It’s Sunday night after a lovely weekend in Porto (in love with that city now). The time has finally sprung forward here in Europe, so it’s also time to once again be thrown off by how bright it is in the evenings. In any case, this means that the night escaped from me a lot faster than I expected and I’ve amassed a long queue of posts to write. We’re going to keep this one quick with a soccer game that Chris and I went to last week.

In our ongoing quest of watching soccer while here in Europe, we knew that we would have to try to do a game with the Swiss National Team at some point. Fortunately, they were set to play a qualifier against Denmark for the 2020 European Cup. Knowing that Swizterland’s colors are red and white, I also struggled with what to wear to the game because Denmark has the same colors. I ended up wearing one of my Quakes jerseys because I felt at the time that it was the only red and white shirt I had with me here. I must have forgotten about the Where’s Waldo outfit I wore in Cologne earlier this month.

We got to the stadium about half an hour before the start, which gave us enough time to get scarves from the miniscule stands selling Switzerland gear, grab dinner and find our seats in the stadium.

We got our tickets back in December because we thought tickets had sold out. Surprisingly, though, the stadium was relatively empty with a little over 18,000 attendees. It was still a fun atmosphere, though. We also had pretty good seats. We were all the way in the corner, but were also two rows. It made for some exciting corner kicks when the players were on our side.

For the first 75 minutes of the game, Switzerland looked like they were going to win. As the game progressed, it looked like they were going to win with a pretty nice three goal lead. For the majority of the game, it looked like the #craleabump was going to strike again and there would be a Switzerland win.

Unfortunately, the game turned around late in the game. Denmark kept on scoring goals and Switzerland could not successfully clear the ball to the other side of the field. They ended up scoring three goals and equalizing the game. It was a disappointing way to end the game, especially when Switzerland spent most of the second half in a safe lead, but that’s the way soccer goes.

So that was about it. The result could have been better, but it was a fun game and I’m glad that we were able to catch a Switzerland game while we were out here. It was also surprisingly cold that evening, so I’m glad I came out with a hat.