Mansfield Vs. Derby

   Yesterday, I went to watch a pre-season match where Derby County played at Mansfield.  Derby is a championship level team, meaning they are in the second-best level of playing in the country's football hierarchy.  Mansfield is at the level of "Conference National," the fifth level in the system.  With this in mind, it would seem only logical that Derby should win easily against Mansfield.  And that was what it looked like after the first half, when the score was 1-0 in favor of Derby.  But who'd have thought that in the second half, after Derby switched out the entire team, Mansfield came back and scored their own goal.  And then they did it again.
   This is a picture of the Stadium that Mansfield plays in.  It's not actually terribly impressive as far as features go, but it is rather large, and it can hold a lot of people.

   In America, no one cares which side you're rooting for: everyone gets to buy their tickets, and you get to sit wherever you pay to sit.  In England, however, they segregate between home fans and away fans.  This is because a decade or so ago, fights would break out all the times at games.  So away fans were given a special part of the stadium where they could sit, while the rest was reserved for home fans.  Because of this system, there's only one entrance to the visitor grandstand.  Once you're through that, you can walk almost straight up to the boundary line.  Even though I was still on the cement where I was supposed to be, I could have, in only a few seconds, run to touch the goal and then come back to where I took this photo from.

   Because of the violent history of Football in this country, there are quite a few policemen, or as they are sometimes called over here, "Bobbys."  Since they don't exactly look like what an American cop looks like, I thought you might be interested to see this.  Then again, the majority of my audience seems to be from the U.K, so I'm not sure if it's worth it...

   Interesting side note: it seemed very much certain that there were as many Derby fans at this away game as there were Mansfield fans.  The Derby stand was, at the very least, considerably more densely packed than the rest of the stands.