Cheerleaders, Celebrities and Fickle Crowds

I watched a couple of the qualification football matches last night at Beijing's Worker's Stadium. First up was USA vs. Nigeria. The US had a player sent off five minutes into the games and struggled to contain an energetic Nigerian side, which eventually triumphed 2-0 despite some last minute heroic efforts by the Americans. At half time the cheerleaders about whom I have heard so much appeared. They danced in with the Olympics mascots, the Friendlies, frenetic pixies leading elephants. Then another group of what appeared to be escapees from the set of "Cats" appeared and did their own routine. Finally, all three groups danced together. Looked very odd to me, but you be the judge. Apologies for the camera work but there was a fair amount of jostling for space to watch, for some reason.

After that I moved around to another seat for the second match, Argentina vs. Serbia. Obviously Argentina are one of the teams to beat, having brought a number of their world famous players such as Lionel Messi. Somehow I found myself in the seating area reserved for athletes (security?) and was surprised to find after a few minutes that the crowd on either side were screaming and pointing in my direction. Hmm, I thought. Flies undone? Nope. See below.

(For the record, this video has been temporarily blocked because of a supposed copyright violation; we'll do what we can to get it back up asap)

As you can see, Mr. Bryant was extremely gracious, posing for photos and signing autographs. As you can also see, the crowd went completely berserk, with much of the attention of that half of the stadium focused on him rather than the game for some time. I did notice that he was holding a Messi shirt and wondered if he might have wandered into the changing room to get it autographed, something you can presumably do if you are him. The Chinese love their celebrity sports stars as passionately as anyone (Kobe received one of the biggest cheers of the night during the opening ceremony when he was shown on the big screen). But the crowd can be remarkably fickle. Take this game as a case in point. There were plenty of Argentina shirts in evidence and blue and white flags painted on faces. The crowd cheered for Argentina lustily and positively bellowed whenever Messi moved into the warm up area. However, Argentina had already qualified for the knock out round (they eventually beat Serbia in a lackluster game) and clearly weren't going to risk an injury on one of their star players. (The Argentinians actually may not have had a choice, having likely promised Messi's club Barcelona they wouldn't play him except in the big games: he had to fight to come out anyway as clubs hate to see their zillion dollar players risking injury for a mere medal.) Anyway, once people began to realize that Messi wasn't going to play, people began to get annoyed and cheer for Serbia. That rapidly deteriorated into booing every time an Argentine touched the ball, a continuous, ugly baying and drumming on seats that echoed around the stadium. This went on for a solid twenty minutes until the final whistle. So much for loyal support.