Excuse Me, Are You From Uzbekistan?

With the recent conclusion of the World Cup qualifying matches I thought this an appropriate time to tell you about the one and only time I myself have attended one. This was a few years before I settled in England, back when I was not really settled anywhere except for whatever cheap hotel room I had stowed my backpack in for the night.

In the Spring of 1997 while travelling around the Horn of Africa I met a group of British university students in a restaurant in Gondor, Ethiopia. They were all on a study abroad program in nearby Yemen where they were learning Arabic. They had flown over to Ethiopia during a break in their studies. They were all very nice, and as finding fellow English-speakers was a rare treat in that part of the world, I spent several hours with them. They told me about Yemen and I told them what I knew about Ethiopia. Unfortunately there was one important thing I forgot to mention, which was that Ethiopian spaghetti sauce is equal parts onion and chili cooked down to an orange paste (one of the students named Eddie found this out the hard way while we were all talking). Despite this lapse, Eddie and I got along well and we went to explore the famous Debre Berhan Selassie Church the next morning. The following night, the eve of their departure, Eddie gave me his address and phone number in Sana'a and invited me to come stay in their student accommodation if and when I made it to Yemen.

I did make it to Yemen about a month later. After about a week travelling up from Aden through Ta'iz I finally made it to Sana'a. I somehow managed to work a Yemeni payphone well enough to reach Eddit. He came out to the street to direct me to the students' house where I was welcomed and given a mattress on their roof to call my home.

Sana'a was a fascinating city, and I was a bit weary from several months of hard travelling, so I did take advantage of their hospitality a bit more than I really should have. In total I spent almost two weeks with them. It was a fantastic time, though, and I have hundreds of memories from my experiences there: shopping in the the old town, eating saltah (a savoury Yemeni soup) in subterranean restaurants with no women allowed, walking through the forest of mud-brick skyscrapers in the city centre, and chewing the mildly-narcotic qat leaf over tea in the afternoon heat. Perhaps my strangest experience, though, was the day we went to see Yemen take on Uzbekistan in the Group 5 Asia Qualifying match for the 1998 World Cup.

Several of my student friends had decided to go to the match and they asked me along. I didn't know a lot about football at that point in my life - my home town of Atlanta had not had a professional outdoor team for fifteen years - but I went along anyway because I am generally up for anything unusual. Watching Yemen play Uzbekistan seemed unusual enough.

Of course, as a group of westerners we would seem pretty unusual to the Yemeni supporters. We always took care to wear modest clothing when out and about but didn't stand a chance of blending in. For the guys this only resulted in a lot of staring. For western girls, however, it could result in some serious harassment. In a desperate attempt to be anonymous some even tried wearing the head-to-toe black coverings. This did not work because Yemenis were able to identify western girls by the way they walk. The best that could be done was for guys to wear long trousers and the girls generally wore a black shawl around their shoulders covering their arms and neck. Since there was no chance of being inconspicuous, and we were going to a football match, several of the guys wore replica football kits. Steve, one of the more flamboyant students, wore a yellow Brazil top.

The match was to be held at Althawra Sports City Stadium, which was a bowl shaped structure with an athletics track around the pitch and enough rows of concrete to fit up to 30,000 football fans.
View Larger MapAs we arrived in a couple local taxis it was obvious that the stadium was going to be close to full. There was some confusion as we entered - the gate we were supposed to go through was locked and a crowd of people began to press against us. Eventually we found a safe way in on the other side of the stadium. We passed through a tunnel and onto the concourse that ringed the seating area.

Within moments of our emergence from the tunnel, a huge roar rose from the crowd situated above us. Several thousand Yemeni men (and it was only men) were shouting with all their might, and jumping up and down. Some were waiving flags, but many more were shaking enormous photographs of Yemen's president, Ali Abdullah Saleh. To us this appeared a curious way to demonstrate one's patriotism, but effective nonetheless. Anyone who has spent any time with Yemenis can tell you that they are a proud people, so the fact that they wanted to demonstrate their support for the national team in front of a group of westerners was hardly surprising (even if it was a little bit intimidating).

Because there were three women in our group we were required to sit in the family stand. This turned out to be on the exact opposite side of the stadium from where we had entered. As we made our way along the concourse more and more fans rose to their seat to jump and shout and wave pictures of their president. We were like a walking Mexican wave.

The family stand, which was the only part of the stadium that did not appear to be dangerously overcrowded, was a largely empty area behind the opposition bench. There were no more than ten other people in the stand, including a man who had come with his two wives who sat on the same row as me a few feet away. Considering how hard it can be to interest any wife or girlfriend in the beautiful game, getting both wives to come to a match was a considerable acheivement I suppose.

As we watched the two teams warm up Eddie and I discussed who we thought most likely to win. The general consensus was that the Yemeni team lacked height and would struggle. Their one possible advantage was elevation. At 2,200 meters Sana'a is two thirds as far above sea level as La Paz, home of the world's greatest home pitch advantage. Still, the Uzbek team looked large and menacing. Since it had only been independent for a few years at this point, I wasn't really sure what the Uzbek people looked like. However they looked, most of their national team, consisted of tough looking ethnic Russians. There was an Asiatic-looking man and his wife wandering around with a camera taking pictures of the Uzbek players. My guess was that they were ethnic Uzbeks, and from all appearances, were the only travelling fans that day.

The western contingent sitting in the family stand was definitely four-square behind the Yemeni team. Having been in the country nearly a month at this point I had developed a deep affection for Yemen and its people, whose hospitality seems to know no bounds. Unfortunately for us, and for the hoards of presidential picture wavers, the game started badly. The Uzbeks superior size helped them to dominate and at twenty-seven minutes their bearded striker, Numon Khasanov put them a goal ahead.

The crowd, which had previously been much wilder than I had ever experienced before, appeared to verge on a riot. What's more, many of the Yemeni fans were shouting and pointing at the family stand. We all sat silently hoping that Yemen would level the score soon and settle everyone down.

Yemen did not score again and in fact struggled to even create chances. The altitude must have begun to affect the Uzbeks though, because the game devolved into a midfield stalemate. In the second half Yemen finally had some luck when Khasanov, the scorer, was sent off for his second yellow card. I hoped that this would give Yemen the boost they needed to finally penetrate the Uzbek defence.

Because the facilities at Althawra were pretty basic Khasanov simply took his seat with the rest of the Uzbek team after receiving his marching orders. A few minutes later the Jordanian fourth official came over to reprimand him and force him to leave the bench. Khasanov was not happy, but eventually he gave in. Because there was no where else to go, he grabbed a water bottle and walked up into the stands. Since the only area with any space was the family stand, and because this was situated right behind the Uzbek bench anyway, Khasanov plonked himself down two rows in front of me and my fellow westerners.

Despite being a man down the Uzbek defence held. The Yemeni fans became more and more agitated. A few minutes after Khasanov's arrival the man with two wives leaned over to me and said, 'Excuse me, are you from Uzbekistan?'

It was perhaps the most unexpected question I have ever been asked. I was so taken aback that despite the answer being an obvious one it took me several moments to answer him.

'You see, all of these people think you and your friends are from Uzbekistan. No one knows what anyone from Uzbekistan looks like,' he explained.

Suddenly a lot of things I had not understood made sense. The crowds had not gone berserk when we had entered the stadium because they wanted to show the western guests how patriotic they were - they thought we were supporters of the opposing team. The hostile gestures that we assumed were directed at the Uzbek bench (but just not in quite the right direction) had been directed at us. To be fair, it made sense. We were sat right behind the Uzbek team and I was sat a few feet away from their best player. And I didn't know what real Uzbeks looked like any more than the Yemenis did (except that they did not look like me!).

'Guys, this guy says the crowd think we are Uzbeks!'

We didn't really know what to do. We had not thought to bring any pictures of President Seleh to wave around. We tried cheering even harder for any good run of play by the Yemeni footballers, but they weren't giving us much material to work with. Steve gestured frantically at his Brazillian top. The level of noise and agitation kept ratcheting up, however. Suddenly getting out of the ground and back to our accommodation without injury didn't seem like a given. Yemenis had been kind and considerate to a fault in my experience up to that point, but we were facing 30,000 seriously pissed-off Yemenis and that was a different matter.

The good news was that while the average Yemeni is kind and considerate he is also heavily armed. Yemen is perhaps the only country in the world to rival America for rifles per capita. Having grown up in Georgia and recently having lived in Montana, it didn't bother me to see firearms every time I ventured outside. Spectators had not been allowed weapons in the ground, of course, but there were a large contingent of Yemeni soldiers wearing blue urban camouflage and sporting AK-47s. As the game reached the closing stages they headed our way and began to form a perimeter around us.

We should have been terrified, I suppose. I must have been on some level. I think the whole situation was so unbelievable, though, that we didn't fully realise the danger we were in. The soldiers were very professional and disciplined and no one got anywhere near us. I don't think, in truth, anyone really did want to hurt us. I think it was more important to everyone to look like they might hurt us than to actually do anything.

The final whistle blew, and predictably, the crowd bayed angrily in our direction. There was a lot of jabbed fingers and chanting in Arabic. We stayed put, of course, and the soldiers kept their ring around us intact until there were only a handful of other supporters in the ground. Finally they waved to us that we were clear to leave. We stumbled out through the tunnel and into the evening sunshine not really sure if what we had just experienced had been real.

The next day one of the students named Chris asked me if I wanted to accompany him to a shop in the old town bazaar. He wanted to buy a jambiya, which is a curved, ornamental dagger that most Yemeni men wear on the front of their belts. 'This shop's got some really old ones,' Chris told me.

When we arrived the shopkeeper invited us in and sat us down for a cup of tea. Like most men at this hour he had been chewing qat leaves and had a wad of them lodged into his cheek like a half-eaten tennis ball. As we drank the tea he handed Chris jambiyas from their hooks on the wall to admire.

'You were at the football match yesterday, weren't you,' he asked.

We said that yes, we had been.

'I saw you on the television.'

I hadn't realised the match had been televised. I had a vision of a shot of us and a graphic underneath reading, 'Visiting Fans From Uzbekistan.' Would there be more trouble?

This turned out to be an unwarranted worry. I left Yemen four days later without any incident whatsoever. Once the heat of the moment had passed I was not likely to have any trouble anyway. A traveller in Yemen may worry about getting caught up in a civil war, getting kidnapped, or, as I found out, almost sparking a riot at a football match. The most common experience, however, is to encouter a hospitable Yemeni who will greet you with a warm smile and an offer of a cup of tea. Now, if only they could find a physically imposing striker...