BC Place Loud and Proud in the Southside Crowd

I'm a Vancouver Southsider but I enjoy the taste of prawn sandwiches
too much to give them up. So it was that on Sunday, when the Whitecaps
started life in BC Place against the Portland Timbers, I was sitting
up in the press box, stuffing popcorn into my face like it was oxygen
and watching the game from above.

It was a beautiful place to watch the game. BC Place looks like a real
soccer venue, with the retractable seats extended near the touch lines
and the elegant new plastic pitch showing hardly a trace of the
throwball game two days earlier. The only thing missing was one of the
soccer teams: the Portland Timbers showed up but, sadly, the Vancouver
Whitecaps seemed to have sent eleven statues instead.

More important, it sounded like a real soccer venue.

I was standing amongst the Southsiders for the last stand at Empire
Field two weeks ago and, though I and many of you chanted ourselves
hoarse, our noise vanished into the night air with our team's defense
while, to the northwest of us, Seattle's Emerald City Supporters
boomed and echoed. They had a lot more to cheer about, of course, but
it was still disheartening. All of the talk was "it'll be a lot better
at BC Place", but I was not optimistic.

Well, it was better. A lot better. The Timbers Army was assembled
through open doors to the left of me, close enough that I could have
thrown a beer at them. They're justly recognized as the best
supporters in Major League Soccer and their "our house in the middle
of BC" was a big, if geographically inaccurate, hit. But it seemed
like they'd just be getting into their groove then, in a dense little
wedge in one corner of the vast concrete stadium, there'd be the boom
of "WE'RE BLUE! WE'RE WHITE!"

There was no question whose house it really was.

Visually, audibly, the support was a treat to watch from afar. Was it
the way the Southsiders were concentrated into a smaller area? Was it
the carefully-designed and labouriously-crafted tifo which got the
game started off right? Was it the building itself? The megaphones? A
sense of occasion, of purpose? Whatever it was, it was hard not to
leap to my feet and join in "Boundary Road" as it rang, clear and
true, across the stadium. I knew exactly when it was the eighty-sixth
minute.

The Southsiders still have room to grow and improve. But too many
people to name in both the Southsiders and the Whitecaps have done
yeoman's work getting us this far. There's been so much growth, so
much hope, so much promise over the last year that it was remarkable
to see it coming together, to see the tifo and the flags and hear the
chants and songs of fans ten times more exuberant than the team they
were supporting.

It was much more meaningful than a mere stadium; we've seen three of
those in twelve months. Stadiums come and go, but Southsiders are
forever.

Ben Massey, aka Lord Bob
http://www.eightysixforever.com
Follow him on Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/Lord_Bob