Took me, what, three plane rides between Qatar and the UAE to realize that the airport code for Doha could be an homage to Homer Simpson.

Yes, the code is … DOH

No exclamation mark, though they may as well put one on there and be in on the joke. “The Simpsons” gets pretty wide global exposure, so it wouldn’t be only Yanks snickering at it.

Anyway, speaking of Doh! … the Asian Cup had a bad final day at the yard, something most of us at the Japan-Australia match didn’t notice because we were inside the stadium …

I left town right away Sunday morning, but my colleague at The National, Chuck Culpepper, wasn’t leaving until 6 p.m. yesterday, and for the Monday a.m. newspaper he wrote about the events outside the stadium, which included his attendance at the final press conference of the local organizers late Sunday morning, by which time I was back on the ground in Abu Dhabi.

If you didn’t follow the link, the story in short:

Doha officials, the police apparently, though some people were describing them as “riot police,” shut the gates to Khalifa Stadium while hundreds, perhaps thousands of ticket-holders were still outside.

The people with real tickets, for which they had paid real money, were offered no explanation, no alternatives, no apologies and no suggestions on how they might be “made whole,” as the lawyers say. People who had come from Japan for the match … turned away.

Also involved is a hint of cops behaving badly. Being rude, perhaps even injuring a woman working for a news agency.

Anyway, as Chuck notes in his story, attendance was announced at 37,000-some in a stadium that holds 40,000.  So it is a matter of official acknowledgement/fact that not every seat inside was taken.

Let me back up and describe what I did see of the crowd, from inside the stadium.

Some background: Aside from the opening match, the Asian Cup was mostly about empty stadiums. Like, kinda empty or really empty. People did not turn up to watch matches between India and Australia or the UAE and Iraq. I was at the latter game, back on January 15, and the small stadium was less than half-filled. So, yes, it is fair to say that crowd control was not really an issue for any matches except the first … and the last. You could show up late, get in, sit almost anywhere you wanted.

Back to the final:

I was in my seat in the press tribune about 90 minutes before kickoff. The stadium was basically empty, aside from several thousand Japan fans already at their seats at either end of the stadium. They were amusing themselves by chanting and singing, and later some performers dressed in traditional Japanese costumes or wearing Aussie Aboriginal outfits came out and did a bit more on the entertainment front.

About 45 minutes before kickoff, the main expanse of the stadium across from the media/VIP side of the stadium was still empty. Maybe 40 percent of the stadium’s seats (and that could be low because not as many seats are fitted on the VIP side) were maybe 1 percent filled. One of my colleagues called out to me and nodded at the empty seats and shook his head.

However, in the 20 minutes just before kickoff, thousands of people surged into the stadium. By kickoff, at 6, about 80 percent of the stadium was filled, I would estimate. But people continued to trickle in, especially on my side of the stadium — just to my right were several sections that were not for media, that were occupied by late-arriving fans, as far as I could tell. And some of those people were still coming in 25 minutes into the match. I remember thinking, “Lucky for you nobody has scored.”

Meanwhile, these hundreds or thousands of real ticket-holders were stuck outside, but apparently on the other side of the stadium. We reporters could not see them or hear them, though one guy near me who was monitoring his Facebook account said, “Some people outside say they have tickets and can’t get in.”

We had no idea, however, at the time how serious the issue was.

Now, we have a better idea because many of the ticket-holders were foreigners who were not at all shy about venting to reporters later that night. Like Chuck, who seems to have been button-holed outside the Ramada by four ticket-holders who saw his media badge and were keen to tell their story.

The ticket debacle was not flattering to the organizers, the police, to Doha and to Qatar, and it certainly did nothing to allay the basic fears that a World Cup is just too big an undertaking for a city-state to stage successfully.

The upside to this is that 2022 is still 11 years away … and the Qataris will eventually accept that the crowning glory of their 2011 Asian Cup, the final, the “dismount” of their gymnastics routine, was deeply flawed. That’s more than a little fair warning for 2022.