DOHA, Qatar | For all that we can blame Qatar for, for a month it was more than efficient in the running of this World Cup and in managing the crowds and their movement. That was until Sunday.
While the supreme organizing committee sent us a press release in which David Beckham praised the organization, it was the guerrillas on the ground.
The organizing committee bluntly dropped the ball in the hours leading up to the final.
The city of Doha has become completely disorganized, making access to the Lusail stadium almost impossible.
Crowded subway
Several hours before the match, the subway was stormed by supporters who wanted to go to the stadium, both those with tickets and those without.
A single metro line serves the stadium, which can accommodate nearly 89,000 spectators. It was also half empty during the closing ceremony, an hour before the start of the game.
And this metro line also stops at the Fan Festival where tens of thousands of supporters went to watch the match on a giant screen.
Results? Completely packed metro stations with hundreds of people who have to wait outside for more than a hundred meters to finally be told that the station is no longer in service because it is too crowded.
The Msheireb station, the equivalent of our Berri-UQAM, was already overwhelmed more than four hours before the meeting. It was even closed for an hour because security could no longer manage the influx of passengers who even crossed the security barriers.
And height of the disorganization, one pretext of the technical troubles to make descend the partisans two stations before that which is close to the stadium. A short walk of 11.8 kilometers…
Congestion
What we haven’t told you yet is that we had the brilliant idea of presenting the World Cup final on Qatar’s national day.
Remember that here, Sunday is our Monday. The working week is in fact from Sunday to Thursday. So that means it was a long weekend.
Since there are already some streets closed due to World Cup activities and all Qataris have decided it’s a good idea to take a ride in a car sticking their heads out the sunroof to wave a flag , it quickly became hell not only in the city center, but also on the highways.
And when the royal motorcade set off for the stadium, things only got worse.
Many fans either arrived late or couldn’t make it to the stadium altogether.
The nail
We saved the highlight of the story for the end. Yeah, the Journal rep got caught.
As the subway had been very efficient up to that point, even on the busiest days, we left our hotel room at 3:30 p.m. for a trip of 35 to 40 minutes in total.
After a few minutes of walking, when the metro station of the National Museum was in sight, we thought that something was wrong when we saw all these people who were outside around the entrance.
We are quickly told that it is impossible to enter, that the metro does not work. Go hop Uber to a metro station closer to the stadium. The car arrives in less than three minutes, that’s a good sign.
Once in the car, it doesn’t move. We consult the phone to discover that all the metro stations are experiencing the same problem. We then consult Maps to find that all the roads are red.
Change of plan, we head to the Media Center at the Qatar National Convention Center.
It was therefore sitting in an amphitheatre, in front of a giant screen, that this text was written and that we were forced to follow the final which was to be the apotheosis of a month spent in Qatar.
All that for this.
