Much like Jutiapa my town also participated in an important futbol match this past weekend. In our case it was the final match of a two month long tournament that we (and by “we” I really mean “they”, since our town had assembled an all-star team of our various clubs in order to participate, and lord knows I am not all-star material in futbol) had been participating in the nearby municipality of Lucerna.
Going into this match our team had been undefeated in the tournament and had shown themselves to be the best team in all aspects of play. This was clear from the fact that our goalie was the least scored on, we had the highest goal scoring player, and we had the player voted best defenseman of the tournament. Unfortunately this earlier success did little to help them in the final and my towns team lost a hard fought game 2-0. This outcome is misleading since the two goals came on a blown offside’s call early in the match, and a penalty shot in the last 3 minutes of play, that came as a result of a needless penalty due to desperation to tie the game. The most exciting (if that is the right word) part of the game was came in the beginning of the second half when an on field penalty resulted in a bench clearing brawl (don’t think they use that expression in futbol, but I’m just going to steal it from baseball anyway) that ended with multiple spectators pulling guns (this is a disturbingly common occurrence in rural Honduran futbol matches).
It started when my friend was slide tackled out of bounds over aggressively while trying to center the ball for one of our players to take a shot on goal (this happened directly in front of me and had I not jumped back I would have been plowed into). Rather than just get up and take the free kick that had been called by the referee, my friend (who has a bit of a temper) decided to send the other player a message, and so as he was getting up he kicked the other player in the face (his foot had ended up on top of the other guys head when they fell, so he basically just let it drop on him). This resulted in them both jumping up and exchanging punches (I tried to pull them apart but they were pretty dedicated to beating the crap out of each other). This prompted both teams, and a large portion of the spectators (we were the visitors, but we had showed up with 10 pickup trucks full of fans), to charge into a large group around them pushing and shoving.
Things got out of hand when suddenly one of the fans from the other town (defiantly drunk) to pull out his pistol and wave it in my friends face. He (correctly) decided that the fight was not worth dying over and bolted across the field. This prompted the gunman to jam his piece in another one of our player’s chests, as he was trying to calm the man down. Not to be out done a bunch of the guys from my town pulled their own guns and started moving towards the confrontation (if you haven’t been keeping up with my blog thus far, many people carry guns, even my mayor was at the game with a 45 caliber revolver sticking out of the frint of his pants).
Luckily for everyone cooler heads prevailed and the confrontation was diffused before anyone got shot. Somehow after things cooled down the game resumed without a single card being issued and the game finished almost without incident (though both teams were playing extremely aggressive and mean spirited futbol). The only other incident being a few minutes after when the line judge, positioned in front of the other towns fans, made a call in favor of our team and was shoved from behind and verbally threatened by their fans. Luckily for everyone (especially the line judge) the police showed up right after this and made a show of forced (which is pretty easy when you are a force of six guys in flack vests armed with M16s). After the game ended I opted to get a ride home with one of my friends and his family rather than going out with the young guys to drink off the loss.
Though I learned afterwards, that they apparently just bought a bunch of booze and returned to town to get drunk at a vela (wake) for a 14 year old from one of the aldeas (who it turns out was the cousin of a friend of mine, and I had actually met) who was shot by a friend while playing with a parent’s gun last week . Thinking about this made me realize that in my town futbol matches and funerals are both just seen as normal local social events, but I guess that makes sense considering the likelihood that the former will often enough give cause for the latter.
