Thursday, January 28, 2016

Bilbao 1 - 3 Barcelona

met up with my friend Juan Miguel yesterday.  We've been practicing English and Spanish together for several months on skype.  For anyone learning another language, I highly recommend italki.com to find teachers and practice partners.  It's where I met both Noelia and Juan Miguel.  Anyway, we met up for beer and then the game at Camp Nou, Barcelona's home stadium.  

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(In case Juan Miguel's wife is reading, I can verify that we each had only one beer.)

I managed to buy five seats together, and our location was good, especially since all the goals were on our side of the field.

barcatics

 

So, it was Mary, Rebecca, Frank, Juan Miguel, me, and a stadium full of rabid Barca fans.

[gallery ids="1773,1771,1770,1774" type="rectangular"]

 

Seats at the stadium are cozy.  Imagine watching a game with 65,000 chanting, singing fans on coach seats in an airplane, and you'll get the general idea.  There is no instant replay scoreboard, which is maybe a good thing, given that the refs failed to call what seemed to be several hard fouls against Barca attackers.

Bilbao played well, and led by one at the half.  Barcelona seemed flat, and had problems clearing the ball from their defensive end.  It was a different game the rest of the way.  Barca's short passes started to work, leading to more and more scoring chances, until they finally broke through, ending with three unanswered goals. 

It was not the best night for Messi, but I saw him with my own eyes do Jedi-mind tricks with the ball, leaving  fans, defenders, and Messi himself, I think, wondering, how did he do that?  Though it's from a different game, here's an example of what I mean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmAmK6HlYAY

 

I'm so pleased to meet Juan Miguel face-to-face, and to check an item off my list, attending a game of world class fútbol.