Futebol with the locals

People like football in Brazil. A lot. They grasp every opportunity they have to play ball on beaches, perfectly brown football pitches or dead-end streets. And no matter if you’re young, old, black or white, rich or poor: everyone can join in anytime.

(Funny then that they still get beaten silly by a nation that spends its time making Edammer cheese whilst cycling).

So on the football pitch of King Luiz Afonso, my father-in-law, every saturday afternoon at four o’clock precisely a football match is organised. (One of the few things Brazilians actually come on time for). The caddle farmer neighbour joins in, as well as the butcher from the local supermarket, the local estate agents, the son of two police officers, the local car mechanic with friends of friends of friends and ofcourse a bunch of wannabe Cristiano Ronaldo slackers who normally spend their time chatting-up fifteen year old girls whilst plucking their eyebrows. Five against five. The winner remains.

This produces a fair mix of football players, with skills ranging from nearly brilliant to nearly pathetic. The best goalkeeper of them all, or golero, the gardener of King Luiz. With the gardening gloves he normally uses fot charts ranging to weed plucking to painting bird cages, he stops shot after shot after catlike dives in every far corner of the goal. Shots mostly coming from a fat guy called Andre who believes walking on a pitch no bigger then 40 by 25 meters is utmost unnecessary and therefore, leaving his teammates somewhat crossed, time after time tries to score by shooting for goal from the other end of the pitch.

Another example of the nearly pathetic (but nearly brilliantly funny) is a big black guy called Kissuco. He arrives 45 minutes before the start of the first match, just to make sure he is on time, wearing a perfectly suited (but very fake) AC Milan football kid. But as soon as the first match startes he takes of his t-shirt. I imagine he does not want it to get creased. His tactics are simple: if you run towards the goal of the opponent’s, you’ll get closer to the opponent’s goal. And not surprisingly, it works!

And whilst executing his strategy, his main way of avoiding his opponents is running straight at them, hoping that they will move asside out of sudden fear. Which, also not very surprisingly, does not always work out well. Either resulting in him losing the ball to Andre (who then shoots for goal after which the gardener gives the ball to Kissuco again) or in a painful collision that, if we all were children, would end in tears.

Also one of them is a lost Dutchman wearing his worn-out Oranje shirt, on many occasions successfully defending to afterwards equally unsuccessfully attack by mixing up the players of his team with those of the opponents. One player his does know for certain is his team member, his father-in-law, who, even on age 54, frequently outruns him.

It all lasts until six, when a perfectly orange dusk sets in, all the players rush home Brazilian style (which means no rush at all) on their bycicles, motorcycles, in the back and on top of pick-up trucks to start another week full of far less important things.

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