You will find that set up right the AKG shotgun gives a VERY accurate full range recording with minimal crowd noise. I beg to differ w/ my cardiod loving brethern as I don't really need to hear a guy ordering Nachos and a beer on my tapes. Great, accurate recording of the event with the crowd noise in between songs where it belongs.
As a taper who used shotguns regularly from 1986 to 1994, using both AKG and Nak guns, I did not find them suitable at all as an "all purpose" musical recording capsule. They are not "full range" either, not to the ear or on a spectral graph. The response of shotguns is not linear, and rolls off at the top and bottom inside the 20-20K range, often with dips and spikes in certain frequencies. They definately show their weakness when used outdoors for music, as opposed to sound gathering for broadcast and film, their intended use. I eventually sold off my shotgun capsules and now use my CK63s about 20% of the time, CK61s the rest of the time.
Guns are a good choice if forced to taped from the far back of an arena or stadium, and I think they saved me many times back in the '80s when a taping section was deep in the rear. But, in many instances I felt they were a poor compromise, with the impact from reducing crowd noise also cutting out a significant percentage of the soundstage, and making for a very unatural sounding recording when used too close.
Sound reaching a person at an inside venue is a combination of direct, and diffuse sound. A "stack tape" can work when the diffuse sound is bad, say having excessive standing bass building up at the back of a room. When the diffuse sound is not bad, in a room with decent acoustics, shotguns cut too much out for my taste, and create recordings that end up sounding flat and hollow to me, even if they are "full range".
Along these lines, I know some tapers that overuse hypers, which are way more natural sounding than guns, but also cut out too much of the soundstage when used too close.
My favorite shotgun setup was when I ran a 3 mic setup for the GD, with a pair of shotguns and a card or omni in the center, blended in to fill out the bottom end. That was a combo that worked pretty well for me back in the day.
My .02
Edit to add: One more thing, the tube of "short" shotgun is designed to differentiate the wavelengths so that high frequency sound can be pinpointed. In actuality, there is no "top" or "up" to a shotgun, except for stereo shotguns that are M/S and do have to be properly oriented. The front lobe in the polar pattern is round due to the round tube.
The way a shotgun works is the capsule sits at the back of the tube. Sounds with wavelengths longer than the tube are unable to travel the length of the tube, so they are picked up by normal pressure gradient principals through side and rear vents (the low end). Sounds with wavelengths shorter than the tube are captured as they travel down the tube (mids/highs), in accordance with interference tube principals. CK8s have a single vent running along it's length and more around it's base. Other brands/models may have vents on both sides, or all around, but they all work by the same principals. These vents have no real directional characteristics however, it's just an ambient opening to prevent an effect of listening to the sound through a hollow pipe.