Match 13 -- Uruguay v. Namibia

Wednesday, 27 September 2023

My 13th match, and the 25th of the tournament, was Uruguay v. Namibia in Lyon.

It was a 5:45 p.m. match, so it was light enough when I arrived to get a photo of the stadium

This was expected to be a close match. Both Uruguay and Namibia get beaten pretty regularly by the top tier nations, but against each other, they should both have a chance.

My seats were the third row from the top, in the corner.

Way up by the roof structure

 

Pre-match warmups

The national anthems

Namibia got out to an early lead, scoring a try in the first three minutes. They stayed in front for the first 54 minutes, leading by as much as 14. Was this going to be Namibia's first ever win at a World Cup? Perhaps not. Uruguay pulled ahead with a Santiago Arata try. That try, and the preceding one, happened while Namibia was short a player because of a yellow card in the 48th minute. 

But Namibia was still within seven points, trailing 26-23. Even if they don't come back to win, they can at least still get a bonus point out of it. (If a team loses by seven or fewer points, they get a bonus point in the pool standings.) Alas, Uruguay scored again in the 67th minute to make it a ten-point difference. Soon after, in the 69th minute, Namibia scored a penalty kick to bring it back to within seven! But five minutes later, Uruguay answered with a penalty kick of their own, denying Namibia the bonus point. The final score was 36-26. 

It wouldn't have been the first bonus point in World Cup competition for Namibia. They earned one in 2015 by losing to Georgia by a single point. But even so, they are such perennial underdogs that the crowd was really pulling for them.

Leaving the stadium had more bottlenecks than Sunday. Maybe because most people left promptly tonight, while on Sunday a lot of Welsh fans stuck around a while. The crowd control was good, but it still took an hour to get out of the stadium, onto the tram, and to the nearest Metro station. 

The section to my left had a lot of kids in it -- or maybe kid-like adults -- and they started throwing paper airplanes to see if they could make it all the way to the field. Several did, including one that got almost to the 22-meter line.

The "winning" paper airplane

...doug