So soccer has always been my favorite sport. I know that makes me weird, or at least it used to growing up. I get how it can be a boring sport for some people – as compared to basketball, football and baseball it is a low scoring game. Most of the time you have to appreciate the game without any scoring – and I think this is where soccer loses a lot of people. But partly that’s why it is so exciting – scoring a goal is a big deal. Plus I also like how the game is international . . . I know we have the World Series in baseball, but I fail to see much representation by teams outside the US.
Anyways, in the US we’ve been lucky – it seems like for the last 15 years or so we keep getting better – and we have qualified for every World Cup since 1990. Finally I think we are getting some respect in the soccer world – we’re still not one of the top teams but we’re not a joke anymore either.
Anyways, when I decided to come to Honduras I was excited to be in a ‘soccer’ country for the World Cup. I later found out that this was the first time that Honduras has been in the World Cup in 28 years – and I think only their second time ever (there is a long qualification process to even make it into the group of 32 teams you are watching now).
The story of how they got in is a good one: when it came down to the final qualification game, Honduras needed to beat El Salvador and have the US beat or tie Costa Rica. The games were being played at the same time, and Honduras did their part by beating El Salvador 1-0. Unfortunately, the US was losing 2-0 to Costa Rica after 23 minutes in a game that didn’t mean anything to us (US) – I think by that point we had already qualified for the World Cup. But the same way we have done in this World Cup, we came back. We scored a goal in the 71st minute to make it 2-1. Most Hondurans stopped watching their game, since they were feeling good about beating El Salvador. In the final seconds of the US game, we scored to tie the game 2-2, keeping Costa Rica from going to the World Cup, and giving Honduras their first World Cup in 28 years. Check out this video to see how excited they were – keeping in mind that their team wasn’t even playing in this game:
