I\u2019ve been alive for 57 years and covering sports for nearly two decades, and even in my non-sports-covering years, I have been fortunate enough to have the connections, resources, and desire to experience some really cool sporting events. In fact, there aren\u2019t many events left to complete my bucket list. However, until Tuesday, I\u2019d never attended a World Cup soccer match.<\/p>\n
That changed on Tuesday, when I had an opportunity to attend Portugal\u2019s 5-0 win over Uzbekistan at Houston Stadium (which is what FIFA is forcing us to call Reliant Stadium during the World Cup, and to be clear, they\u2019re doing that in every World Cup city). While the game itself was lopsided, the experience exceeded every expectation I had going in, and I had VERY high expectations.\u00a0<\/p>\n
If you\u2019ve had a chance to attend a World Cup match, then you already know, but if you haven\u2019t attended a World Cup match, and you get offered a chance to go, or have the means to buy an increasingly expensive ticket, I\u2019d highly recommend it. These are my big four takeaways from my Tuesday afternoon at Houston Stadium:<\/p>\n
4. The atmosphere, wire to wire, is the best I\u2019ve experienced with any sport<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been to some awesome football games, some iconic basketball games, and about 200 baseball games. I\u2019ve never been to an event with the sustained energy in the building like the match on Tuesday. Keep in mind, it was never a close game either! Still, it was 90-plus minutes of chants, songs, and loud cheering. (I\u2019ll ignore the lame \u201cwave\u201d that got going in the second half.) Unlike every Texans game, the stands were full ten minutes before kickoff, a benchmark that typically takes a quarter and a half of a Texans game to occur. The pomp and circumstance of the two teams entering the dojo was downright regal, with both teams\u2019 national anthems having a scintillating, loud aura. Speaking of aura\u2026..<\/p>\n
3. I watched Ronaldo score two goals, and the kids are right \u2014 AURA is fun!<\/p>\n
Tuesday\u2019s match will likely be my only World Cup match I attend during this tournament, and not because I don\u2019t want to attend more games, but I have a vacation coming up. Knowing that, I was excited to get to see one of the sport\u2019s icons, Cristiano Ronaldo, in what may be his last World Cup (NOTE: He\u2019s 41 years old.). I was even more excited to see him score two goals, as Ronaldo had not tallied a goal in his five previous World Cup games, going back to 2022. When Ronaldo scored the first goal of the game at around the four minute mark, the stadium exploded like \u201cThe Rock\u2019s\u201d entrance music just unexpectedly played at a WWE event in 1998. (If you don\u2019t get the analogy, here\u2019s the translation \u2014 IT WAS EARTH-SHAKING LEVEL LOUD.) Ronaldo has what the kids call \u201caura,\u201d no doubt.<\/p>\n
2. Speaking of aura, I had a chance to meet Brazilian legend, Kaka!\u00a0<\/p>\n
I was fortunate enough to sit in Aramco\u2019s suite at Houston Stadium for the game, and one of my suite-mates was Brazilian soccer legend Kaka! My embarrassing story of the day occurred when I introduced myself to Kaka\u2026.and asked \u201cso, what\u2019s your name?\u201d Yes, I basically did the soccer equivalent of asking Michael Jordan or LeBron James to introduce themselves to me. That said, Kaka was a delightful human being, and his brother Rodrigo, who doubles as his agent, was downright hilarious! It was enjoyable getting a chance to explain little nuances of, and traditions with, our version of football here in the United States.\u00a0<\/p>\n
1. The sport itself has some real structural advantages over other sports\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is more of a general take about soccer than something specific to Tuesday\u2019s in stadium experience \u2014 I LOVE the fact that soccer matches (a) have a running clock, and (b) generally don\u2019t last more than two hours. The pace of a game is crisp, and leaves you wanting more, in a good way! Put simply, any sporting event with a noon kickoff that has me back on my couch by 2:55 p.m. is sublime. Good work, soccer!\u00a0<\/p>\n
\n\tRelated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been alive for 57 years and covering sports for nearly two decades, and even in my non-sports-covering…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[37274,226,56,58,57,10147,123999,731,3692],"class_list":["post-349764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-fifa","tag-homepage","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-houston-soccer","tag-ronaldo","tag-soccer","tag-world-cup"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}