than thought there would be. The game finished about 4.35 and we got back to buses at about 5pm, there was loads of them, but there was a number of problems.
1. Not enough stewards showing way back to buses. park & ride was right beside pitches, the rest of us 5 minute walk again and basically just people walking across road, not controlled like how we got there. It was controlled once you got to buses. We got a bus which left around 5.25.
2. The road there had rush hour traffic, not just the 37 thousand at Hampden leaving there after the football. That meant a lot of extra traffic over there. Also you get into a slightly quicker part and run into roadworks on way back to Glasgow city centre. That wont help people still to goto Hampden this year, but I am not sure commonwealth games are going there in 2 years. I got back to Buchanan Bus Station 6.20pm. If I had used buses I would have got back to auchinleck 9pm. I chose to head over to train station, get something to eat and get 7.12 to Auchinleck and get back at 8.08pm.
Also later I heard from friend there was no parking for wheelchair users at ground, that is something that can be fixed for next games. I hardly saw any entertainment outside ground apart from steel drums at Toryglen so that should be left for these users.
I am glad I went to it and enjoyed the football I was watching, there is just some tweaking that needs to be done.
I hope you can all enjoy the olympics.
