Match 11 -- England v. Chile

Saturday, 23 September 2023

My eleventh match, and the 21st of the tournament, was England v. Chile in Lille.

This was my first time seeing Chile, and my second seeing England. 

Stade Pierre Mauroy

Fantastic seats. The fifth row, right in the middle of the pitch. I suppose if you continued the mid-field line (the 50-yard line in American football terms) it would pass through the seat to my right, so I wasn't quite at the middle.

Midfield selfie

Kickoff

A big guy in an Ireland shirt sat down next to me just before the match started. He greeted me in English. Something like "Good evening, sir." And then he started talking to the other people in his party. The stadium was loud, and I had earplugs in, so it took me a bit to figure out what he was saying. Irish jersey; spoke English to me; in France; watching England v. Chile. I never would have expected German! We talked a bit (in English) in the second half. His group is only in France for the one match. Rugby isn't very big in Germany, but he is a passionate fan.  

England were heavily favored. [I guess I'm adopting the European use of the plural verb for sports teams. 😀 ] Chile started out looking like they'd keep pace, holding England scoreless for the first twenty minutes. But then it all broke loose. England scored five tries in the next twenty minutes and took a 31-0 lead into halftime. And they didn't let up in the second half. Six more tries, for a final score of 71-0.

England's fullback, Henry Arundell, scored five of the tries. That's one short of the World Cup record. Mark Ellis of New Zealand score six tries in New Zealand's 145-17 defeat of Japan in 1995

The Lille Metro folks did another bang-up job of using ropes to guide the queue at the Metro station. They nabbed a few people climbing over the rope and pushed them back where they belonged. (I would have preferred to see the miscreants sent all the way to the back of the line.) But the security dudes missed a couple of fans who jumped over the rope near me. I think they timed it when the nearest security guys were each looking the other way. A bunch of us in the queue told them to go back but they just pretended to not understand us. (They ended up right behind me and spoke more-than-adequate English later. 😠 )

On the Metro, I ended up all the way against the end of the car with a couple of England supporters. We had a nice conversation. One of them even was scrolling through news on his phone and commented about a story about Rand Paul and John Fetterman and a congressional dress code kerfuffle. I didn't expect to talk American politics with Englishmen on a French subway. But I told them that my cousin is in the US House of Representatives and they thought that was really cool.

I had planned to get off at an earlier stop than last time, just to have a different walk back to the hotel. But being all the way in the corner, it was easier to just wait until a large crowd got off, even though it was three stops further than planned. 

...doug