Football in Rio

Football is of course is a big thing here in Brazil, and one of the things on my list to do in Rio was to go to a football match, unfortunetly the Maracaná stadium is closed at the moment for renuvation work. But there are other smaller stadiums in Rio like the Flamengo stadium at the Governors Island, and yesterday there was a match between Flamengo and some other team so I decided to go and watch it.

I decided to leave my camera back for safety reasons, so no picture this time, although now that I think about it , it did not seem so dangerous there with all the security around the stadium. Anyway I made it to the governor island, but I had no idea were the stadium was, then I spotted a father and son in red football shirts, and I decided to follow them, they led me straight to the stadium, the ticket cost me 15 Reals (abouth 5 Euros), it was the cheaper secion, with no cover from the sun, but it had an excellent view of the field. But when I tried to go into the stadium, the security would not allow me, since I had my swis knife with me, I had quite a delima, throw away my swiss knife, or not go in to watch the game, I did not like neither option, but in the end I figured a way out of this situation, I went out and hid my knife in some kind of plant bed, under some dead leafs, and got into the statium, the knife was still there when I came back to pick it up after the game.

The level of football was very good, both teams played attacking football, and the players were quite skilled and full of tricks, as you would expect from Brazilian players, and if given a chance to shoot they score. Every time there was a free kick the local crowd cried the name of Diego, apparently he is their free kick expert, and after two minutes he showed his reputations was well earned, as he scored free kick from 20m, perfectly placing it in the top corner of the goal. Ten minutes later and Flamengo were up up two to nil, with a nice shot from the edge of the box. After that though the local team seemed to lay back and take it easy, the other team took full advantage of that and attacked, and they managed to score too nice goals to level up the score, the local crowd mood went sour, and the curses towards the referee intensified, it ended up at two all.

One interesting thing I did not see somewhere else, is that the referee used some kind of powder to mark the ball and the wall position, in case of a free kick close to the goal, that eliminates the problem of players moving the ball or the wall when the referee is not looking.