The Season Finale

In order to know exactly what was going on in all the vital last day fixtures, we decided to have a chilled afternoon watching the games on TV with a few beers.

I was secretly hoping that Internacional would win after learning about all the match fixing scandals that ended up with Corinthians replaying 2 games they´d lost and gaining another 4 points, meaning they technically should have been one point behind Internacional at the start of play.

As it turned out, with Coritiba taking an early lead against Internacional there was little drama to be had. Corinthians won the title despite their 3-2 loss at Goias, Inter finished second and Coritiba went down. Indeed, the only excitement of the afternoon was that Romario scored 2 penalties to make him the league´s leading goalscorer.

To cheer ourselves up, we rounded up some folk in the hostel and headed down to floodlit Barra beach for a game of beach soccer. England v an International team comprising a Mexican, an Italian and a Spaniard. With the rain pouring down, and the pitch being partially submerged by waves every couple of minutes, conditions were not ideal and we conceded 2 quick goals. A Doug thunderbolt off the post looked to have put us back in it, before we fell to another 2 goals. The tough Italian defence was proving difficult to beat and the pitch was getting worse with play.

However, as the tide started to come in, we realised that the waves were smoothing out one side of the pitch, and by timing our attacks correctly we could race down the line without obstruction. Our team-mate Josh scored a classic solo goal, then he and I completed a neat one-two before I megged the keeper for 4-3. Finally, from a corner, Josh smashed a Tony Yeboah-esque volley into the roof of the goal from my knock down. 4-4.



With everyone pretty knackered, we called next-goal-wins, and after a period of frantic play, Doug poked the ball through to me to score the winner. Goooool!!

Ecstatic at our first win on foreign soil (well, sand) we resolved that next time we had to take on the ultimate challenge, the Brazilians!