Memories: escape from Barreiros in an ambulance | Funchal News | Madeira News – Information for everyone for everyone!

My journalistic memories have caricatured episodes. On April 15, 1984, a football game was taking place in Barreiros for the National Championship of the 1st division, a Marítimo-União derby. The arbitration team traveling from the mainland was stranded in Lisbon due to bad weather conditions at Madeira airport.

It was necessary to call on a referee present in the stands. The chosen arbitration team was chaired by a regional referee, professor Teixeira Dória.

Anyway, Barreiros, good weather and an excellent crowd. Marítimo, 1 – União, 1. Written by the sports editor of Jornal da Madeira Gilberto Teixeira. : “A shame among Madeirans, with the referee saving the degrading spectacle”.

Why? Because during the game, beer bottles “rained” into the rectangle, some flying over my head, near the north end of the Stadium, where I was taking photos. Now, I had the misfortune, at a time when the game was interrupted, of picking up one of those containers and handing it to the referee at a time when the Barreiros cauldron was red hot.

From that moment on I noticed the revolt of the red green fans towards my gesture, with successive verbal insults, all that was missing was hearing the word “crucify him”.

I never had peace with the “angry” crowd again. The game ended, and as I walked along the athletics track in front of the central stand, at a fast pace, I was the target of a barrage of insults.

I had the misfortune of taking my son, who was five years old, to the stadium that day, and who was on the athletics track while I was working. Now, I needed police protection up to the cabins and there I took refuge. My son was “east” of what was happening.

Getting out of the mudflats was not an easy task, and the only way was inside the Red Cross ambulance, to lose the angry crowd…

For more than ten years, I was always insulted when I was on reporting duty. From the pawn the words “melga” and other insulting words were a constant targeting me, in the games that Marítimo played in Barreiros.

An authentic “syndrome” that I had to live with for more than a dozen years.

It’s not easy to be a journalist in a small land like Madeira. It was an authentic brand that I acquired, not leaving me alone. It wasn’t easy to free myself from it.

I had an identical case in Lourenço Marques Moçambique, which made headlines in the metropolis’ newspapers through the news agencies ANI and Lusitânia, 50 years ago on September 7th, and about which I have already written. But in this case I was really attacked. To Marítimo fans, I always managed to escape…