LEXINGTON, Mass. -- Biggest upset of the weekend? We have to nominate a local game – Canton United-Stoneham Spartans 1-1 (4-2 penalty kicks) for the Over-50 first division championship in the Over The Hill League Sunday morning. (Full disclosure: this blogging person plays for Canton United).
Canton took the lead midway through first half (Jerry Casteneda breakaway), then we held on and continued to counterattack. Luckily, Joaozinho’s free kick hit the crossbar.
I found out later that it was THE Joaozinho who was playing. The free kick was about 22 yards out, straight on; it was eerily similar to the free kick he hit for Cruzeiro to defeat River Plate, the clinching goal in the 1976 Copa Libertadores final in Santiago, Chile.
You can look it up on YouTube and probably other places, as well.
If I had known that was Joaozinho at the time, I would have told our goalkeeper, Jack McGee, to go to his right. Jack retired after the game (hip surgery), a great way to go out; and Brian Hunt replaced him after halftime and – yes – saved a Joaozinho penalty.
I told my teammates I would write about them only if we won this game. I figured it was a longshot. Stoneham went a couple of years with unbeaten records in the Over 40 division, and that was before Joaozinho moved to Boston. This season it had an 11-0 record (43-8 goal differential) going into the final. I also did not want to jinx anything. We knew Stoneham had Mateus, a local legend who used to play for Cruzeiro, and a team loaded with technical players. But we must be decent. And we were playing without our two best strikers, Liam O’Brien and Kieran Whelan. I was on the subs bench and didn’t get in, either. But I figured out we would not have qualified for the playoffs without my contribution; I had a plus-10 goals record for the regular season (we were plus-12 goal differential in 10 games). But my performances often were reminders I made the right choice to focus on writing about, rather than playing, the game.
Anyway, good team, good teammates. Plus, great post-game eats, thanks to Jeff Erickson and cooking by Bill Robertson’s girlfriend. If we had continued the feast at Midwest Grill, we might have met up with Revolution executive Craig Tornberg and Joaozinho himself. That's how I found out about who our opponents were -- Craig called to joke that the Brazilians were crying in their beer over the result; he also said the Revolution are working on a bringing in Cruzeiro for an amistoso. Stay tuned on that.
