The Brazil-Spain duel of the FIFA Under-17 World Cup at Jawaharlal Nehru International Stadium at Kaloor was still sometime away when a Spanish fan walked into take his place in the queue.
He looked around and on finding overwhelmingly dominant Brazilian fans around him walked up to a youngster to have his cheeks painted with the Spanish colours. But he was crestfallen when the youngster told him that he only knows to paint the Brazilian flag.
That summed up the mood at the stadium where Brazil fans sporting fancy head gears in Brazil colours simply outnumbered their Spanish counterparts. Jomy Mathew and Thomas Jacob, traders from Kottayam, were representatives of the boisterous Brazilian crowd for whom football meant only the game played by Brazil. The love for Brazilians manifested in the loud roar that greeted their team bus, which rolled into the stadium around 4.45 p.m.
However, the Brazil fans were shocked into silence five minutes into the game when Spain went ahead by a goal. But the celebrations by a motley crowd of Spanish fans proved short-lived as the men-in-yellow restored parity and took the lead before the break.
When the game slowed down considerably in the second half, the crowd intervened to enliven the atmosphere and energise the players hit by energy-sapping conditions by starting successive Mexican waves and flashing mobile flash lights in tandem.
Earlier, fans who had turned up to watch the game in a cacophony of drums and Vuvuzelas in a cauldron-like atmosphere experienced during the Indian Super League (ISL) matches hosted by the city ended up a disappointed lot. The stringent FIFA guidelines meant that forget about musical instruments, even bottled drinking water was not allowed inside. This ensured that packaged drinking water sold at ₹50 a litre made brisk sales inside the stadium while outside vendors selling jerseys and tender coconut water did equally good business.
The manic rush of the ISL games was also missing since the number of spectators was significantly scaled down to 29,000 compared to the 65,000 for ISL matches. It also made things a bit easier for the security apparatus.
Though it was informed that spectators will have to take their seats an hour ahead of the 5 p.m. kick-off, they could be seen streaming in well past that deadline. There were a good number of children and girls among the crowd. Interestingly, very few foreigners turned up for the game.
Nearly 2,000 policemen were deployed in and around the stadium to ensure security and regulate traffic.
