Barcelona

As I have repeatedly written in past blogs, soccer is king in Honduras, everybody has a favorite local team, Honduran national league team, and an international team, Barcelona is hands down the favorite international team in Honduras. Barcelona is arguably the best soccer team in the world right now especially after trouncing Real Madrid 5-0 last week; the same is true in San Marcos. How is it the same in San Marcos you ask? /Why are you writing a blog about this? There are a lot of different soccer leagues, Barcelona happens to be one the names of one of the teams in the 3rd division of 20-25 year old soccer players in San Marcos. Our region (San Marcos, San Francisco, Quimistan, La Flecha, Santa Rosa) has about ten teams, Barcelona is the best, it also happens to be one of the teams that my host dad runs, and also the team that I have recently begun playing with. So far we are first place in our division; we roll over most teams, last game winning 7-2 over a decent team. My first game came a few weeks ago, I didn’t play much, but in the time I did play I had a great time and it was real exciting. We were losing almost the whole game due to some sloppy plays, with 15 minutes left in the game we were down 3-2, that’s when I got into the game. We scored an equalizer but then we quickly let in another goal and it was looking bleak until one of our forwards scored again to make it 4-4, I was playing right mid and was involved in a couple plays, with about 5 minutes left in the game I was passed the ball for what would have been a simple give and go to an overlapping defender from our team, unfortunately a player on the other team had a different idea, frustrated by our comeback he slid tackled me from behind getting all leg an no ball, I went down hard but wasn’t hurt. I jumped up quickly to see what the ref was going to say, apparently I looked angry… the ref quickly gave the opposing player a red card, but my coach, wanting to protect me from doing anything rash rushed onto the field and began yelling at the ref, he got ejected too….oops. We ended up scoring from that free kick and winning the game 5-4. It’s funny, because we are in first place most of the fans were mad because of our comeback and generally root for the opposing teams so all the games have a lot of energy and passion. I’m getting to know the guys on the team better and it’s been a lot of fun, besides the frustrating paperwork problems being a foreigner. Today at 3 we play the second place team in the league in what should be another great game; I’ll let you know how it turns out.