Chapecoense: the club that rose from the dead

Across the city of Chapeco, in bars and in living rooms, tens of thousands were watching. The young footballers were competing in the kind of cup that would normally interest their immediate families, but not many more. That night they were backed by hundreds of thousands, by people old and young who have taken to wearing, as if it were their work outfit, the green replica jersey of a provincial football club whose name will forever be associated with tragedy.

To Chapocoense supporters, 2016 was a landmark year well before events of November 29. The first team had reached the final of the Copa Sudamerica, their continent’s equivalent of the Europa League. It was unprecedented for Chapecoense, but no less than they had earned. Neto, the pillar of the robust defence that helped the team through the knockout stages, and his teammates approached their two-legged final against the Colombian club Atletico Nacional, of Medellin, with confidence.

When they boarded the last of the two flights scheduled for the away tie, with the Bolivian commercial airline LaMia, from Santa Cruz de la Sierra to Medellin, the self-belief felt tangible, even to experienced sports journalists. As one of the contingent of travelling media, Rafael Henzel, 43, of Radio Oeste Capital, remembers: “There was a happy atmosphere.”

And it was convivial. Players, reporters and directors swapped seats during the four-hour journey to chat and share reflections on a marathon season, spread across the regional Santa Catarina league; in Brazil’s national Serie A; and the big adventure in the Copa Sudamericana. Cabin staff, and the pilot, Miguel Quiroga, of LaMia Flight 2933, welcomed the Chapecoense party as old friends. Quiroga, who was also a senior director of the airline, had flown the team to Barranquilla in Colombia for an earlier tie, establishing an ongoing relationship with the upwardly mobile club.

Crash survivor Zagueiro Neto talks to players from the Chapecoense youth team

FACEBOOK

Quiroga had begun the descent when the lights went out in the cabin. He was alarmed about the aircraft’s emptying fuel tank. He kept that information between himself and air-traffic control at Medellin. There was no message to passengers. Henzel, seated at the rear between two broadcasting colleagues, remembers: “There wasn’t any panic. In fact, some players put on the torches of their mobile phones to imitate disco lights in the dark.”

Henzel fastened his seatbelt, noting a look of anxiety in the face of a flight attendant, Ximena Suarez, as she buckled hers. He reassured himself. “After the lights had been out for few minutes and we kept going, I thought it would be OK.”

Neto, some rows ahead of Henzel, in the seat originally assigned to the radio commentator, felt more concerned. “I prayed to God to guide the plane,” Neto says of the last moments he remembers. “Most people thought we would land OK. I sensed there was something wrong.” The plane plunged through the rainy night, and, on impact, spread wreckage over a wide area.

It was many hours later when that a young Colombian fireman, Marlon Lengua, persistent as the first phase of the search operation was winding to a close, found Neto alive. He was the last — after Henzel, Suarez, her Bolivian colleague at La Mia, Erwin Tumiri, and the Chapecoense players Alan Ruschel and reserve goalkeeper Jackson Follmann — of six survivors from the 77 on board.

Chapecoense supporters have long regarded Neto as something of an amulet. Without him in defence, the team could look insecure, flimsy. With Neto, they had a penalty-box general. Aerial duels were invariably won, implausible interceptions made, and in matches such as the tense, goalless home leg of the semi-final of the Copa Sudamericana against Argentina’s San Lorenzo, he and the agile young goalkeeper Danilo, appeared blessed with a special invincibility. That pair, more than anybody, had propelled Chapecoense to their first continental final.

Neto and Danilo were sitting next to one another when the cabin lights went out. The goalkeeper, 31, died on the way to hospital. Neto only learnt of that almost two weeks after he was carried from the wreckage. He remained unconscious for 10 days, bones broken, faced scarred and with a deep wide gash the length of his left shin. After waking in pain, he got the bad news. “When the doctor said the plane had gone down I couldn’t believe it,” Neto recalls. “I had thought, ‘OK, I’m alive, so everybody else must be’. Then there was great sadness. I cried for hours.”

There are moments when his story, and that of his lost team-mates, still seems to him utterly unreal, and times when, as he speaks, his jade-green eyes glaze over.

“From my perspective, it is still unbelievable,” says Neto. “Sometimes while I am at home, looking at photos it feels just a bad dream, something that didn’t happen. But then I think, ‘Time doesn’t stop. You have to be strong’.”

Brazil’s Chapecoense player Helio Neto is helped by paramedics at the San Juan de Dios clinic in La Ceja

LUIS ACOSTA

Remarkably, Neto has already resumed the routines of his profession. He is recuperating at the Arena Conda, Chapecoense’s stadium, where in November he commanded that epic semi-final, and heartily congratulated Danilo on a stunning reflex save in additional time that put Chape in the final. It was, Neto says, the “most important match of my life”, and so of a distinguished career that extended beyond provincial Chape, and once made Neto a mainstay of Santos.

His next match will seem far more significant than any. Neto will need crutches to walk for a while yet, but he is lifting weights, encouraged by physiotherapists to believe he can play again, perhaps this year. The physical healing, at least, can be gauged vividly. When I asked him about the scar tissue criss-crossing his left leg he reached for his mobile phone and showed me a photo of how it looked last month, a great crater of an open wound.

“Every morning I wake up grateful to God for my health, my work, for my family,” Neto says, softly. “I was close to death. Now I give more value, to friends, family, everything else. My thought is to recover — from my broken wrist, knee, my back and all the other breaks. One day I will have to go back on a pitch. If I do, it will be to a new reality. My mind needs to adapt to that reality.”

The new day-to-day reality brings challenges. Last Wednesday, Andre da Silva Terres, a 13-year-old from the Chapecoense youth academy, came into the physiotherapy room to meet Neto. The boy smiled, then broke down in tears. “People keep coming up to me and touching my face,” Neto says. “They don’t believe I am still here. It’s so different from anything I experienced. I used to be just a footballer. Now I represent something to people — a miracle.”

71 of the 77 passengers onboard LaMia Flight 2933 died when the plane crashed in Colombia

LUIS BENAVIDES

His colleagues are reassured to see the Neto they always knew, but they also detect a change. “You talk to him and on many levels it’s the the same Neto,” says Tulio de Melo, a friend and colleague who has returned to play for Chapocoense after a year away. “Yet it seems he hasn’t fully realised what everything that has happened means. He is going to have to. The important thing is he is putting himself to work, with an objective. It is a true blessing he is here with us.”

Hope is that Ruschel, 27, can return to training, though his injuries are grave. Follmann, 24, will not. The goalkeeper had his left leg amputated after the crash.

Neto found boarding a plane to come back to Brazil stressful, but was soothed by the embrace of his children, nine-year-old twins, when he arrived.

“They know what I have been through. When I came back to Brazil, they hugged me and cried for 10 minutes without being able to utter a word. They thought I was going to die. Then they feared I was going to have forgotten them. I remember my daughter Helen’s face and how frightened she looked because I had too many cuts. Then my son Helan started to seem the more worried of the twins. My wife showed them a recording I made for them from the hospital in Medellin. My son couldn’t reply because he was so concerned. They are getting used to it. They help me a lot.”

Does he feel angry? “Never. I know a lot of my friends are lost. That is a great sadness. The pilot is dead, too. I cannot judge him. I trust God to make fair judgement.”

Football teams and plane crash tragedies

Torino, 1949

Torino were the most admired club in Italy, their players dominating the national team in the late 1940s. Flying back from a testimonial in Lisbon, the team’s aircraft crashed into the Basilica on Superga hill, near Turin. All 31 on board died. Torino retained their title a few weeks later, youth players largely representing the club, while their opponents, out of respect, also fielded youth teams against them. But Torino later lost their status as the country’s finest, and have never regained it.

Manchester United, 1958

The Busby Babes, English champions, were returning from a European Cup tie in Belgrade when, after a stop in Munich, a third attempt at take-off in wintry conditions ended in disaster. The aircraft crashed; 23 of the 44 passengers died, including eight players. Manager Matt Busby survived and later set about rebuilding the squad. A decade later, the United of Bobby Charlton, who had survived the crash, and George Best won the club’s first European Cup.

Zambia, 1993

The national squad were flying to Senegal for a World Cup qualifier when their plane plunged into the Atlantic near Libreville, Gabon, where they had stopped to refuel. Witnesses reported seeing an explosion just before the plane fell. There were no survivors: 18 of the 30 on board were footballers. Within months, remarkably, a rebuilt team reached the final of the 1994 Africa Cup of Nations. Zambia then won their first Nations Cup, held poignantly in Gabon, in 2012.