el pibe de 17 anos

Today, a footballer known to the world as Ronaldo retired. He's 33 years old. If you pay any attention to football he's been around for what seems like forever, in footballing terms.

There's a famous story which I found myself repeating about my first night on Latin American soil. I was taken to see a football match. I was hugged by a fat, sweaty man on the terraces. Thanks to him I learnt my first Spanish words the hard way. Saltar. Cantar. It was a fitting introduction to what was to become the other side of my life.

What I didn't realise, when telling this story, was that there was a kid of 17 playing for the Brazilian team, who scored two goals and ended up on the losing side. Because he was young, he wasn't famous in Europe at the time. There would have been no reason for me to have heard of him. His name was Ronaldo.

It's only this evening that I've worked out what team he played for in Brazil before he went to play for PSV in Holland. The same team that was playing against Nacional, in the Estadio Centenario, that night. The 28th October 1993.

The details of the match itself have always been hazy. I know Nacional won. Largely because of my capacity to learn in no time at all what the Spanish word for 'to jump' meant. I remember there were penalties involved. But not how many, or how decisively. Though now it comes back to me.

On that night, I was still a 'pibe', albeit of slightly more than 17 years. I had long hair and honey coloured skin. I didn't have the faintest idea that the internet existed and that it would become part of my life. Therefore I had no way of even conceiving the fact that one day I would be able to rediscover that night. That I would rediscover my first night in Latin America on the day that the kid who scored two almost immediately forgotten goals would eventually choose to retire.

Thanks to this thing called the internet, I would see the faces of the people who were all around me again. Hear the sounds of the stadium again. It's the sounds which, above all else, remain familiar. All of which I rediscovered here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvjtFM4vKrg&feature=related

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This match was the quarter final. In the semi final, I learn, Nacional were eliminated by Flamengo. The game was "Suspendido a los 77 minutos por incidentes." I suspect that translates. I wasn't there to saltar.

Ronaldo and the internet and myself. And everyone else. We've all been a long way round the houses since that mad, spectacular first night of victory and defeat in Montevideo.

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