Fans of Brazil’s Chapecoense football club whose team was wiped out in a Colombian air crash crammed into the home stadium for tearful prayers around the empty pitch.
The stadium in Chapeco, southern Brazil, was a solid wall of green as fans and mourners dressed in the team shirt stood shoulder to shoulder.
They gathered at exactly the hour their team, which just a few years ago was in Brazil’s gritty lower leagues, should have been kicking off in Medellin, Colombia against Atletico Nacional for the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana finals.
Instead of participating in what would have been the biggest match in the club’s history, the team, many of the chief staff, and 20 Brazilian journalists were killed when their charter plane slammed into a mountainside short of the airport late Monday.
And instead of sitting excitedly in front of televisions to watch the action in Colombia, the people of Chapeco, a provincial city of about 200,000, trooped into their stadium to mourn and join in ecumenical prayer.
