“Ya’ll need to back up. Now,” shouted the giant police officer putting his hands to the handle of his rifle, “I’m not gonna tell you again.”
But the crowd had nowhere to go. The line, which had been so orderly just 20 minutes earlier, had descended into a chaotic scrum.
An unhappy Argentinian banged a plastic cup against the metal railing while an Englishman shouted “just f**king let us in.”
“If y’all don’t listen nobody’s getting in,” was the response of the 6 ft 5” security guard who was in charge of the stadium entrance.
This just enraged people even more. There was shouting, swearing and jostling.
Missing the kick-off for the massive England versus Argentina game would upset most people, but honestly, I’ve never seen a group of journalists so angry.
Somehow, at the biggest game so far of the World Cup, the stadium in Atlanta had managed to underestimate the number of media who’d be attending the game.
They had only arranged one entrance for the hundreds of journalists in attendance and the queue for the media entrance was longer than any other part of the stadium.
Now, few people would pity the journalists having to wait in the scorching Atlanta sun; it is, of course, a privilege to be covering these events.
But bear in mind that there were TV presenters due to go live and were suddenly missing because they couldn’t get through. Deadlines for articles were being missed and angry editors were on the phone demanding to know why no content was being sent back.
“We have to work”, several of the reporters pleaded, then more angrily “, let us in, we have to work.”
The reason for the chaotic scenes was farcical. The underestimation of media numbers had resulted in not enough of the tags used to indicate a bag has been cleared by security.
The hunt for some stripey tags to attach to the bags completely shut the security gate down, blocking the media from getting access to the stadium.
It sparked some wild scenes, which, even in a bad-tempered England versus Argentina game, were more intense than some of the action on the field.