What an amazing night of soccer for Chattanooga! Chattanooga FC doesn’t just get to play a great soccer team from Guadalajara, but we actually compete with them in front of our largest crowd to date!
Yes, you read that correctly: Not only did we see some wonderful soccer from the U-23 team of the second oldest soccer club in Mexico: FC Atlas, and we did see some impressive soccer, we also saw some equally wonderful soccer from our very own Chattanooga FC. I think we shocked even ourselves as we went on to win our first international friendly 2-1 in front of 6,300+ fans. And to top it off, even the forecasted ugly weather ended up being most cooperative. A lovely night for the beautiful game!
FC Atlas may have underestimated us by not bringing their top stars or by not preparing too vigorously, but they still had some really good talent and very, very nice play. In our opinion, their front three attackers were a sheer pleasure to watch, and they sure put our defense through the paces. Apparently one of their midfielders has been playing occasionally with the FC atlas first team, and we may see him in the Primera División very soon.
So, while we were able to sneak a 2-1 win away from FC Atlas on this night, we are well aware that it could just as easily been a 4-0 win for them… And the biggest reason that was not the case has to go to the Chattahooligan’s official Man-Of-The-Match: Goalkeeper Richard Masters! Richard played yet another exceptional game for CFC, making easily 5 great saves and only allowing one absolutely brilliant free kick to bend in.
While we won’t bore you a with a complete recap of the game (you can read the twitter feed or news articles on that – any chance we can see video highlights somewhere?), we will give a quick summary of thoughts on the game:
The CFC defense played doggedly and with determination. We bent, but we did not break. Nice work gentleman. The midfield showed some nice poise and definitely did their part to help shore up the defense. The attackers made some nice play (particularly Salazar)… Ochieng has amazing touch and vision, but seems to lack that one last burst of speed to get past the defenders to score. We’ve heard a rumor of an injury he’s playing with – true? Will he be healthy for Pumas FC Sat?
Decent coaching on the whole. We did have some spots of the game where we packed it in on defense, but we still kept attacking right to the very end. Very exciting.
One word summary of the game: Beautiful.
Other things worth noting:
We did it!
This blogger’s hope was to break 5,000 fans in attendance at CFC’s first home game, and we did just that. 6,317 or something was the official tally from the press box announced during the game… but we felt it was more like 7,000 to 7,500 as we easily filled the north stands by more than 75% — and it holds 9,500…
This attendance in Finley is second only to an exhibition game by the US Women’s National team against Sweden that saw 13,000 turn out… We even beat the the MLS doubleheader in 1998 that had only 3,757 in attendance back when Valderrama and Lalas came to town! Amazing!
Nice Atmosphere
Not only was attendance good, it was diverse! Of course there was a large Mexican contingent, but there were also VW and SIAG workers from Germany, and a big list of of other internationals too. Our only hope is that they might find the game appealing and drop on by later in the season for another game or two…
The production level was high — flags for all the 32 world cup team countries, 4 beer stands (yay!), better signs for sponsors, more vendors and concessions (more beer!), a video board with replays and a more organized and professional announcer (or two, as one did English and the other Español). Even the pregame music was peppy. We liked the nifty roster-stats sheet where you could keep track of players and events during the game…
Our only complaint was $4 beer? What is with the price gouging? Up from $3.50 last year… still a dang good bargain, but c’mon — we wish we had known to budget accordingly.
All we can say is that we had a GREAT TIME and we’ll be back this coming Saturday for more… will you?
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