TULLAMARINE,
7.30 am, last Wednesday
The check-in steward
asked if I had any seat preferences and I said I'd like one next
to Alvaro Recoba. Somehow, I had chanced a booking on the same flight
as the Socceroos and the Uruguayans, and given the Australians were
up in business class, I figured I'd take the Uruguayan superstar
under my wing and share with him a sustained, 14-hour dissertation
on, say, cloud formations. Wake up Mr Recoba, that one there is
a cumulonimbus, that sort of thing.
"I'm sorry, sir,
but you can only request an aisle or a window."
And so the dream was shattered. I sat near the Uruguayan boys (close
enough to see a man who is paid about $300,000 a week negotiate
a reconstituted frittata with a plastic knife), but not near enough
to engage in any forms of gamesmanship.
By the time the plane
was one hour from Buenos Aires, the Uruguayans had fired up a Discman
with external speakers and were leading a section of the cabin in
a Brazilian pop song. Hola amores! Nicolas Olivera winked to a couple
of Qantas flight attendants. The men Uruguayans call Los Celestes
(The Sky Blues) seemed to be travelling worryingly well and outside,
18,000 metres above the greens of Argentina, there was barely a
cumulonimbus to be seen.
Thursday,
Montevideo
I decided against the
domestic flight from Buenos Aires to Montevideo, thinking I was
saving $A100 by boarding the ferry, but not knowing I was also dodging
a line-up of gollying Uruguayan fans.
By the time I'd taken
the three-hour voyage across the Rio de la Plata, the airport incident
was dominating the news. We are so sorry, it is not the Uruguayan
people, was the response from all corners of a beautiful city of
tree-lined streets and beaches. It is a disgusting minority who
are the agitadores (hooligans). The same 30 or so people, they also
tore things up here after the game in Melbourne.
I spent some time clarifying
whether the frenzy came as a result of disappointment with the 1-0
defeat or excitement at the sight of Angry Anderson with so many
motorcycles during the pre-match entertainment in Melbourne.
"We are very ashamed
of what Australian people must think about Uruguay," said 80-year-old
Elsa Rye, who caught me in a shopping centre car park snapping a
photo of a sodden urban horizon, inky clouds banded with a deep
orange underbelly. "Thank you for taking a photo of our sky.
You should take that sky to Australia and tell people that good
people live under this beautiful sky. I very much like this sky
of mine tonight."
She then promised me
that Uruguay would lose the match, for the simple reason of international
conspiracy. FIFA will not make enough money out of a country of
just three million reaching the World Cup. We will lose.
The reason for hanging
around the shopping centre car park was that it backed on to the
Sheraton, the Socceroos' hotel, the place to go as an Australian
chasing a ticket. A few minutes earlier, I'd interrupted a photo
shoot to ask Mark Viduka and Paul Okon how they were killing the
hours between training sessions, but made the mistake of failing
to clear it with the media officer first. Okon stared at me, and
Viduka stared at my feet and sipped disconsolately on his prop lemonade.
He then had a mild panic attack that it was made from local water.
"I feel a bit funny
already," he said to the media officer. "Did you see the
bottle get opened?"
I felt bad about asking my boring question about boredom, and slunk
into the car park with my ticket. I then perched on the beautiful
beach promenade, watching night soccer games and reading Gabriel
Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera by lamplight - and
praying that Garcia Marquez's lyrically described animes (the water
spirits the main character discovers to be mosquito larvae) were
staying well clear of an Australian striker's $A11 lemonade.
Saturday
night, Primata Hotel
I met another Australian,
Simon de Young, and together we were humiliated in a beer-garden
sing-off. The power had gone down for the second time in the night,
and fuelled by beer and pre-game excitement, La Primata Bar's drinkers
exploded into a rendition of Soy Celeste: Soy celeste, soy celeste,
celeste soy yo...
It translates to something
like: I am sky blue, I am sky blue, Sky blue am I - which lyrically
might not sound any more inspiring than Aussie, Aussie, Aussie,
oi, oi, oi, but it has a moving, hymn-like quality that we can never
achieve if we exclude melody and keep the ois.
Simon and I hit back
with a Waltzing Matilda that was mocked for being too slow, and
then a series of AFL songs that we tried to sell off as soccer songs.
"Where is this Tigerland?" someone asked, a question dodged
by a nimble sidestep into the Happy Little Vegemites theme.
The final blow from locals
came in the form of an entire bar room of drinkers jumping on their
chairs and singing: Borom bom bom, el que no selte, no va a Japon.
Eventually we received
a translation - the one who doesn't jump doesn't go to Japan - but
by the time we'd joined in, the bar had shifted into a harmonised
version of an old Uruguayan folk song called Jump, Jump, Jump, You
Little Kangaroos.
Sunday, 2pm,
El Estadio Centenario
One of the great pleasures
of Australian sport is walking to a big event through the Fitzroy
Gardens. In Montevideo, the scene almost rivals it. Waterfalls and
promenades and hectares of gardens surround El Estadio Centenario,
the ground built for the first World Cup in 1930.
"If you win, you
should run after the match," a man in the yellow-and-black
colors of the local side Penarol said with a toothless laugh as
we gathered outside the gate. "But don't worry, Uruguay will
win 2-0," he added reassuringly.
"No, Australia will
draw 1-1," I said, buoyed by the presence of about 50 mounted
police.
I must have looked like
I knew what I was talking about because in no time I was pounced
upon by Japanese television for an interview. To hide an Aussie
rules background, I tried to pepper my answers with recently learned
soccer expressions: If Okon can release Kewell, if we can organise
ourselves well down back, if Lazaridis can find the ball down the
left... From the way the Japanese interviewer stood there silently,
I need not have bothered. Nobody understood a word.
Across the way, three
backpackers with yellow-and-green hair were doing a better job singing
songs for ESPN.
Then the Uruguayan bus
arrived, and tens of thousands of waiting fans began the Soy Celeste
song again. I am sky blue, sky blue am I. As 100-odd Aussie fans
entered the stadium under police guard, there was no reason to doubt
them. From the cloudless heavens to 65,000 jumping individual sky-blue
units, the place was a pulsing, monochromed colossus.
"Oh my God, they've
got a moat," was all Simon could say as we reached our seats
on the top level. Sure enough, at each end of the pitch there were
muddy troughs of water, a few metres wide, and topped with razor
wire. There would be no Pat-Cash-style dashes into the crowd today.
>From the moment the
players made their grand entrance through the side of a giant inflatable
cigarette, there was a sense El Estadio was something larger than
any of us. The 200 or so Australians in the police-cordoned top
deck roared Advance Australia Fair, but the sound was lost in the
winds and the whistles of those moat-side. And the Uruguayan anthem,
which to me had sounded something like The Flight of the Bumble
Bee in Melbourne, now shook the stadium with sombre menace.
The Socceroos fidgeted,
the police saluted, and the crowd sang of their country's proud
independence, secured in 1828, and maintained ever since as a buffer
between Portuguese Brazil and Spanish Argentina.
In the 14th minute Dario
Silva scored, and from that moment watching became an agony. Australia
had its chances, most notably a searing Kewell strike in the 64th
minute, a duffed header from Viduka a minute later, and in the 79th,
Paul Agostino's header, which was well saved by Carini. But the
Uruguayans had more chances, more class, and were clearly a two-goals-better
team.
The final scoreline was
3-0, the last two coming from the substitute Richard Morales, a
man who had sat just two rows away on the flight over and who had
absolutely dominated the Lethal Weapon3 pinball machine in transit
in Auckland. Flippers Wednesday, feet Sunday - the man was having
a good week.
At the final whistle,
it was time for the South Americans to make big decisions, like
who to embrace and how many clothes to remove for the victory lap.
The Socceroos meanwhile endured a terrible walk back across the
field and up the inflatable cigarette.
As for those of us who
crossed an ocean with the dream that Iran 1998 might be redeemed,
we clapped them right to the filter tip. It had, after all, been
a good campaign. But as Garcia Marquez might say, three more years
of solitude.
I spent the time after
the match eating pizza with a couple of Australians in something
called a cervezaria (it roughly translates as beer-ateria). Outside,
on Avenue 18 de Julio, an emergency call had gone out to every open-topped
car and truck in Montevideo, the not-so-secret summons being a two-hour,
unbroken horn blast. On the vehicles and between them, radios blared
and people danced. And not just any dancing either, it was passionate,
ecstatic and synchronised to a samba beat led by hundreds of drummers.
As though they were performing an impromptu musical called Not This
Time, Little Kangaroo.
On a nearby table, a
man who introduced himself as Jose Tanco commiserated.
"It is sad for you,
but for us football is very important. It would have been a national
disaster to miss out for the third time running. Football is inside
every Uruguayan. We have won two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals,
19 Copa America, 10 more than Brazil. It's beyond sport, it's like
The Pride."
At that moment, another
reveller hurried through the door of the bar and over to our table.
He said something very fast and incomprehensible to me in Spanish
(which means it wasn't hello, goodbye or beer-ateria), before flashing
a smile that was big on effort, but low on teeth.
I stared back for a moment,
worrying over a response before opting for a smile and a simple
"si".
The man clapped me on
the back, said "gracias" and ran out with the rest of
our pizza. It was that sort of day.
This
article was first published in the Age,
Nov 28, 2001
ISSN
1834-9277 (Print)