Pain & Fun

What a sunday morning.... quite a neutral start, first highlight the excellent coffee combined with the fact that my sunday newspapers are already in my letterbox. But than... the sports part of "Sonntagszeitung": Federer in the Wimbledon Final - nice , Cancellara in the "maillot jaune" - nice, the budget of "my" Soccer team: 7-8m CHF - hmmm.... ticketing income: 6.4m, sponsoring income: 4.3m let's add.... 6.4 + 4.3 = 10.7m.....
ALL other clubs in the first Swiss Soccer league have a higher budget than just ticketing & sponsoring income added but my bloody fcsg not... okok, one could say that they need to get rid of some debts. But the truth is that the owners of the new statium make a lot of money and the club which fills the stadium gets the debts... GRRR..... why bother supporting this money-wasting team?
Because it's THE team, green-white, the love of us "East-Enders" of Switzerland - one of the only things we can be proud of (actually... not really).
Hard to explain, hard to understand.
To be honest: I'm actually not proud of my club and it's management at all... but I'm bloody proud of my brother! The missing link? For ages he's now travelling to each and every game of FCSG to comment for a radio-station, more or less without being paid for. Him and his mate Jaan Schaller became kind of cult in St.Gallen and already three years ago the main newspaper of St.Gallen wrote an article about them: "Keine Ahnung von Fussball" pointing out their very special way of commenting games not just focussed on the game but more on the fun.

Jaan Schaller & Lukas Bollhalder

First I thought nobody really listens to them: a "real" soccer fan probably wants 'serious' commenters and everybody else would not listen to them as they couldn't care less about soccer... but it looks like I'm wrong and not the only followers of their show. Even the 'hard-core' supporters have a thread for them on their forum with some funny pictures.
Maybe one day his 'fame' will go beyond the "East-End" of Switzerland and he will not just write in the local newspaper about his parking fines, his balcony, about tipping in the supermarket, the open air or why it sometimes it is better to order fries instead of sausages.
However, I'll not stop supporting him!

My Name: Bollhala and yes, I'm a jackass!

The quote:
The greatest sport ever. PERIOD. Misunderstood by jackasses who have never seen or been to a game.

The truth: I've seen it, iI've been there:

Memorial Day, 25th of May 2009, A beautiful warm evening and you are in NY. So what is your plan tonight? Right, you ignore whatever a reasonable person would suggest (like your girlfriend) and you take a 30min train ride out to the Citi Field in Queens ($2). In the packed train you promise that you'll immediately go back to Manhatten if no tickets below $20 are available.
You'll end up in a long queue in front of a ticket office roughly 2hours before the game starts and you promise again to the reasonable person next to you in the queue that $20 is the max you'll spend for a ticket - you end up paying $69 for one ticket. As a result the reasonable person does not speak to you for the next 3 hours (she pays you a beer though ($7.50)).
The first two hours she can't speak to you as you keep on talking to her: "Serioulsy, that sport is great! What you've seen on TV is not what you will experience now! Baseball is completely different live! Much more exciting than on TV! A happening! You'll have fun! And you might even become a sports-fan! And if not for the sport than for the athmosphere! And for the food! You'll see there's a huge variety of food available! And I read in the program that the Broadway-Cast of West Side Story will sing the anthem before the game!" - It's true, that's what I read - even 5mins before the anthem it said it on the big scoreboard (unf. I was too late to take the pic of it...)

However, the guy who wrote the program as well as the guy responsible for the scoreboard both forgot (like me) that on Memorial Day only one thing counts: the soldiers and the respect for the veterans.
As a result a soldier sang the anthem and the line up was broadcasted live from soldiers in iraq (their relatives got the chance to greet them live out of the stadium - all shown on the huge screen). A few airforce-planes flew over the Citi Field before the game and during the game you saw in every break during the 9 innings members of the army on the screens.


The seventh inning however apparently needed to be streched and Seargeant Elizabeth Quinones sang us the "Amazing Graze" (at least that's the song I recall).


What else can I remember? 3 more beers (3*$7.5 - needed to show the ID twice to proof my age (yeeha)), 1 hotdog ($4.50). Hotdogs & Burgers were the only food available if you wanted to queue for less than 30mins (didn't make the reasonable person joining me on that game happier). The game? Ended up 5-2 for the Mets which means you saw seven times within those 3.5 hours (most probably it took longer) a guy running around the bases. The rest of the time one team stood still on the field while two guys were throwing the ball to eachother and a guy stood between them swinging a stick but only hitting air or if hitting the ball the ball did not go into the field (and very rarely got into the field but landed directly in the glove of a guy standing there - which somehow was bad for the stick swinging guy). The stadium was full though (more than 40'000 people) and the crowd was screaming, waving, clapping and leaving 20mins before the game ended.... (A probably more accurate summary can be found here).
The atmosphere however was not even close to a 2nd league soccer game in St.Gallen...
At the end I fully understood why the reasonable person was pissed off of that evening before it even started... she (once more) was 100% right!

Promised

Yes Gena,



I promise to visit you in Singapore if you stay there at least until the 7th of May 2011!



Have fun and try not to beat the whole SG Tradingfloor bloody! One bleeding trader here in CH was enough!



I miss you!



Lars

Per Carlo II ... and for Aprkus

the suspenders are not yet properly in place and the shoes to small.... and the front is only visible on the 23rd!