Flamengo at the Maracana

With two weekends in Rio we couldn’t miss the chance of a football match and luckily the day after we arrived Flamengo, the most supported of the Rio clubs, were playing at home against Atletico Paranaense. Coincidentally this was also the first match back in his home country for Adriano, the Brazilian international who spent years at Inter Milan. We should have arrived earlier at the game because with half an hour to kick off the queues to buy tickets were enormous. The long wait was broken by the spectacle of a giant-sized banner, with the image of Adriano’s face, floating up into the sky. We eventually reached the front, managing to buy our tickets in chaos at the windows with people shouting and virtually standing on top of each other to get to the sales windows, but missed the first 25 minutes of play. We missed the first goal, scored by the new man himself, but the trip was still completely worth it. The stadium is a bowl, seating over 100,000 people. There were nearly 75,000 for this game with over half of them squashed unbelievably tightly into the cheapest seats. It was from there that lots of drums beat out the famous Samba rhythms as the crowd bounced and sang in time. It was good to see almost as many women as men at the game and a low level of policing.Despite looking a little podgy and as lazy as ever (though nothing compared to the big, fat Ronaldo now playing at Corintheans of Sao Paulo), Adriano did what was required to repay the adoration dished out to him with 2 well taken headed goals.

It was a good game with great fans in a sea of red and black. It was also good to visit the stadium that will host the 2014 world cup final, when the country will be truly devastated if the crowd is not a sea of yellow and green.