Sunday Soccer

The few locals with satellite services able to televise professional soccer matches charge about 10mts, 30 cents US, for watching, which only our teacher colleagues and other salaried workers can afford. With plenty of passion for soccer but very limited access to viewing broadcasts, the weekly soccer games on the town pitch always draw a crowd. Our town has several teams, some drawing players from local entities, like the health workers or boarder guard teams, and others from neighborhoods, like the Sanjika team based in our bairro. We even have a teachers’ team, but we don’t play too often, although several of our teachers manage other local teams. Sometimes its hard to tell who exactly is playing because there are only a few complete sets of uniforms, so the teams pass them around. A hierarchy exists encompassing all levels of Mozambican soccer, although no one seems able to explain its exact structure. What is clear is that our teams are near the bottom of the soccer pecking order, but occasionally when one of our them is on a winning streak the team may get invited to play one of the more legitimate sides from the provincial capital. Other times we get stood-up, like the week we all came out to see our boys play one of the teams sponsored by the big coal company down in Moatize that never showed up. Game day atmosphere tends to be mellow and conducive to talking with friends on the sidelines while eating sugar cane or other simple snacks available from the ladies who usually work near the market, but migrate to wherever large crowds assemble. Alcohol is usually consumed moderately, but there’s always enough for a few drunken fans to take their cheerleading and trash talking to either funny or annoying extremes. After last year’s World Cup vuvuzela craze, at least one person in town managed to get one of those annoying horns and he makes it heard at every game. Matches usually start late and don’t necessarily end with the referee’s final whistle. Various unrelated problems can lead to the termination of play: the ball getting stuck in a tree or going flat, lack of light if the game gets going too late in the day, a controversial penalty call prompting one team to storm off the field, or actual storms when the rain is really heavy. The soccer field is not completely flat, but it does sit on the edge of town with a panoramic backdrop of the rolling fields dotted by mango trees and gigantic rock mountains. We don’t always make it to games, but we live close enough for the cheering to inform us how many goals have been scored in each contest.