Both of the above posts with links from yahoo sports were very interesting if you are interested.
I have never kicked a soccer ball and don't understand the finer nuances of the game, twasn't popular in the US when I was a park rat. But as a result of my exposure to it in CR, I'll watch the World Cup quarter to semi and finals every four years, and of course the rare CR v US.
But, I wondered afterwards why they scheduled a soccer match at the foot of the Rockies in early spring. Got the answer from the first link above:
"Gulati (Head of US Soccer Federation) said the decision to play in Denver in March had not been based on any desire to have difficult wintry conditions for Central American opponents (duh, but you knew when you planned it that it was going to be early spring in the Rockies, right?), but was mainly due to the desire to spend a week at altitude before a game in Mexico City on Tuesday." (Which is from what I've read elsewhere was one of the reasons they didn't cancel the game--they both had games set Tuesday).
I get scheduling the high altitude game to prepare for the Mexico match--it also apparently is being played in a high altitude arena--but it backfired with the snow thing. Or maybe not?
Did you read President Chinchilla's tweet while they match was going on? Not nice for a Jesuit educated (Georgetown my alma mater) chica Catolica princessa.
Of course they were losing when she tweeted.
This snow debacle will go down as an insult no Tico of TV age will ever forget. It'll be right up there in their minds that when they get the opportuntiy they will attack like they did with William Walker, a lawyer from Tennessee, who conquered Nicaland and became its president in 1856 and instituted slavery, and then tried the same in CR. But CR resisted and stopped him at Rivas before he got to the border in 1857, and who was executed by Honduras 3 years later when he was 36. To memorialize it, the Ticos, like they did for Juan Santamaria, the name sake of CR Int'l Airport, he who led the charge against the bastard gringo Walker 156 years ago (the hatred of whom we still sometimes feel but can't figure out, especially on April 11, a national CR Holiday in Juan Santamaria's honor), CR will build a statute of the Tico who makes the winning revenge goal and it'll be mounted at the Liberia airport renamed in his honor.
The next time you are heading home via Juan Santamaria Int'l airport and see Juan's life size statute there, or at the Congress, remember he and William Walker are behind all the reasons you in anyway got screwed by a Tico. And lay low and stay out of Tico bars on every April 11th, the #1 day of the year for Tico nationalistic pride.
|