Colo Colo

Tuesday, April 29th – Day 133

I came back to Santiago because I fly up to Calama on Thursday.
Colo Colo is playing tonight, and this may be my only chance to see a top-level soccer match while I’m here. If you read the previous post, I mentioned that Colo Colo is the working man’s team – kind of like the Oakland Raiders of Chilean soccer. That’s because Colo Colo is a poverty stricken barrio here. Two people I know said that I should avoid the game because their stadium is in a bad neighborhood and their fans are unruly (local girls). One person said “Dude, you should go!” (local guy). I took the subway.

Walking across the parking lot of the stadium, I could hear what sounded like (and turned out to be) the largest diesel generator in the world. I know the game is on TV, but c’mon, there’s only one small TV truck. Turns out that the use the generator to power the stadium lights. Electricity is not that consistent in this part of the city, and a sudden loss of power could be a real problem.

I know enough to stay away from the cheap seats, so I buy the most expensive ticket available - $7,000 pesos. It’s general admission, and stadium feels virtually empty, except for one corner where the knuckleheads gather. Their section is packed, and is separated from the rest of the stadium by a 15 foot fence that is topped with barbed-wire. It kind of looks like they’re in a prison yard.

In this parts of the world, whistling is the equivalent of “booing”. The first people to come out onto the pitch are the referees, escorted by riot police, and they are greeted by nothing but whistles. Then the other team comes out and there is more whistling. When Colo Colo comes out, the knuckleheads start singing. And they continue to sing, non-stop, throughout the entire match.

There are different songs for different situations. At the beginning, the song is about how Colo Colo is going to kick your ass tonight. There’s another song for making fun of the other teams mistakes. Colo Colo got behind, and there’s a song for encouraging the team to work harder to score. Once they scored, there’s a song to tell their team how good they are. Then, they go back to “we’re going to kick your ass tonight”. Anyway, this goes on the entire night.

My only disappointment is that they don’t sell beer. I guess that would be sort of like throwing gasoline onto a fire. But since everybody should be sober, it looks like you can bring in whatever fireworks you want. Several times, the fans set off stuff that blasted a hundred feet into the air with two or three rounds of explosions.

Colo Colo appears to be the perennial champions of the Chilean professional league, and they have the trophy room to prove it. Ultimately, this match ended in a 2-2 tie, so the fans were not terribly happy or sad, and everything was pretty orderly as we left. To get into the subway station, you had to walk through a gauntlet of riot police, probably 30 men on each side. It was a pretty strong show of force, and would certainly take the edge off of any situation that might come close to getting out of hand.