UEFA Under 21 Championships: Israel vs England

This past Tuesday I went to Israel's final preliminary round game vs England as part of the UEFA under 21 Championships with my friends Amit and Clara. Since Israel is the host country, they had automatically qualified for the tournament. The game I went to was theoretically meaningless due to Israel having tied their first game against Norway 2-2, and lost to Italy 4-0. The adventure to Jerusalem began in traffic of course. It took the group of us that went to the game almost two hours to get from Tel Aviv to the Teddy Stadium for the game. When I say Jerusalem has some of the worst traffic in the world, I am not kidding. Once we were in the stadium, my friend Amit said Israelis do not really sit in the seats given to them on their ticket. Finding a seat is predicated on where you can find open seats. Any of the seats at the Teddy are great to watch the game. It is a pretty small venue with about 22,000 seats. The game was scoreless going into the second half. Israel had a bunch of chances but could not convert until the eightieth minute when midfielder Ofir Krieff found the back of the net. The crowd went nuts after that since most of the spectators were Israel rooting for their national team. The game ended 1-0 with Israel winning. It was a great experience getting to see a Israeli team play well against tough European competition. I even got to check something off my do to list while in Israel, seeing a national team game. It was well worth the ride to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.