San Lorenzo vs. Boca Juniors

Everyone knows that South Americans are crazy about their futbol (soccer), but there certainly is a difference between imaging a crazy raucous stadium and seeing it firsthand thinking, ‘man these Argentinean futbol fans are crazy!!’  This is the difference.

The barb-wire keeps the fans off the pitch

Four Australians and I joined the other westerns in a van accompanied by local futbal fans as guides to the stadium in San Lorenzo.  The ticket price was nothing to brag about, but it did come with transportation to the game, a free beer, and navigation through the crowd which ultimately was priceless. 

We had to get to the of that

You have to get to the match at least an hour early, which at first sounds insane, but became clearly evident when standing in the large crowd of San Lorenzo supports all chanting the singing local songs, and pushing the crowd forward into the gates blocked by police in riot gear.  It felt more like being in the Warp Tour mosh pit than lining up to enter Candlestick.

After a bit of running to avoid getting trampled by locals, and a thorough inspection of my personal space we were into the stadium, standing near a fence, high and difficult to climb, with barbed wire at the top.

The Boca Juniors flag

We were expecting seats, instead we found bleachers and a menacing looking crowd.  As we made our way through the crowd our guides actually uttered, ‘ok, this is the part where we have to walk by the hooligans, I’m not sure what’s going to happen, just keep your hands on your stuff and move quickly…’

South American stadiums are a free-for-all, they don’t worry about things like ‘aisles,’ ‘emergency exits,’ or ‘having all your front teeth (as most of the fans seemed to just have focused on keeping just the one).’  I was all for our plan of taking the most nosebleed seats we could find, being the fly on the wall (also it’s a lot harder to throw rocks up, so we’d be safer), however that meant about 15 minutes zip-zagging our way up through the crowd, a lot of ‘permiso.’

San Lorenzo celebrating as the game starts

I’ve never seen a crowd more excited, I’m pretty sure they were louder for the players warming up than the cheers for the winning touchdown at the Superbowl.  The crowd stands, like the whole time, it was exhausting.  They also never stop singing, they must have sung 15 different songs, with their favorites being sung repeatedly for most of the game.  Some insulted the other team, said ‘punto’ constantly, while others had something to do with San Lorenzo.  I’ll give them credit, they had incredible stamina and pretty good voices.

As the game starts shit gets real crazy, smokey flares in the team colors, everyone throws confetti to the tune of magazines that they’ve been shredding all pre-game, in a moment the stadium went white, and most of the red and blue balloons they had been waving got launched into the air.  Then this massive flag, big enough to cover our whole quarter of the stadium, gets pulled over us from what appears to be no ware, and gets waved around, taunting the other fans.

 

Cooling down the crowd

Futbol fans seem to be ruthless, for this event, 75% of the stadium was for the home team, with just one section for the away Boca Juniors.  But they don’t just get their own section, the bleacher have a huge gap between theirs and the other side with the home fans, with many empty seats near each edge, and police lining the sides, pretty insane.

The only disappointing part was that I felt like I was more into the game than many of the fans.  Like a big play would happen and most of the crowd just kept singing, rarely getting rattled by a particular play.  In fact there were at least a good thousand people that I know for a fact could not see the game, what the hell were they doing?

The game was sweet though, tons of energy, when the stadium clapped in unison I could feel the loud ‘pop.’ and when our section jumped on the concrete steps I unnervingly could feel the bleachers flexing under the weight.

After the match, for safety reasons, they let all the Boca fans leave first.  But even long after that, the San Lorenzo fans sang and cheered as loudly as ever until it began to get dark, and inevitably terrifying.  Most surprisingly was that San Lorenzo LOST 0-2.  I couldn’t have even fathomed how excited they would have gotten had the team won, or even scored a goal.

Our group got ourselves out of the lion’s den in one piece, back to the bus and exhausted from standing in the sun all afternoon.  We witnessed one guy get escorted out of the stadium by riot police, and a fight broke out in our section, with both guys running out of the stadium.  Oh, and I stepped in gum, so yeah, it was pretty dangerous…