Tears at La Bombonera

Stories from a Six-Year Sojourn in South America

Christopher Hylaand, Christopher Hylland

• Publisher: Pitch Publishing
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785319044
• Year: 2021

Tears at La Bombonera is author Christopher Hylland's six-year journey living, working and travelling through South America - where football is a way of life. From Buenos Aires to Colombia's Caribbean coast, and back again, Hylland experiences the history and fanaticism at some of South America's football clubs along the way. Football is a global language, and he shares the stories and experiences from the terraces. It's a place where what happens on the pitch can rank low in terms of quality, but means so much off of it; where everything else, most notably the culture of the game, is unrivalled. Hundreds of thousands of football-mad visitors flock to South America every season. To the iconic stadia such as La Bombonera and Maracanã; to lower division teams in the shadows of some of the world's poorest slums and favelas. Tears at La Bombonera is a book rich in human interest, including the author's own personal experience of adapting to a new continent and way of life.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• An Introde to Eduardo Galeano
• List of important phrases
• 1. Boring, boring Arsenal de Sarandí
• 2. Racing Club’s mufa
• 3. Martyred Markitos at Defe
• 4. The theft of the Argentinian Wembley
• 5. Tears at La Bombonera
• 6. ‘Brazil’s Hiroshima’
• 7. Semi-finals and UFOs
• 8. The superclásico of international football
• 9. Santiago de Chile: the atrocities at Gate 8
• 10. A short excursion to Excursionistas
• 11. La Paz: the gringo trail
• 12. Lima: Foals to the slaughter in deepest, darkest Perú
• 13. Bogotá: English referee scores winner against Millonarios
• 14. Medellín: Plata o plomo and el narco-fútbol
• 15. Cali: Garabato’s curse
• 16. Lima calling
• 17. In Patagonia
• 18. Rosario: Lepers versus Scoundrels
• 19. Buenos Aires: ‘Half plus one’
• Epilogue
• Chronological list of games attended in South America (2009-2019)
• Acknowledgements
• Photos