A Dynamic Blog

South American football*, manic as it is, only becomes more scary when a nation´s place in the world cup is at stake.

I´ve only ever been to one soccer game and that was a Melbourne Victory game, in Melbourne, against the might of the Wellington Phoenix. There were maybe 20 thousand there to be generous, and what seemed to be a pretty timid 20 thousand at that.
Considering the recent history between our two nations with regards to football world cups, I understood that an Australian might not be too welcome at Estadio Centennario in Montevideo, Uruguay. Last night I defied this lack of welcome and went to Uruguay´s world cup qualifier against Colombia.

Uruguay needed to win. To encourage a good attendance promoters decided to impliment a 2 for 1 ticketing policy. What this meant wasn´t with every ticket you buy you recieve another ticket for free, intsead it meant that with every ticket you buy you can bring a friend along. So now to go with the tension of Uruguay´s need to win, was an over-sold, overcapacity 80 year old stadium that you could feel bounce when everyone started to jump. They liked to jump.

(As a bizarre side-note to this story, as I´m typing this, right now, one of the lads I´m here with has come in off the street and said he just saw the girls who were sitting behind us at the game last night. They gave him a note, addressed to us which they had written on the off chance that they would run into us the day after. The note is a page long, it starts by introducing themselves and continues to tell us how they thought it was great that we enjoyed ourselves and really got into the spirit of Uruguayan football. It finishes by saying that they hope we remember and love Uruguay. Accompanying the note were some pictures of Uruguay and one of them together at the game last night. The world isn´t as weary as it was on those bus trips with Jeaninne but once again, so shines a good deed).

I´m not sure if my initial blog idea can upstage the weirdness that just happened. Either way it was pretty special. Uruguay won 3-1. There weren´t any riots and the Estadio Centenarrio remained in tact.



*Soccer, sure, but this is what they call it so suck it up.