Maybe I should look for a shaman?

I moved to the other side of the Equator, hoping to reverse the curse.

It turns out that my luck with sports teams is unaffected by the Coriolis effect.

The local soccer team, Deportivo Condor, was having its best season in recent memory. It had advanced to the provincial semifinals. Two more wins and it would move up one classification.

Let’s just say there has been a buzz around town.

(The way soccer works in pretty much every country in the world is that if you play well, you move up to a higher division. And the teams that do poorly in the high division get relegated to lower leagues. The local team is about four miraculous seasons away from making it to the top classficiation. If the NFL worked like this, the Lions would be playing against flag football teams.)

The semifinal was in Santa Rosa, a city about 30 minutes from, and I went with some coworkers to the match.

True to form, my team came up short. We had some great opportunities in the first half to take the lead but couldn’t convert. We never really had any rhythm in our passes and couldn’t create offense on our own. Our best chances came from our goalie’s goal kicks because he sent the ball 75 meters down the field where our striker would have a one-on-one against the opposing defender.

In the second half, Santa Rosa was in control most of the time and scored about ten minutes in. Then, in the final minutes of extra time, we started to get some pressure on Santa Rosa and appeared to score the game-tying goal in the final seconds. But the referees had apparently blown the whistle before the ball went in. So, it was back to the buses for the Condor fans.

Even though we lost, I still had a great time. You have to have that kind of attitude when you have the recent track record for sports teams that I have had (It only applies to teams that I cover. So because I’m writing about this team on my blog, the curse applies.).

Here are a few of my other musings and observations from the match.

- The team (or bus company, I’m not quite sure) had arranged for a caravan of buses to take fans to and from the match. And these aren’t just your normal buses. They are full of hooligans, including the driver. He beeps his horn the entire way, and fans are yelling out the window in support of their team. I’ve always enjoyed watching these pass caravans pass by on the street on the way to games and have always wanted to participate in one. Well, it was awesome — and exactly what you would expect. We drove around my town for 20 minutes, honking the horn and yelling to get people on board.

- The soccer stadium was concrete and pretty typical of other soccer stadiums I had seen in small South American towns. Think of a big high school football stadium with the field surrounded in barbed wire.

- In terms of concessions, the most important — and popular — concession was the beer tank, which was full of big bottles of Pilsener (the most popular beer in Ecuador). For $1.00, you could get 750 ml. I explained to my friend that is costs six times as much to get half of that at a baseball game in Detroit.



- In terms of food concessions, I was reminded of The Simpsons episode when there is a big soccer match in Springfield and Homer asks the paella man to “wing one up here.” Well, paella isn’t a traditional dish in Ecuador. But salchipapas are.



- At every other soccer game I have attended in South America, the section for visiting fans was surrounded in barbed wire — to prevent any fighting between the fans. At first, I thought this practice was a little excessive. I mean, it makes the stadium look more like a prison yard than an athletic facility. Then, Santa Rosa scored. And in celebration, they started pouring beer on the Condor fans and throwing plastic bottles at them. A fight nearly broke out, but the police came in to calm tempers. So for the rest of the game, an anti-riot team stood between us and the Santa Rosa fans.

- Something about soccer that I will never get used to is the whining, embellishing of fouls, and faking injuries. In soccer, if the other team is called for a foul, you get a free kick. So there is an incentive in getting called for a foul. And because one good free kick can be the difference between winning and losing, whereas in basketball the game will rarely be decided by one foul. So these soccer players are flopping all over the place, and play dead just so that they can get a free kick. I think it teaches the kids here a horrible lesson. Because when I play soccer with the neighborhood kids, they’re flopping all over the place as well.

My friend asked me if athletes in the United States fake injury like they do in soccer in Latin America. I told him that if a hockey player were to fake an injury like some of the soccer players do, that hockey player would lose all credibility. The only players that are really known to embellish the injury are kickers in football because of how much his team benefits from the penalty.

- But as much as I hate the fake injuries in soccer, I love the medical units that are deployed to handle such injuries — a guy with a water bottle and two guys carrying a stretcher. The guys with the stretch will role the “injured” player over, onto the stretcher and carry him to the sideline, where he almost always recovers immediately from the injury that paralyzed him seconds earlier. In stadiums with more advanced medical equipment, they have a magic spray that they apply to injuries that heals them on contact.

- The two penalty cards in soccer are yellow and red. A red card is an automatic ejection, and the team has to play with 10 players for the rest of the game — instead of 11. Two yellows equal a red. These cards aren’t very complex. They look like a notecard or just a piece of paper. For some reason, the referee at last night’s game didn’t have a yellow card. So he used a neon green one, instead.

- The halftime show at the game was pretty impressive, as well. It was a guy bouncing the soccer ball (I don’t know if the correct verb is bouncing. It might be juggling. Or it might be something that I can’t thing of right now). But it was really cool. He finished it by bouncing a big rock (I have a video of it that I will try to upload to the YouTube and link, but I don’t think my Internet here is fast enough for such an undertaking). Would I say that his performance was more impressive than backwards somersaults the length of the basketball court, followed by pedaling around in a tractor? I would call it a toss up.

- I’m really happy that my local soccer team’s mascot is Condor. I don’t know exactly why it’s condor. It might be something corporate. I don’t really know. But I would say that having condor as your team mascot is the South American equivalent of having the wolverine as your mascot. The Andean Condor is the largest flying bird in the Western Hemisphere, with a wingspan of 9-10 ft. It is a national symbol of all Andean countries and has a similar mythological role to that of the bald eagle in North America.