“I just had this numb feeling,” Farr said about the short break before 30 minutes of extra-time caused by the single most nutso collapse in modern Open Cup history. “It's getting late on a Wednesday night, you know, the stadium's half full. We're looking around at the Birmingham players. It kind of looks like they're exhausted.
“The whole thing was odd and horrifying,” Farr added about having to be boosted for the extra period by the coaching staff and the guys on the bench.
It was amid that psychological minefield of having just given the game away that the second phase of the Magic/Madness cycle unfolded. It came in the form of a perfect ball from the right side from Eddie Munjoma and a cinematic overhead bicycle kick worthy of the biggest and brightest stages of the beautiful game by Manuel Arteaga, the Venezuelan attacker with a flare for the dramatic.
It was a miracle of a goal. Plain and simple.
“It’s definitely in my personal top three,” Arteaga told usopencup.com, citing a similar overhead volley last season and one from deeper in his career with club side Deportivo La Guaira in his native Venezuela. “This crazy thing, we dug a hole for ourselves and we had to dig out somehow – I always say it’s not the mistake that matters, but how you react. That’s where the mentality shows.”
If Arteaga was matter-of-fact about his otherworldly goal that made the game 5-4, Farr, 80 some-odd yards back and watching on agog, was not. “Sometimes those bicycle kicks can kind of loop in, catch the keeper off-guard, but this one was just, like, perfect,” said Farr. “I was thinking, now I’ve seen it all. But that’s what makes the game beautiful, you know, you have to have this painful event happen in order to get the beauty of a bicycle kick winner in the 102nd minute.”
Arteaga got another goal late in the OT session and it finally ended the contest – 6-4 was the final score after 120 minutes of soccer. Cal Jennings went home with the match ball for his hat-trick and no one who saw that game will ever forget it.
It had everything – from the sublime to the ridiculous – and it epitomized, in all the ways big and small, the very essence of our Open Cup. “Someone said it in the locker room after the game: This is the Cup,” said Farr. “Nothing matters as long as you survive and move on.”
