October 28, 2009 THIS GRASS IS GREENER Players are in love with Red Bull Arena
By Michael Lewis
BigAppleSoccer.com Editor
HARRISON, N.J. -- It was as though the players were having a superlative contest to describe Red Bull Arena.
Team captain and striker Juan Pablo Angel called it "phenomenal" and "amazing."
Central defender Mike Petke said it was "unbelievable."
No one got into an argument with either player after they saw the stadium with a full grass field for the very first time Tuesday as the final piece of sod was laid down.
If Angel and Petke had their way, they would be out in the middle of RBA kicking around a soccer ball, but the grass had not taken root yet.
"I would like to put a couple through right now and do a few slide tackles right now in the wet weather," Petke said on a rainy morning.
"To finally to have this here and to look at it, it's tingling. It's unbelievable. It's finally here and I could not be more excited."
Angel, the self-professed biggest critic of Giants Stadium, the team's home for the last 14 MLS seasons, felt the $150 million, soccer-specific stadium was worth the wait. RBA is scheduled to open in 2010, with the Red Bulls' season opener against the Chicago Fire March 27 as the first MLS match.
"It's worth every second, every day," Angel said. "It's just phenomenal. I've been following the progress through the website. Until you can come here and see it by yourself, it is just amazing."
He called it the "best stadium in the country."
"It can't get any better," he added.
Angel wasn't finished gushing about the 25,000-seat stadium, which isn't finished. Thousands of seats must be added between now and March. and a lot of the interior work must be completed.
"It's beautiful," he said. "You see the grass is inviting. The stadium looks beautiful and it is not even finished. You can see the difference. It is a different atmosphere when you walk into a soccer-specific stadium. Even if you have only 10, 12, 13,000 people, its going to have a different feeling, a different atmosphere. So I'm excited about it. This is going to be a new beginning for soccer in the whole tri-state area."
Perhaps no player can appreciate RBA than Petke, who had been hearing about a stadium since he joined the team in 1998, when it was called the MetroStars.
"This was the six-week project, the six-week announcement since 1998," he said. "Every six weeks here we would have an announcement. It was the longest six weeks of my life. Just to have it . . . actually realized, the vision, the dream that they had, its unbelievable. It's not only great for the players, but for the league, for the Red Bulls, for the community, it's unbelievable."
Someone mentioned that if the team doesn't win, would the buzz of this state-of-the-art facility go away?
"I don't see us not winning," Petke said. "We have people in the front office who have been trying to right the wrong. We have players understanding what had happened. I think this off-season is going to be a very big opportunity for everybody to sit back and realize what went wrong and what part they had in it to correct that. I'm not thinking along those lines. I don't think anyone is, if it doesn't go right, if we lose or something
“We have an unbelievable opportunity, possibly one of the best opportunities in league history to come out into the best stadium in America, soccer-specific stadium and to right a ship that went wrong this year. I think we're going to do that."
Angel, for one, is glad Giants Stadium is history for the soccer team. He hated playing there because of the artificial surface and the lack of atmosphere for a team that averages at best 15,000 in an 80,000-seat stadium.
"I never liked it," he said. "I never liked the surface. Apart from the L.A. game in 2007 when I first came here, that was the only decent atmosphere that we had. Apart from that, it was a stadium that looks empty. For me personally, I never felt at home. That is why I am so excited about. This is home. It's like you walk into your second house. This is what it's all about. A soccer specific stadium is where you can create an atmosphere, where the supporters and the fans can feel we can spend an afternoon in our place. This is where its all about. Any European stadium would like to have a stadium like this. It's like playing in Europe easily."
Petke had similar thoughts, although he joked about getting over the artificial turf.
"I'm brain washed," he said. "I'm still seeing turf right now. So until I get down there and actually feel it, I'm not going to believe it. Yeah, while Giants Stadium, they were good to us and it been our home for so long. Just to have not only the stadium, but significantly the grass out there, knowing that we're not going to be running on rock-hard concrete any more, sparse crowds, is just an overwhelmingly great feeling. Until March 27 it will be biting at everybody to get out there and it's going to be unbelievable."
