AS ROMA

So two Tuesday's ago on the 16th was Adriano's birthday and a couple days before some of the guys were talking about going to a soccer game. AS Roma happened to be playing that day so a bunch of them went to see how much tickets would be. Well as everything API gets, it began with 6 of us buying tickets, then calling our respective roommates to let them know and of course more and more people found out about it and it ended in about 30 American students trying to get on one bus all wearing various Roma jerseys and t shirts that we had bought earlier that day to show our Roman pride. Which we had to made sure that the tickets were in the Roma fan section of the stadium otherwise we wouldn't have been able to sport our new gear. I, of course, bought my jersey from a street vendor and was so proud that I haggled him down from 10 to 6 euro only to later find out that Mancini, the name on the jersey, was traded to another team last season. Haha, that would happen to me. But everyone said he was a sick player and I figured that it also made me look like a long time fan to have an old jersey.

The game started at 8:15 i think and I didn't get out of class until 6:30 so I had to rush home to change and meet up with people to leave at least an hour before the game started to get there in time. We attempted at splitting into three smaller groups and traveling to the game just so we weren't in such a huge obnoxious group, but would we really be Americans if we weren't? Of course we ended up meeting a group downstairs that took extra long to leave and another group of people once we got on the tram, then arriving at the bus stop we met up with even more people that we didn't know were going also. As annoying as the huge group was it really made it a lot of fun. Once getting to the stadium after talking to an Italian kid on the bus about American football and "real" football the original 6 or 7 of us who bought tickets first realized we weren't sitting in the same section as everyone else but a little further up, which actually made for better seats because you see the field in its entirety. After about 10 minutes into the game we decided to sit down with the rest of the group because they were all together down about 20 rows.

This is me and the birthday boy Adriano.

The game was for the Champions League qualifier and was against some Romanian team that I don't know the name of. All I do know is that it was supposed to be an easy win for us. Roma scored in the first like 20 minutes of the first half and then that was it. The other team had two more goals throughout the game and after they made the first one Roma pretty much fell apart and stopped playing as much offense and needed to work on their defense more. We were bummed that they lost in the end but it was still a lot of fun to see all the hardcore Italian fans yelling and cheering and organizing chants and stuff like that, waving flags and scarfs everywhere to show their team pride.