Many of you have been to a soccer match in person.  Last Thursday, I popped my live soccer match cherry when I attended a match at the Home Depot Center in Carson, CA.  The match was two struggling teams banging heads in the LA Galaxy and Chivas USA.  Galaxy hadn't won a match in about two months and Chivas had lost I think something like their last four matches.  Since the two teams share the same "home" field, Chivas was the designated home team that night.  And rightfully so, the Chivas fans are awesome and incredibly dedicated.  But I'll get to that in a moment.

First, I want some commentary on the Home Depot Center in general.  It's a very, very nice facility.  But there are several issues that bothered me right off the bat.  My seats were outstanding.  I was seated in section 112, which as you can see below, they're pretty damn nice seats.  We were in Row J.

via www.aegtickets.com

We arrived pretty early as I wanted to take pictures of the warm ups.  Well, apparently regular people aren't allowed to bring in a camera with a large lens.  I had my wife's pretty big lens so they turned me away at the ticket gate.  I had to walk all the way back to my car and leave our $1,000 plus camera in the back seat of my car.  I was quite irate.  When I inquired why they forced me to do so, the security guard basically said that only media was allowed to bring in larger lens.  Then shortly thereafter I saw people around me with large lenses taking photos.  They probably weren't as big as my wife's lens, but still, where do they draw the line?  It made me pretty angry to start out the evening.  So if this post is a lot less photogenic than you would've suspected, well, at least you know why.

The other thing is that my nephew wanted a pizza and the pizza oven was broken.  Then I waited in line for about 20 minutes to get Camacho's Nachos which are the best thing they offer to eat at HDC.  I get up to the front of the line and they didn't have bowls to put the nachos in anymore.  I was beginning to think this just wasn't going to be my night in general.

But onto the game.  It was freaking awesome.  The LA Galaxy had experienced quite the disruption over the past week.  Everyone knows about Gullit and Lalas.  The upheaval I think served the team well because they came out blazing in a way that I hadn't seen in months.  If you'd watched any Galaxy games, it would seem like the team would sleepwalk through the first 15-30 minutes routinely.  But there was fire and plenty of movement with the team.  They didn't just sit back and wait for things to come to them.  That led to Landon Donovan giving the Galaxy a 1-0 lead on a beautiful run.  Donovan didn't have a great game, but his highlight was the first Galaxy goal.  The crowd was definitely very tilted in Chivas' favor, but the Galaxy contingent also made their way out and the roar was loud when the Galaxy took the 1-0 lead.

It stood that way until half time.  We decided to take a long walk around the stadium at that point and I was able to finally get my Camacho's Nachos at that point.  Course it meant missing Chivas USA tying up the game because the lines were so ridiculously long.  Since I'm a Galaxy fan, not a big deal any way.

Chivas took the lead shortly thereafter on a very nice shot as the Galaxy had a mental lapse for about 15 minutes.  Other than that, I felt they played very, very well and Alex Gordon scored on a "climb the ladder" header in extra time to give the Galaxy a 2-2 tie in a game they probably should've won.

It was also a nice rivalry game where there was a lot of anger between the sides.  There were elbows flying and someone from Chivas even took a late and very intentional run at Beckham's knees.  Then after the game, the Galaxy taunted the Chivas fans at the endlines with the SuperClasico trophy after Beckham got into a bit of a dust up with Chivas USA coach Preki.

What was amazing to me was to see the length of the pitch and how players worked it and made timed runs and moves.  The things you just can't pick up on television.  The atmosphere was fantastic as well, but it did have me wondering how incredible it would be to see a Premier League match live.  The European fans just seem incredibly energetic and just plain fun.

Interestingly, the biggest news from the evening wasn't Cobi Jones first (and ultimately last) game as head coach.  It was the ominous presence of Bruce Arena that would up overshadowing any result on the field.  But I'll get into that in a post soon enough.

I'll just close this out by saying that I wound up buying tickets to another game later this year.  And this time, I'll bring a smaller lens.  I'd like to actually have some memories besides the ones in my head.