Tonight, that same group spent a half hour after the game caravanning around Arenillas, celebrating their team's classification into the next round.
That's soccer.
This afternoon, facing a must-win game at Santos FC in Pasaje, Condor netted its point in the 25th minute and held on for the rest of the match to advance to the Liguilla. Now, Condor will face the five best teams in the conference in a ten-game season to advance to a national-level tournament.
This afternoon's game looked like so many of Condor's other matches — scoring early and letting its guard down in the end. But despite allowing three corner kicks and a few other good chances in the final minutes, Condor held on and lives to see another day.
My first celebration caravan
Once we got back to Arenillas, a parade of cars coming back from the game amassed at the bridge. Then for the next 30 minutes, we drove through town, honking our horns and shouting about Condor's big win.
It is fun to see the community get behind its team and should be interesting to see as the season continues.
Punished
Well, after last week's outburst at the referees, Condor head coach Roberto Salazar was suspended by the soccer federation. For the next three months, he is not allowed to be on the sidelines during games.
The team's trainer was also suspended for three months.
Since the stadium was empty and pretty quiet, that didn't really affect their ability to continue doing their jobs. They just did it on the other side of the fence.
But it did create some interesting situations when the Condor players faked injuries and they called over the medic because the team's medic is suspended and there is a rule that the coach can't attend to injuries.
Since the assistant coach was the only person on the sideline, he had to go out and attend to injuries.
Just so you know, he has no medical background. Luckily, all he had to do was spray on the magic, heals-everything solution.
Just a bit outside
The Arenillas radion commentator did his best Harry Doyle impression during today's game, going through quite a few beers while calling the game.
Now, I understand that expectations of what qualifies as acceptable professional behavior might differ between cultures, but I think it might be a little bit out of line when the commentator starts complaining on the air that the next round of beers isn't coming quickly enough.
His main job during games is to read off the advertisements.
By halftime, he was kind of slurring his words together a bit and mixing up the words he was saying. Then, when he was asking about the out-of-town scores, he clearly wasn't paying attention because he had to be told five or six times before being able to tell the audience that Santa Rosa and Fuerza Amarilla were scoreless.
Home away from home
Although Santos is a team from El Guabo, they do not have their own home stadium and have to play their games in Pasaje (half hour from El Guabo). As a result, there were about as many Condor fans on hand as there were Santos fans, canceling out any home-field advantage.
It was so quiet in the stadium that everybody could hear the Radio Voz Arenillas announcers as they broadcast the game. At one point, the radio announcers pointed out a mistake that the refs had made, and everybody else got mad at them.
Phrase of the day
Donde la papa quema - literally means where the potato burns. (I'm pretty sure this is what I heard)
The announcer mentioned this when Condor had some good chances to score. I believe it refers to being in good position to score, as in "They are spending a lot of time down where the potato burns."
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