GAME DAY, PART 4: IT’S LIKE THIS FOR EVERY GAME

Contributed by: Dave

The team bus turned down the final stretch of road to the stadium to an explosion of sound. People screaming, horns blaring, vuvuzelas vuvuzelaing. Sirens wailed, contributing to the chaos. Bright colors flashed along the street as seemingly everyone waved a Sierra Leone flag. It was peaceful at first. People stood at a respectful distance from the bus and waved and cheered wildly.

Then, something happened. The bus made one final turn and suddenly, it was a madhouse.

The coach’s van, carrying Chad and I, was never more than three feet from the players’ bus. There was barely enough room for a person to pass by. In New York, where jaywalking is an art, an attempt to get through would result in a smacked hood or an injured pedestrian. But where we saw impassability, the fans saw opportunity. As we turned, they surged between the van and the bus. And instantly, we were stuck. We couldn’t move forward without hitting them… and they were not moving. The bus slowly crawled ahead of us. The gap widened, inviting more and more people.

Quietly, from the back of the van, the goalkeeping coach, who hadn’t spoken a word, said, “Close the windows if you want to keep those cameras.”

People began to notice that the coach was in our van and they started flocking to it. Men pounded on the doors and windows, they rode on our hood, they hung from the back of the van. Enjoying the brief (but absolutely necessary) respite from shooting, we took the opportunity to ask the head coach if it’s always like this. “Every game,” he responded. When we finally scraped through large iron gates better suited for Jurassic Park than a football match, we were relieved. We still had no idea where Josh and Clay were, but we knew Abu would take care of them.

Inside these walls, the madness was curtailed. The van rolled to a stop just yards from a pair of steel doors 15 feet high labeled “Home Team.” A dozen military and police officials guarded it. The coach’s assistant hopped out, slammed the door behind him and proclaimed, “This is the coach, the white coach.” He tried to get security to open the door, but when the throngs of fans realized that the door to the stadium was going to be thrown open wide enough for a van to pass through, they saw their chance. They rushed towards the van, quickly surrounding it. The fine men and women of the Sierra Leone police and military did their best to secure a perimeter around the van, but there were too many people. Seeing what was happening, the coach said he’d just get out and squeeze through an entrance small enough for a person. Chad and I jumped out of the van and stood beside him. The coach’s assistant still hadn’t had any luck getting the door open, so he scaled the doors and continued his assurance that he was with “the white coach.”

The instant the door opened, the crowd pressed forward and people were literally being squeezed through the entrance. In a true, “You jump, I jump” Titanic moment, Chad reached back, grabbed my hand and we burst through the door and found ourselves standing outside the Sierra Leone locker room.