It’s not often that you take a road trip, watch your side wilt like poisoned weeds, and come away feeling anything besides anger and disappointment. Yet my overwhelming emotion on Saturday evening at Columbus Crew Stadium, as a limpid DC United fell to a 3-0 loss with barely a kick of resistance, was not bitterness but envy.

Where to start? With the stadium, clearly. Four years after moving to the US I walked into a proper soccer ground for the first time and felt like I’d come home. A compact, sensibly sized soccer arena with spacious concourses, tilted floodlights, easily accessible, and with superb views of the pristine pitch from all angles. I sat up high in the summer breeze, the city to my left, the setting sun to my right, and a draft Amber Bock in my hand. Not even the static, apparently impotent black uniforms below could rob me of the pleasure of this moment.

It’s not just the stadium, though, it’s the feeling that the city of Columbus takes the game of soccer seriously. When you tell people that you’re here to watch the game, they actually know that the city hosts a professional soccer club, and they don’t look at you like you’re insane for taking a 840-mile round trip to watch 90 minutes of sport. The local ice-cream store has a Columbus Crew flavour ("It’s basically chocolate chip, with the chocolate colored yellow," according to the girl behind the counter), and not only does the mayor of the city come and watch, he makes a speech to the crowd and sounds enthusiastic about it too.

Columbus struck me over the weekend as a very friendly, laid back city with a deep streak of civic pride. It was colorfully and conspicuously supporting Gay Pride Week. There were crowds of people out walking the (clean) streets down town and in the neighborhoods, and the summer air didn’t glue your clothes to your skin. And all around the city you saw yellow signs and stickers, on people and on cars and in shops, showing you that Columbus has a soccer side.

As Saturday evening wore on, and I gave up all hope of a respectable result, I started to dream of a stadium and a presence like this in DC, where the seats would not be two-thirds empty, and where you could wander around the ground in the open air feeling like you were on the promenade above the beach. Perhaps we too could provide an information-packed, well laid-out match programme for just three bucks. Or have the imagination to entrust The Star-Spangled Banner to a barber shop quartet, who sang the most wonderfully subversive version of the national anthem I’ve heard since Wynton Marsalis took it on an improvised jazz-trip in the mid-1980s.

Even better, where families in yellow now sat quietly sipping their drinks, we would also have fans cheering, standing, singing, bouncing and going wild at endless goals from our young and energetic team. For the down side to the Crew’s stadium was the tame atmosphere, and the fans only really expressed themselves at the goals.

In hindsight, and looking at LA’s Home Depot Center, many observers have said that the stadium would have benefited from a roof. This would help, but if the fans are determined enough then it shouldn’t matter too much. And the ambience is never helped by the moron at the mike attempting to chivvy the home fans up while the ball’s in play. If that was me in the Crew bleachers I’d refuse to respond on principle.

These are minor quibbles, though. Very few can come here and fail to be impressed by the whole set up, including coach Ray Hudson. "It’s a pleasure to play in this stadium," he said afterwards, despite the result. "What this organisation does, it’s marvellous and they [the fans] really provided a lot of impetus for this team to come out and hand us our heads."

This perhaps overplayed the role of the warm but taciturn fans at the expense of a DC team he readily labelled as "pussycats". But it wasn’t just the fans that impressed him, it was also the club, the ground and, Hudson acknowledged, "its training facility. This is very, very pertinent. You go to its training facility and it’s manicured. You go to its stadium and it’s run at a big fucking league level, the real deal. Who wouldn’t want to be here?"

Hudson cited the Crew as "the benchmark for all clubs in this league", and also praised the way it brings players through its system, "hones those guys and keeps them here and works them and makes them believe for their colours". Perhaps he was thinking of former DC rookies like Justin Mapp, Mark Lisi and Craig Ziadie, now blooming and prospering at other clubs around MLS. Or perhaps, like me, he was fantasising about a soccer-dedicated facility, backed by a city that cares about the game and some players that care about the shirts they’re wearing.

** Readers of this column may have noticed that ever since I mocked people called ‘Brian’ in my column two weeks ago, players of that name have clocked up three goals and two assists in the four goals DC has conceded since. Having placed The Hex of Brian over the club, I am afraid that I have no idea how to lift it. All fans with a knowledge of witchcraft should contact the club immediately.