Last night Sheri and I went to RFK stadium and watched the U.S. national soccer team trounce the Cuban national team. The final score was 6-1. The score is misleading in that the game was not nearly as close as a 6-1 score might reflect.

It was a drumming. The Cubans weren’t very good. Two of the players evidently defected before the game and were nowhere to be seen.

You know what else took a drumming?  My wallet.  We paid $50 each for our tickets up in section 446.  That doesn’t include the $18.20 “convenience charge” Ticketmaster charged me for buying two tickets.  It also doesn’t include the $4 processing charge or the $4.75 they charged me for the convenience of printing the tickets with my own printer using my own ink.  We also had to pay $15 to park in a poorly maintained, unlit parking lot next to the stadium.

The stadium had a massive amount of empty seats.  The announced attendance was 20,293. If there were that many people there, many of them must have been dressed up as faded burgundy and gold plastic seats covered with bird droppings. Maybe if they charged a lot less for the tickets, more people would have attended. Maybe.

The spectators sitting in the lower level did their best to make up for all of the empty seats. They beat drums. They blew whistles. They wore American flags as capes. They screamed and yelled and tried their best to draw attention to themselves. Mostly, they were just annoying. I’d like to think that most people were at the game last night to watch world-class soccer, not to see a bunch of basement living dorks pretending to be soccer hooligans.

You know what’s dumber then spending $8 on a Bud Light? Throwing that $8 Bud Light high up in the air, covering you and your fellow spectators in beer every time the U.S. team scores. There were some in the lower section doing that.

For some unknown reason, some in the lower section would also light smoke bombs after the U.S. team would score. Smoke bombs? I don’t know a lot about smoke bombs. I do know they stink. This made me wonder why they even bothered searching people’s bags when entering the stadium if some are allowed to bring in smoke bombs.

I think I’d rather just watch soccer on TV. It’s cheaper, nobody is setting off smoke bombs, and nobody is throwing beer in the air. In my home, beer is for drinking, not for liquid confetti.