Luis Fabi MANO!

The Ivorians and the Brazilians standing for their anthems was incredible, obviously. The pressure on these guys is absolutely incredible.

The game itself was exciting. Luis Fabiano scored early with a great rip. He scored again in what resembled Pele's first goal, but as the ball was trapped, there was a clear handball. The refs blew it, again, and the goal counted. We began chanting 'Fabi MANO.' It caught on in our section, but there is a problem with this World Cup. Whenever a good chant begins, the vuvuzelas will begin blowing and drown out everything. I kept an open mind at first, but I am a fan of banning them everywhere. They should only be used for such things as torturing BP executives.

The only crowd participation is the Wave, which elsewhere is called the 'Mexican Wave.' There were 84,000 people at Soccer City, and the wave was absolutely stunning.

Brazil won it 3-1, but I did get to see my boy Drogba score in a pretty impressive drive. The Ivorians were in trouble at this point.

This is intended on being a family-friendly blog, but something should be noted about this trip. The first is that it was a graduation trip for three of four fraternity brothers and a post-1L class for me. The second is that beer is really cheap in this country. Even at the stadium, where it is about 3 times as expensive as at bars, it is half the price of beer in the states. We had three per half for this game, which may explain what follows.

As we were leaving, with the Brazilians chanting all over the place, we began chanting 'Luis Fabi-Man-O' as we skipped down the ramp waiving our hands like Beyonce in the single ladies video. We passed a huge crowd of Brazilians, one of whom ran in front of us with a jersey that said 'FABULOSO.' We are DECKED in USA stuff, remember. One of them got pretty into Scott's face screaming 'COUNT THE STARS! ONE TWO THREE FOUR FIVE! {sidenote for non-soccer readers: when you win a World Cup, your country places a star above the logo of your country on your jerseys. Many people do not like the fact that we have three stars as part of our logo, which represent stars} The response was more skipping and singing (and maybe a pithy comment about freedom or life-expectancy).

As we got in front of them, we heard them chanting 'F*ck U S A! F*ck U S A!' So again, at their own HUGE win, the Brazilians started chanting at us rather than their own country. We were pretty proud.