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Published: February 14th 2008
Its a scorcher at the Maracana!
Like being in a pressure cooker!!Trip 3 to the Maracana!! and it´s a biggy! Fluminense vs Flamengo. Flamengo are Rios biggest and best supported team. Fluminense on the other hand are their arch rivals. Thus the FluFla derby was born! Early on and the atmosphere outside the stadium is electric...we are down with the end with the nense fans, who are already in high spirits singing and chanting outside the stadium. We sit in the shade with a few cold beers because man it´s a scorcher!
Inside and it´s back to the familiar grandstand where me and Chris were nearly teargassed last time, told you we enjoyed it! One glance around the stadium and you can see we are easily outnumbered by the Flamengo fans, well I guess we´ll just have to sing louder, so thats what we do! (well we murmer loudly as obviously we dont have a clue on the words!) The flags are being swung and there are banners the size of the stands being draped about!
The stadium is soooo hot, that believe me the beers in the stand were completely necessary and not at all enjoyable.
The first half is a reasonably tame affair which ends goalless, despite
Fluminense being by far the better team. Still we don´t have to wait long for some action. (In more ways than one!) As soon as half time hits, so does a storm, followed by a heavy downpour. The lightning over the Maracana looks really cool, buut the rain sends everybody retreating to the rear of the stand trying to find cover. That is until they realise this might actually be quite fun....so here we are halftime and a quarter of the fans in the three stands we occupy start taking their tops off and they literally swing them above their heads whilst running between the stands. (imagine 4 or 5 giant conga lines running parallel to each other across 10 rows of seats and you sort of get the idea!) This fires up the smaba bands all these temas bring to the game and you have pretty much got a party! The storm is so bad that the teams take 25 minutes over halftime instead of the usual 15! It´s so awesome to watch though.
When play resumes Flamengo take an undeserved lead, this is cancelled out about 5 minutes later when the Fluminens striker Thiago Naves curls home
a beautiful three kick. The crowd go wild, but not as wild as another 5 minutes later, when he scores almost a carbon copy to put us 2-1 up!! By now you can pretty much imagine how mental we all go when Naves bags his hattrick for 3-1! The crowd, us inckuded all strat chanting his name and making suggestive you
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