JEDDAH, 6 November 2005 — Thousands of Al-Ittihad Club supporters celebrated their emphatic win over the UAE’s Al Ain in the second leg final of the AFC Champions League at Prince Abdullah Al Faisal Stadium here last night.
“This is an excellent gift on the third day of the Eid Al-Fitr,” Abdullah Noor, a student of the King Abdul Aziz University and avid Al-Ittihad fan said. “While we’re happy at the 4-2 outcome, we’re disappointed as until the visitors scored their second goal in the last minutes of the game, it mostly looked like a one-sided game,” he told Arab News.
All roads led toward the stadium some hours before the clash of the two Asian giants began at 7:45 p.m. A total of 30,000 football lovers filled the stadium a couple of hours before turning it into a sea of yellow and black. As expected, the home team enjoyed crowd support as Ittihad supporters continuously waved flags and cheered in chorus for their favorites.
“It was difficult to get tickets for the match, as top end seats with prices ranging from SR100 to SR300 were sold out. We had to manage with the cheap ducats that we got hold of a day before,” said Osama Al-Muwallad, a young Saudi airline executive. Visibly happy were Ittihad team manager Hamad Al-Sanie and their coach Anghel Iordanescu. “We’re extremely thankful to the AFC for staging the final here, as we could have been deprived of the opportunity to watch our team in action if the organizers had stuck to the original plan of playing the second leg in Amman,” Adnan Dosary, an Al-Ittihad Club member, said.
