Futbòl

Boca Junior Fans: loco.

Did we go to the Futbòl? You even had to ask?. Miss out on going to a game in South America? "¿Eres loco?" (Are you crazy?). Of course we went to the Futbòl.

Dorthe and I tried to go to the Futbòl last time we were in Buenos Aires, but decided against it in the end - the game that was on was the final of the South American club championship, and it was sold out - our attempts at buying black market tickets only turned up P$5 (US$2.60) tickets for US$200. Thanks, but, ahhh, no thanks. Part of the problem is that you don`t really know what you`re going to get - not only is there the issue of fake tickets, but also you could well end up in the "zoo", with all the nutters. And if you thought that english soccer fans were crazy, you ain`t seen nothing yet!

We decided that rather that go through all the hassel of trying to buy a ticket ourselves, like last time, we would take a tour with on of the local hostels - it wasn´t all that much more expensive, and we knew what we were getting. The game we went to see was Boca Juniors (Deigo Maradona`s old club, and the most famous in Argentina) play at home against Colòn, from Santa Fe. We didn`t quite anticipate how removed from it all we would be though - we were bussed in the back entrance on our private bus with 30 other gringos, then we had our our allocated season seats, nice and far away from the "zoo". Not quite what I was expecting....

...but then it didn`t matter. When the singing is defeaning, as it was, it reverberates throughout the entire stadium. And when the stadium shakes because everyone is jumping up and down, then the entire stadium shakes. The atmosphere was, as you can imagine, electric, and the crowd sang about how great Boca was from start to finish.

There were two things that I found unusual. The first, was the response to the first Boca goal - loud, but perhaps not as crazy as I had expected. And then the response to the equalizing Colòn goal in the second half - there was no response. The crowd just kept on singing away, as if it hadn`t happened. I perhaps had the loudest reaction of all (it was a pretty sweet goal from a free kick, after all), which earnt me a few evil stares from the locals - whoops! Thankfully, we weren`t in the zoo....

The equalizing goal though did increase the tension amongst the crowd, who were suddenly rather unhappy with their team, and especially the ref, who started to be known as "¡Puta!" (I`ll let you figure that one out). And the final whistle, with the score at 1-1, really only led to the singing dying out. In many ways, it was the same as any other sporting match, anywhere else in the world. Except, maybe a bit more intense.