Twelve hours after the Socceroos beat Syria, across
Greg Mancz Womens Jersey 120 nervous, suffering minutes in Sydney, Romell Quioto beat the offside trap. To the delight of 38,000 Hondurans in the Estadio Olimpico Metropolitano, he spun a neat full circle, picked his spot, and unlocked a series of events that would send a handful of
Greg Mancz Womens Jersey Socceroos fans on a 14,000km trip from Australia to San Pedro Sula.
It could have been Panama. Or the United States. Kevin Pollard, a travel booker from Melbourne, and his fellow travelling Socceroos fans had done the maths – the points, the permutations of the results and the airfares. Honduras, the small Central American country, population 9 million, were the outsiders.
But if decades of supporting the Socceroos had taught them anything it was to expect the unexpected.
Pollard and his fellow fan Les Street, a self-confessed tragic writing a history of Australian football stadiums, are two of roughly 300 fans travelling to Honduras for this week’s first leg of the Socceroos’ final World Cup qualifying playoff. If the current numbers hold steady, they will be outnumbered by about 120 to one.
Street says he saw all this coming – in a dream. “I’ve actually had two dreams about the Socceroos in Honduras,” he says. He went to bed on the night of the Syria game, his mind on Panama, and instead dreamt of booking tickets to Honduras, where, thanks to dream logic, he found himself playing baseball.
In the lead-up to Friday’s game (Saturday AEDT), much of the media focus has been on the gangsters and
http://www.avalancheofficialauthentic.com/Tyson_Jost_Jersey_Adidas gun crime of San Pedro Sula. It has been reported as a
Greg Mancz Womens Jersey place of Zika virus, hurricanes and carjackings – with world’s third-highest per capita murder rate.
But Pollard, and local journalists, say the only source of danger to Australian fans is Honduran anger at this relentless caricature of a country that has, at least for travelling football fans, always been safe harbour.
Pollard is leading the contingent from the Green and Gold Army, a fan group that have followed
http://www.shopjaguarsnfljerseys.com/Arrelious-Benn-Jersey the Socceroos overseas since 2001. They’ve been to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Iran, Tajikistan, Malaysia, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
This will be his 50th tour, the latest
Greg Mancz Womens Jersey in a long-running tradition of away legs, especially for older fans, who grew up before the glory days of three successive World Cups and the (notionally) easier path of direct qualification via the Asian confederation.
“We have fans who have been on a lifetime journey with the Socceroos,” says Michael Edgley, a director of the Green and Gold Army. His love of away
http://www.goldenstatewarriorsonline.com/Official-Zaza-Pachulia-Jersey matches began when he watched Australia beat England 3-1 in a 2000 friendly at Upton Park, West Ham United’s old stadium in London. “We have all generations of fans. They’ve gone to Scotland in 1985, they’ve flown to Argentina in 1993.”
This kind of far-flung, cross-confederation travel, is in many ways a part of the DNA of a Socceroos fan. From 1997’s 1-1 with Iran in Tehran, to the 3-0 humbling in Montevideo in 2001, to have been a fan is to have lived, for too long, on a diet entirely of odd intercontinental trips ending in heartbreak.
And this
http://www.officialrockiestore.com/Trevor_Story_Jersey will probably be the last time. With the World Cup expanding in 2026 to 48 teams, Australia might never have to endure a playoff again. The travellers to Honduras are saying farewell to a unique kind of Antipodean, self-doubting rite of passage – of white-knuckle, absolute drama, constant fear of disaster, and the mad mathematics of away goals always in the back of the mind.
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