GOALLLLLLLLLL !!!!!!!

---

South American Football, everyone knows it has passion, fervour, fireworks, banners, enthusiastic chanting and even the occasional stabbing. I wanted a piece of that action, well maybe not the stabbing, but I wanted to experience everything else, so Dom and I checked the Saturday fixtures for the Paraguayan Soccer League. As luck would have it there was a match being played that afternoon, and we confirmed it was actually being played, unlike our last attempts in La Paz. We grabbed our cameras and bottles of water and found the nearest taxi to take us to the Roberto Bettega Estadio in Asuncion.

Now Paraguayans aren´t mugs at playing football, in fact they made the quarter finals of the 2010 World Cup, which was much better than Australia, England, France and Italy, so we were expecting big things. However, things don´t always go as planned in South America......does this sound familiar ??

The match we were going to see was 7th vs last, Tacuary vs Sportivo Trinidense, so I envisaged it would be much like going to an Eagles AFL match, except their would be a lot less Chardonnay drinking F&%kwits and a lot more passion. In fact Sportivo played in blue and gold much like their cellar dwelling AFL counterparts.

But I am ahead of myself.....back to the taxi. We hopped into or yellow 1970´s diesel Mercedes driven by Lorenzo the cab driver. The Mercedes sounded like a plane taking off and drove like a tractor. It had no suspension and we felt every bump as it took us towards our destination. Not far from the stadium we saw a nice park, families were playing in it, a kids soccer pitch, a playground and cows......yes cows just wandering around randomly. This was not looking good.

We arrived at the ground at the advertised kick off time of 1600hrs and found there wasn´t too many cars in the car park, but undeterred we went and purchased our tickets which cost us 50 Guaranyi´s each, which equated to about $12.00 AUS. Our seats were classified as preferrential as ours had shade, the rest of the stadium was in the sun, and it was warm, the temp was about just over 30 degrees and the humidity just like Bali. Lorenzo said he would wait for us until after the match as Taxi´s were difficult to obtain at the stadium. WTF? but we agreed all the same.

We made our way to our preferential seats and couldn´t believe the size of the crowd. It was huge, so big that Dom actually managed to count it and found there were 74 people present, made up of 52 locals, 20 police and 2 stupid gringos.

The match kicked off and there was no chanting, no banners, no cheering, in fact the only thing you could hear were the birds chirping up in the rafters of the stand and the occasional swear word from the players when they stuffed up. This was not quite what I had envisaged. The first half ended in a 1-1 stalemate and I wandered over to the cantina to buy some refreshment and a souvenir program, only to find the cantina was closed.....brilliant. Lucky for me a man was wandering around the spectators selling bread from a basket on his head, that would have to do.

Then a bus load of ´other´ players arrived at the entry of the far side of the pitch, that is when it suddenly dawned on me we had been watching the reserves play. In our defence, they didn´t advertise this on the official website, but we still felt pretty stupid. Dom said she didn´t want to stay for for the main match as she was all soccered out after the excitement of 1 game, so after ´our´match finished 1-1 we left to find Lorenzo. I told Dom if anyone asked why we were leaving so early, she could explain to them that we were relatives of number 6 who was playing for Tacuary and now that his match was over, we were leaving.

Actually, Lorenzo found us inside the stadium as we approached the main gate and I saw the Cantina was now open. Lorenzo told us he would like to stay and watch the first half of the main match, I gave him the big thumbs up, Dom´s bottom lip just drooped. I was hanging for a cola or a beer. The lady at the cantina produced a Corona bottle........with a red liquid in it which I found out was cordial as they can´t inflame the fans with alcohol. They seemed to forget that they pissed me off pretty much by not serving anything decent to drink, I was a one man powderkeg, ready to explode.

By now the crowd had swelled appreciably, no doubt thanks to the presence of 2 fully crewed ambulances, a contingent of the local fire brigade and a further 11 riot police complete with full face helmets, batons, riot shields and even a shotgun. So I decided it was probally best that I didn´t run amok in my one man protest at the lack of decent beverages. Dom took the time to count the crowd again and found it was now 137 strong and there was even chanting. This was more like it. I decided to get into the spirit of things and chant along with them, until Dom told me to stop. How was I to know that I was calling the referree a ´crazy son of a bitch´?

The Paraguayan version of the Eagles received a controversial penalty and scored it, to take the lead, which they held until halftime. I commented to Dom it would be funny if Lorenzo was enjoying the game so much that he wanted to stay. We found him at halftime and sure enough he wanted to watch the match until its conclusion. Dom was over ruled 2-1, besides it was a long walk back to the hotel alone past the park with the cows, so she reluctantly decided to stay. Lorenzo sat with us in our preferrential seats and shared some of our left over bread snacks with us. By now I had worked out a few more of the ruder chants and laughed everytime I heard them, Lorenzo, would give me a bit of a nod and wink, happy that my Spanish lessons were coming along much faster than anticipated. The match finished 1-0. We left the stadium quickly to beat the rush only to find the police with flashing lights on motorcycles, utes and buses were leaving much faster than us. The excitement of the game had more of an effect on them than it did us.

---