by Rod Hughes
Poor Alajuela! No team ever tied its way into a national championship but that appears to be the strategy of “La Liga,” as it is affectionately known—affectionately if it is winning, that is. But that has been tha pattern this year and Sunday the erstwhile winningest soccer team tied Brujas 1-1, showing a limp midfield performance and a certain bewildermen about how to get the ball close in to the goal.
For Brujas it was no great fiesta, either. Its star forward, William Sunsing, sold last week to Liberia, muffed a penalty kick that would have won for the Escazu team. L. Lara’s goal for Alajuela at minute 29 and Brujas response by B Pena some five minutes into the second half was the sum of the scoring.
San Carlos, the “Northern Bulls” as they are nicknamed, showed plenty of spark by downing group-leading Liberia, 2-1. Goals by Perez and Furtado put Liberia into a comfortable lead in the first half and Ronald Fonseca’s response during the second part did not rattle the Bulls a bit.
Meanwhile Sunday, the Santos (meaning “Saints” in Spanish) upset the University side 2-1, prompting a clever headline wirter for Al Dia to ask, “Which saint did they invoke?” It is true that Santos head coach Milton Morales, who was fired last week because of the team’s terrible showing, strolled to the middle of the field after the game and raised his hands to heaven as if to thank a Celestial Force for the victory in his final game as the team’s coach.
S. Calderon opened the count for University after only eight minutes of play but Santos got its stride when Campos tied it six minutes later. Then, Divine Intervention kicked in with 30 minutes to go in the second stanza when University’s defender Maitland lost control of the ball, resulting in a self-inflicted goal. Not exactly a stirling victory, but Santos will take anything it can get this year.
Saturday’s results
Saprissa-Cartago
It was Alonso Solís all the way in Saprissa’s 4-0 bludgeoning of Cartago. La Nación’s sportwriter Gustavo Jiménez, never the most charitable commentator, accused the Cartago team of “inexcusable apathy.”
But how can only 11 people, superb athletes or not, defend their goal when Solís is all over the field? Check out the scoring:
At only 19 minutes into the game, Solís fed Walter Centeno the game-winning goal. But Alonso wasn’t through by a long shot, which was the only way you can describe his monumental goal at the end of the first period. A long, long shot. Then at minute 48, Solís fed Armando Alonso a goal-producing pass. And then, at minute 72, he fed Rónald Gómez a similar pass with the same result.
It was as if he were singlehandedly saluting the 35th anniversay of his team’s Ricardo Saprissa Stadium.
Heredia-Puntarenas
Then there was the Herredia win over an always tough Puntarenas team, 1-0. Heredia deserves credit for holding the port city team despite the expulsion of star midfielder Felix Montoya after 23 minutes of play. The teams were not even in numbers until Puntarenas’s Rodrigo Cordero was booted on his sercond yellow card at minute 57. The only goal came early, after nine minutes when Jafet Soto centered the ball in front of the Puntarenas goal and Robert Arias headed it in.
Perez Zeledón-Carmelita
Carmelita left the stadium in shell shock after a whirlwind of Perez Zeledón players administered a 4-1 drubbing. PZ’s Jesfy (yes, that’s the way he spells it) Valverde converted a corner kick into the opening marker. That seemed the end of it, because no one scored until 13 fatal minutes in the second half when Diego País slammed the ball from substitute Bill Gonzalez into a goal. Six minutes later Tirso Guio fed Luis Venegas another sweet one for 3-0 follwed by Wilmer Lopez’s pass to González for 4-0. Kervin Lacey popped in Andrés Chaves’s centering of the ball at minute 86 for a lost cause.

by Rod Hughes
A word about the weather: Wet.
Hurricane Felix, a category 5 storm when it brushed the island of Aruba over the weekend, could bring heavy rainfall to Costa Rica even though it will likely pass well out to sea. Costa Rica has been lucky because the pattern is for the main body of storms to miss the Caribbean coast entirely. But lower air pressure in the Caribbean usually means that wet Pacific air is sucked in and “wrung out” of its rainfall.
As this is written Felix has been derated to category 4 and is expected to hit the northern Nicaraguan and southern Honduran coasts Tuesday. Felix was an unusually fierce storm and a hurricane hunter aircraft, flying close to the inner wall of the eye late Sunday afternoon, clocked a wind gust at 192 mph.
Judging the effect on Costa Rica is a tricky business due to the indirect nature of a hurricane’s impact on this country. Hurricanes that have directly hit northern Nicaragua and southern Honduras have brought flooding to Costa Rica in years past. The closest in recent history that a hurricane made landfall near Costa Rica was one that hit Bluefields, Nicaragua, on that country’s central Caribbean coast.
On Friday when Felix was a mere tropical depression, it was expected to bring in moist air and some flooding was feared along the Pacific coast. Certainly the weanth turned from wet to wetter. Sunday, an Escazu couple and their 15-year-old daughter escaped death by a hair as they waited for the Ministry of Public Works to clear a landslide off the highway at La Garita de Alajuela. A giant boulder broke loose from the water-saturated hillside above and slammed down on the car, reducing its normal height by a third. The family escaped with abrasions and bruises.
The National Emergency Committee is keeping a wary eye on things, since the soil is saturated, a condition often provoking mudslides and severe erosion that swells rivers.