Technical difficulties experienced during the first-ever Ottawa RedBlacks game at TD Place Friday night were a thing of the past by the time Ottawa Fury FC hit the pitch Sunday afternoon, the Ottawa Sports and Entertainment Group said Monday.

Huge concession lines, audio/visual issues and malfunctioning ATMs were a few of the blemishes on an otherwise memorable and historic night for the city and the people behind bringing football and soccer back to Lansdowne vowed the problems would be fixed quickly.

That appears to be the case.

"We didn't experience any of the issues that we had Friday night (on Sunday)," OSEG CEO Bernie Ashe told the Sun Monday.

Granted, the 14,500-plus on hand for the soccer game wasn't quite the sold out 24,000 that showed up for RedBlacks opening night -- but a big crowd is a big crowd and another night of broken cash machines and long beer waits likely wouldn't have been well-received.

"Obviously the smaller crowd allowed us to do things a little bit better," Ashe said.

Temporary ATMs were brought in, as the permanent machines aren't yet operational. The point-of-sale server that crashed Friday worked without glitches Sunday and vendors were reorganized slightly to reduce lines.

With no time for a dry run before the RedBlacks game, Ashe said there were lessons learned throughout the evening.

"We opened early and everybody went right to the food and beverage," he said, chuckling at the fact many of the glitches stemmed from the excitement generated by OSEG themselves leading up to the game.

"I guess bad on us, we promoted all this food and beverage stuff," he said.

Ashe also explained that contrary to what some reported from the RedBlacks game, the stadium never ran out of beer, instead running into logistical issues while trying to keep up with the demand from thirsty fans.

"We had tons of beer in the building, we just couldn't get it to the destination," he said. "The (beer hawkers) would load, turn around, sell, load turn around, sell. They couldn't get into the stands."

OSEG would not reveal how much beer it did end up selling.

Glitches aside, there's no denying both opening nights were successful, Ashe said, even if the scramble to get the massive scoreboard working was "like having a brand new TV delivered just as guests arrived for the big game."

"We had a deadline that at seven on Friday night, we had to play football," Ashe said. "That's a hard deadline and we made it. We were there, the place was full and the lights were on. The place worked.-

chris.hofley@sunmedia.ca

Twitter: @chrishofley