Another Close Call

If you don't like soccer then you need to stop reading now.

Last night our favorite team went to Argentina for the second leg of the quarter finals of the Libertadores.

If you remember our blog from last Saturday our team beat the reigning champions of the tournament 1-0 in our stadium last week.

Last night we played in their stadium.  We needed to win, tie or could even get beat by one goal as long as the score was 2-1 for them or above (3-2, 4-3, you get the idea).  Confusing?  I'll try to briefly explain. In this tournament there is more value placed on scoring in your opponent's stadium.  If you combine the scores of the two games and it's tied then the team that scored the most goals in the opponent's house wins.  It's the tiebreaker for tied combined scores after the two games.  Say the first game in your stadium is 0-0.  The next game in your opponent's stadium is 2-2. So, after two games it's 2-2 but you win because you scored 2 goals in their house. Make sense now?  Probably not.

Anyway, Estudiantes (the team from Argentina) scored 2 quick goals on us in the first period.  If it stayed that way they would go to the semifinals. It stayed that way until there were 2 minutes left in the game.  Then we scored an amazing/saving goal.  The guy who scored it is named Giuliano.  He's only 19.

Here are the goals.

I love watching the video because you can hear the fireworks going off as we scored our goal.  It's their fans celebrating their victory.  They continued to go off even after we scored.  The media has been talking about whether all the smoke from the fireworks messed with goalie's vision on that play.

Our neighborhood sounded like a war zone when we scored the goal.  At 5:00 this morning there were still fireworks going off in the city.  It never gets old.  I've said it before you've never experienced any sporting even as cool as watching, and being a part of, a big time soccer game.

We don't play the semifinals until the end of July.  This tournament now takes a break until then because of the World Cup.  We play São Paulo in the semifinal. They are tough.  Don't worry soccer fans, we'll share more then.  Hope it will be more good news.