[ENG-PT] My first big sporting event / Meu primeiro grande evento esportivo

Hello everyone,

At the end of July, I attended for the first time in my life an important sports event. I went to Brisbane Stadium to watch Brazil vs France for the Fifa Women’s World Cup. It was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. I knew beforehand that it would be something incredible to be part of, but I was still taken aback by it.

To give a bit of context, I’m Brazilian, so football is very much present in my life, even if I don’t want it to. But I was never too invested in following any sports events. I like to watch the Olympic Games when they are on, but I wouldn’t make much effort to follow a match or anything. That is the reason why I didn’t pay much attention when people started talking about this World Cup, so I didn’t make any plans for it.

I live in Perth now, which is the most remote capital of Australia. And even here in the wild west, the World Cup was present. They started organising events around the town to promote it. That’s when I started to think, there is a huge event taking place in the country that I’m living in, and I have a chance to participate. I started looking at the dates and places of the matches, saw that Brazil would not play here, only in the East Coast. That made me lose interest, I don't want to cross the country to watch a football match. But then, everywhere you look people are talking about it, people in the Facebook groups saying that they would travel to watch this or that match, and it got me excited too. I started looking at tickets and saw that they weren’t available. After seeing a post of someone saying that they were opening new sales every day I decided to check again the next day and there were a few available in a good spot of the stadium. I bought it right away. I will see about the flights later.

So after overthinking a bit more, on the next day I booked the fights. They were quite expensive, but that is the price to pay when you decide on a trip less than 2 weeks before. I wanted to participate in the event and have that experience, so I was fine with the price I had to pay. And I did not regret it for a second. Even when the result of the game was disappointing. The whole experience was so incredible that not even a bad result of the game would affect it.

I started seeing the excitement of the Brazilians in Brisbane on the morning of the match when I went to the city centre to buy a t-shirt for the game. I went to 3 shops and in all of them there were other Brazilians searching for the same thing. I already knew that there would be a pre-game party in the afternoon from the social media posts, so after a getting a bit of rest (I hadn’t slept much during the overnight flight), I took the train there. I arrived at the party a couple of hours late, and I was quite shocked to see how big it was. The party was at a pub very close to the stadium, less than 1km walking. The street in front of the bar was closed because of the match and that was a great thing because the people took over it. There wasn’t enough space inside the bar for everyone, so a lot of the people stayed outside on the street. I don’t know what I was expecting, but certainly wasn’t that many Brazilians all in the same place.

An hour before the game, people started the walk together to the stadium, playing instruments and singing. It was beautiful to see the street absolutely taken by the people excited and happy for the game. Women’s football hasn’t been a popular sport in Brazil, even though we have a player that has been named 6 times the best in the world. Seeing all those people excited for the game was really amazing.

When I got to my seat at the stadium, I was a bit anxious because I went alone and I had no idea if there would be other Brazilians sitting next to me. I would feel a bit awkward if there were only foreigners around me, even more so if they were all French. 😆 Thankfully, the Brazilians started to arrive, and I was very lucky that the group sitting close to me were a group of very friendly young ladies. That made the game much more fun to watch.

It was great to watch the stadium filling up and seeing that most of the people were wearing the Brazilian colours. The attendance that night was almost 50 thousand people. Singing the national anthem was certainly the most emotional moment of the night. At the end, when they stop the music, and you can hear the whole stadium singing is a unique sensation. I had seen that on tv before, but being there is something else.

After that, the night was a roller-coaster of emotions. In the 90 minutes of the game, I went through, excitement, anxiety, anger, happiness and sadness. I had forgotten how overwhelming a football match can be. It is certainly great entertainment, but I don’t think I could go through all that on a weekly basis, following a team playing in various competitions. I prefer to have a proper recovery time between these events. Every 2 years is good enough for me. The next time that I will stop to watch a football match after this World Cup will be in the Olympic Games. That is plenty of time for me to recover from all those emotions. 🙂