COLUMBUS, Ohio -- They came by jet from Jacksonville, by charter from
San Jose, by crosstown bus and by Dodge Durango from South Carolina.
All were wearing some combination of red, white and blue, which confused the
partisan lines between the fans of Costa Rica and the United States before
Wednesday night's semifinal round World Cup qualifying match at Crew Stadium.
The flags of both countries are the same colors, but that is where the
similarities end.
"This is our main sport - like baseball is for you," said Rigoberto
Mendez, an announcer for one of the seven radio stations broadcasting the match
back to Costa Rica. "We HAVE to win."
Behind him, two dozen men danced while holding a Costa Rican flag aloft,
keeping beat with several drums and horns. Another hundred people, most waving
Costa Rican flags or wearing one, watched the scene. A couple hundred yards
across the parking lot, another group of 100 or so Costa Rica fans blew
whistles, honked horns and shook cow bells.
Two American fans took it all in, one wrapped in a flag.
"This is what it's all about," said Daniel Johnson, a British Airways
supervisor in Jacksonville, Fla. He nodded at the Costa Ricans and said he
admired their enthusiasm. "We're all together here because of the sport."
The crowd also included Miguel Angel Rodriguez Echeverria, president of
Costa Rica, and Yazbeck Parrales, a construction worker from Greenville, S.C.
Parrales drove the 575 miles in his Dodge Durango with five others. Seven more
Costa Rican fans were crammed in another car behind his.
"If we lose today, it's going to be sad," Parrales said. "This is
something that means a lot to us. This is our main passion."
The winner of the match was guaranteed of advancing to next year's
six-nation regional finals of the North and Central American and Caribbean
region, which will produce three qualifiers for the 2002 tournament.
Frequently the U.S. team encounters hostile crowds even in its own country
because the sport is embraced by so many immigrants.
"We have a game in LA and the crowd is anti-U.S.," forward Ante Razov
said.
Officials from U.S. Soccer have gone to great lengths to make its team feel
at home in its homeland. Soccer fans ordering tickets from outside the United
States were given upper-level seats at Crew Stadium.
"We tried to make this stadium as pro-American as possible but there is
only so much you can do," U.S. Soccer Federation spokesman Jim Moorhouse said.
"People that identified themselves as Costa Rican fans were not sold tickets
in large groups. There were split up and put up higher in the stands. But
unless they said they were Costa Rican fans we wouldn't have known."
AP NEWS
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