Chapecoense

Chapecoense defender Neto, who was one of just three players to survive the team's 2016 plane crash, has announced his retirement from playing football. 

According to Daniel Davis for MailOnline, the 34-year-old still suffers with consistent pain after the crash which claimed 71 lives.

Neto was the last person to be pulled from the wreckage and is expected to assume a new role with Chapocoense.

Neto spent two years recovering from injuries suffered in the crash before resuming his playing career but has decided to retire because he was still in pain.

The Brazilian explained his decision to Globo Esporte (h/t Davis): 

"My body couldn't take it anymore. The pains were greater than the pleasure.

"I talked to the doctors and soon there will be an official statement from the club. Apparently there was no pain in my daily life, but in high-level training the body could not stand the knee and back pain, which saddened me most in the end and took me off the field."

Neto had trained with his team-mates after completing a long recovery, but the pain issues have been too much to carry on his career.

Per the Associated Press, only one of the other two players who survived, Alan Ruschel, is still actively playing on loan for Goias. The other surviving player, Jackson Follmann, had part of his right leg amputated as a result of his injuries but hopes to join Brazil's Paralympic team.

The club's flight crashed near Medellin, Colombia, en route to play the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final against Atletico Nacional. After the crash, the final was canceled and Chapecoense was awarded the title.

Chapecoense have been relegated to the second tier of Brazilian football almost three years to the day since the plane crash that killed 19 of their players. 

They lost 1-0 at home to Botafogo in the Brasileirao on Wednesday to drop nine points from safety with three games of the 2019 season remaining:

After 6 extraordinary years in Serie A, Chapecoense have been sadly relegated. Tomorrow marks the third anniversary of the crash that almost wiped them out. Such a spirited club, good people and great fans, I hope to see them back on top again soon. VamosChape 💚

— Don Riddell (@donriddellCNN) November 28, 2019

They could theoretically still tie on points with Ceara, who sit in 16th place. But the first tiebreaker in the Brazilian top flight is games won. 

Ceara currently have 10 victories this term, and Chapecoense would only reach nine if they won their last three matches.

It is Chapecoense's first relegation from Brazil's top tier and marks the end of a six-year spell for the club in the Brasileirao.

On November 28, 2016, a plane crash near Medellin, Colombia, killed 19 Chapecoense players, as well as numerous members of the coaching staff and accompanying journalists.

Only six of the 77 passengers on board survived.

The team were travelling to take part in the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final against Atletico Nacional, the culmination of a remarkable ascent for Chapecoense, having risen from outside Brazil's four national divisions to the top tier and continental recognition inside a decade. 

They were subsequently awarded the Copa Sudamericana title by CONMEBOL at the request of Nacional:

https://twitter.com/eaamalyon/status/803614716660686848

The club rejected the proposal of protection from relegation for a three-year period and avoided the drop in the 2017 campaign after other clubs loaned them players for free. 

In 2018, after many loanees returned to their clubs and the departures of other players, Chapecoense finished 14th, just two points above the relegation zone. 

After their relegation was confirmed on Wednesday, captain Douglas said, per Adriana Garcia of ESPN FC:

"It's a delicate moment, difficult to find words in this situation. We players are very sorry to leave Chapecoense in this situation, but Chapecoense has always shown unity.

"I think this is the time for the whole community to unite again, rearrange things, leave everything on track for Chapecoense to return to Serie A, which is the club's place, and continue to build this beautiful story."

Radio reporter Rafael Henzel, who was one of six survivors of the 2016 plane crash that killed many members of the Chapecoense football team and 71 people in total, died on Tuesday aged 45 after suffering a heart attack.

Reuters' Andrew Downie (h/t Channel News Asia) relayed the news from the Brazilian club:

https://twitter.com/adowniebrazil/status/1110715564710916097

Per Globo (h/t Downie), Henzel was taken to hospital after he collapsed while playing football in Chapeco and died shortly after his arrival.

In a statement, Chapecoense paid tribute to Henzel: "Throughout his brilliant career, Rafael told the story of Chapecoense. He was a symbol of the club's reconstruction and he will always be remembered in the green and white pages of this institution."

So too did La Liga club Athletic Bilbao:

Athletic Club offers its sincere condolences for the sudden death of the journalist Rafael Henzel, who recently participated in Thinking Football as a survivor of the plane crash of #Chapecoense and protagonist of the film Nossa Chape, which has won the contest pic.twitter.com/9K24DmVKkN

— Athletic Club (@Athletic_en) March 27, 2019

Chapecoense are due to play Criciuma in the Copa do Brasil on Wednesday, but they have asked the Brazilian Football Confederation to play the match on Thursday instead following Henzel's death, per Sport's Juan G. Arango.

In November 2016, a plane carrying 77 people—including the Chapecoense team, staff and 21 journalists—crashed on the way to Medellin, Colombia, where the club were due to compete in the first leg of the Copa Sudamericana final against Atletico Nacional.

Only six survived, including Henzel and three Chapecoense players.

"If you believe in some power that can guide Chapecoense this afternoon, now is the time to appeal to it," Rafael Henzel asked fans from his radio booth.

As Chapecoense went into Sunday's final round of the Brazilian Serie A season fighting to avoid relegation for the first time since they earned promotion in 2013, a record crowd of 19,992 headed to Arena Conda for the decisive game against Sao Paulo. It was the equivalent of one of every 10 people from Chapeco, a small agricultural city in southern Brazil, deciding to attend the match.

Many of them were wearing earpieces so they could hear Henzel, the club's favourite match commentator, call the game for Oeste Capital radio.

The atmosphere was incredible.

While Henzel spoke about faith in the moments prior to kick-off, he was aware that Chapecoense had not been as close to the drop since their promotion. The club, once dubbed the Brazilian version of Leicester City for their overachievements, were only one point above the relegation zone after struggling to find their best form throughout the season.

But the 45-year-old announcer was not the type of man to lose faith in the side's chances of securing another season in Brazil's top flight.

Henzel is a miracle himself.

He is one of the six survivors of the tragedy that devastated Chapecoense in 2016, after 71 people, including 19 players, died in a plane crash en route to the final of the Copa Sudamericana in Medellin, Colombia.

When he woke up on Sunday to prepare for the final fixture of the season, he knew it would be an emotional day that would stir up recent memories.

"It's impossible to forget that nearly two years ago the coffins of our friends were being brought into Arena Conda for fans to pay tribute to them in a ceremony," Henzel told Bleacher Report.

The Sao Paulo match—a fixture that local newspaper Diario do Iguacu had dubbed "the most important game of Chapecoense's history"—was being held on the eve of the two-year anniversary of the memorial services held at Chape's stadium back in 2016.

Back then, Henzel had not been released from a hospital in Colombia. He still had a tube down his throat and was sedated after breaking seven ribs in the crash. It would only be later that he learned about the caskets being carried on to the pitch for the wake.

On Sunday, though, he was back at work. Climbing those familiar stairs to take his place in the press box and begin broadcasting a full 90 minutes before the kick-off. However, this time, instead of 50 bodies on the pitch, he had 11 footballers wearing green and white colors, running to show the surviving spirit remains at the club.

Being relegated to the Brazilian Serie B would have been seriously problematic for Chapecoense's future.

Chape, as the club is affectionately known, have had 54 lawsuits brought against them by families of the victims. They have already reached a deal to settle eight of the compensation cases—arranging for the payments to be made in installments over a period of five to 10 years.

The legal battle is far from finished, however, and since August, fearing a possible relegation, the club has postponed reaching new agreements until they had clarity on their future.

For the Santa Catarina-based side, going down to the second division would mean watching their annual broadcasting rights revenue, the largest source of income for the club, drop from R$28 million (£5.7 million) to R$7 million (£1.43 million) and make it near impossible to honor similar settlements to those already agreed.

The financial concern was so big over the course of the season that the footballers even discussed it inside the dressing room.

"We have talked about this situation—how important the first division survival would be for everyone," says Douglas, one of Chapecoense's captains. "The club is being rebuilt almost from the scratch. We are aware that so many people and families rely on our work to move on with their lives. From the first day, it has always been our main goal to remain in the Serie A. Fighting to the end is part of our DNA and will forever be."

Not many people expected the uncertainty to go on until the last round of games, though. Results in the previous season had set the bar higher than the team could sustain after all it went through.

In 2017, a few months after the plane crash, Chapecoense surprised rivals to sit top of the table for the first time in their history. It seemed inevitable that the initial sprint would not endure, and a midseason slump saw them fall down the table, but they still managed to finish in eighth, their best-ever position, and secure a spot in the Copa Libertadores.

It was another remarkable success story for Chapecoense, a club that went from the fourth tier to the elite in just five seasons, but the cracks finally started to show this campaign.

"I've got the impression that last year the players played for the cause," explains Henzel. "Chape was recovering from a tragedy, did not have a squad and had to reconstruct the team with loan players.

"Although they were not emotionally connected with the city, it was possible to see they wanted to honor the memories of those who had died.

"I could not recognise the same this season—it looked more like a random team than one who was continuing the rebuilding work."

Former Chapecoense marketing executive Andrei Copetti says bringing in more expensive footballers also failed to pay off and instead created a distance between the club and the fans.

"When we gained popularity across the country, Bruno Rangel [one of the players who died in the crash] had the biggest salary at the club, around R$120,000 (£24,495) monthly," Copetti tells B/R. "He was revered in the whole city. Nowadays, we're paying R$200,000 (£40,826) for some players, with no criteria.

"Chapecoense has lost its essence."

Besides that, it has also been chaotic off the field, with three different coaches (Gilson Kleina, Guto Ferreira and Claudinei Oliveira) taking over during the season, high-ranking directors (Rui Costa and Joao Carlos Maringa) being dismissed and president Plinio David de Nes Filho embroiled in a controversy over a proposed bonus payment for Chapecoense finishing second in the Santa Catarina Championship.

Amid this confusion, the footballers still have to cope with the pressure of replacing names such as Danilo, Cleber Santana and Kempes, who lost their lives in the disaster.

Even for an experienced player like Artur Moraes, that proved a tough ask. The goalkeeper, who played for big clubs like AS Roma, Benfica and Cruzeiro during his career, was part of Chape's rebuilt 2017 squad.

"Being compared to those heroes was something very hard to handle," Moraes admits.

"Perhaps not handle, I mean, but to deal with—it's inhuman because you will never be able to take their places—and most importantly, you don't even want that. They're irreplaceable and will forever be remembered. It's impossible to fill the vacuum in the fans' hearts.

"Nevertheless, it was a very heavy comparison for me and took me some time to understand the supporters. But after three months, I realised I had no other choice. Our main legacy was the respect we showed to the families and people who went through the tragedy while encouraging them to continue."

Despite the rebuild still being a work in progress, rows and lawsuits with relatives of the plane crash victims have seen Chapecoense lose their spot as the second team in the hearts of many fans in Brazil.

However, they can still rely on their loyal fans to make sure the surviving spirit keeps pushing them ahead.

"The atmosphere of the weekend's game reminded me a lot of the one we had on November 23, 2016, when the goalkeeper Danilo made a brilliant save in the end of the semi-final against San Lorenzo to confirm the 0-0 draw and our place in the final of the Copa Sudamericana," Henzel recalls.

É SÉRIE A!! 🏹⚽💚
Confira um pedaço do que está por vir dos bastidores da permanência!
JUNTOS A GENTE MUDA O JOGO!
Obrigado torcedor!! #VamosChape #Brasileirão2018 #MudaOJogo pic.twitter.com/K461JMuxRZ

— Chapecoense (@ChapecoenseReal) December 3, 2018

The noise in the ground went a long way toward explaining how the small-town club beat Sao Paulo 1-0 to secure a spot in the first division for the sixth season in a row.

As the referee blew the final whistle, wild celebrations took over the Arena Conda.

Henzel could not contain himself in the press box and cried while repeating several times that Chapecoense "could never be relegated to the second tier."

At the same time, two other survivors of the crash—Alan Ruschel, who played 18 times this season after an eight-month recovery process, and Jakson Follmann, a former goalkeeper who has a prosthetic leg and now works as an ambassador of the club—went around the pitch on a golf buggy, carrying Chapecoense's flag.

The trio demonstrates that, despite the confusion off the field, the fairytale story of the Brazilian club is still open for new chapters.

                     

Follow Marcus on Twitter: @_marcus_alves 

There was a pause, but the moment needn't have lingered. The realisation and choking frustration was immediate.

Matheus Saroli was heading down in the elevator of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Sao Paulo, Brazil, when his father broke the good news: a plane ticket to Colombia, meaning he'd now take his place at the big game. However, Saroli had arrived in the city on an internal flight.

"Where's your passport?" came the question. Before it was out, they both knew the answer.

"I don't have it," he said. "You told me the whole time I can't go."

Delirium to disaster. At least that ought to have been the lasting emotion. Yet, with neither the expectation nor the need, brutal perspective was creeping closer.

Saroli idolised his dad, and it was easy to see why. Caio Junior had been a decent professional footballer, but he was a better manager. His CV was dotted with some of the biggest clubs in Brazil. After a stint working away in Dubai, he and his family decided in mid-2016 that home mattered most and agreed he should take on a project.

In a nation where a few bad results often see chairmen burn down the house to get the flies out of the kitchen, the small southern city of Chapeco was somewhere he could take time, test himself and try to build something special.

It turns out he didn't need much time. In his first handful of months, the local club got past relative behemoths such as Independiente, Atletico Junior and San Lorenzo and into the final of the Copa Sudamericana.

But while Saroli had been to many games—he was in Sao Paulo for a Brazilian top-flight clash and had shared a hotel room with his father—continental ties had meant chartered planes. To save it getting messy, Caio Junior had stopped the families of the team from boarding. As if a test, that included his own.

"Monday morning, I wake and am in a hurry because I've to go to the other airport, not the international one, to fly home," Saroli says. "Then my dad tells me, 'Look, the flight changed. Now you can go. The first part is commercial.'

"I was so excited, and then, that 15 seconds we were in the lift. ... The situation was I didn't actually need a passport for Colombia, but he'd never been, so he didn't know that. But that was it. If we had the conversation a minute later, I would have gone."

A few days later, Saroli was in Chapecoense's stadium next to his mother as the coffins were brought in one by one and marched around the field.

"The day was horrible," he recalls as rain fell like tears. "We were in a box on one side of the ground, and the bodies were carried in on the other side by the army so they'd come from the far touchline all the way across to us. There was about 50 coffins.

"The strangest thing happened, though. When one came by, I nearly fell to the floor. My mom didn't know what hit me. But I kept following it with my eyes. And I was right. It was Dad."

He says he can't explain that, but there's been a lot he's struggled to explain across the year since 28 November, 2016, when LaMia 2933 plunged into a mountain on its way to Medellin, Colombia, killing 71 of the 77 on board, including Caio Junior.

Top of that list tends to be why this happened, as that question needs to be separated from the cold and surgical facts around how this happened.

---

There is no excuse for letting a modern jet run low on fuel, never mind run dry. Standard operating procedure ought to stop it happening, as should aviation law. But even when those are bypassed for whatever reason, low-fuel amber lights will come on in the cockpit.

Pilots at this point carry out the quick-reference handbook procedures. Then, when there's nothing to quench the engine's thirst, an electrical generator or a hydraulic pump will provide energy to vital controls. That electrical or hydraulic power will go next, bringing on more warnings as noise and panic increase.

That must have been the case up front on LaMia 2933 in its final moments. Back in the cabin, however, it went quiet. Ximena Suarez was the air hostess on duty and remembers it just like that.

"We didn't have access to the cockpit; the last I saw of the flight deck was when I brought the pilots dinner," she says. "I just heard the captain's voice again when he said over the intercom we were approaching, so I got the cabin ready.

"It was a really normal flight until we started going around and one of the passengers asked why. I wanted to ask the pilots about it, so I reached for the phone and the lights went off. I had the phone in my hand, and there was no shouting or anything. Silence. Then came the impact. The only noise was after we hit due to the screaming.

"It's a lie when some said in the news that people were out of their seats. If they got up, I'd have to get up as well, and I wouldn't be here today."

She got lucky, and she now has a tattoo of a LaMia aircraft on her back heading to heaven to remember those who didn't. Those unaware of the gamble that was taken with their lives.

After Caio Junior and his band of underdogs had made their way from Sao Paulo to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, on a commercial flight, they boarded a chartered Avro RJ85 for Medellin.

According to the flight plan, captain Miguel Quiroga—who also was joint-owner of LaMia, a detail that cannot be overlooked considering the conflict of interest in the industry between profit margins and safety levels—had filled in an estimated flight time of four hours and 22 minutes. Underneath, the fuel range was filled in as exactly the same. This was no mistake, with airline employees later saying such cost-cutting measures weren't a one-off.

The other co-owner of LaMia, Gustavo Vargas Gamboa, pleaded guilty to the first earlier this year and has been under house arrest since. With serious heart problems, he was unable to talk, having recently been taken into surgery. All the while, his son was head of the Bolivian national aviation authority who authorised the LaMia paperwork and procedures.

It gets more damning still.

In the days after the crash, a mechanic came forward and spoke under anonymity.

"I noticed Quiroga in my hangar about five or six times in the last 40 days," he said. "The Atletico team [Nacional, Chapecoense's final opponents] flew twice with him, Sportivo Luqueno traveled with him, the national teams of Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia, too.

"They always traveled with fuel on the edge to make more money. A week ago, I called my lawyer trying to prohibit the operation of that aircraft for the crashed flight, but I think it wasn't in time. They got permission to go ahead."

"It was a small company," Suarez adds. "They were growing a lot, but we had problems in the company with health insurance, salaries were late—this kind of thing. We were flying a lot, though, so there was a lot of overtime. Miguel Quiroga was a really good pilot and, to be honest, I don't know what went wrong in his head. An excellent person.

"People keep asking me about him, but all the questions I have to ask him, that will only happen when I die. Why they didn't tell me anything? Why they didn't warn me? What happened, though—the psychological effects were worse than the physical effects. I am terrified of the darkness. Now I cannot stay in a dark place. I have nightmares all the time, and I see it and get so scared. And why? I'll only know the answers when I'm gone."

The Avro RJ85 has a listed range of 1,600 nautical miles, but the distance from Santa Cruz to Medellin is 1,604 nautical miles. That doesn't take into consideration that a plane never flies in a direct line between points due to external factors such as hold-ups and headwinds, or that a jet out of the factory 17 years consumes more fuel than it did when it was brand new.

Besides, a planned journey on this plane should be under three hours, with law requiring an additional 30 minutes of fuel reserves for the time it would take to reach an alternate airport (here, Bogota was that alternate, a full 55 minutes away). Then there's the need for 5 percent contingency fuel. Being generous, you get four hours and 15 minutes of maximum journey time as a risky call, yet from takeoff to off-radar, LaMia 2933 was a half-hour above that. And still they stood a chance, although in aviation, they call it the Swiss cheese effect, where all holes must align for a disaster.

At the Medellin airport, air traffic controller Yaneth Molina had come to work in the tower that night as she had done for 22 years.

"Never in all that time did it happen like this. It was such a coincidence that at the same time, two planes declared emergency. And for the same reason, a fuel emergency," she recalls of an Airbus A320 belonging to Viva that asked for priority landing that night due to a suspected leak. It forced LaMia into a holding pattern as warnings flashed in the cockpit.

Quiroga had taken too long, though. He should have called pan-pan or mayday, granting him priority, although that would have resulted in obviously unwanted on-ground inspections and interviews. Thus his language didn't incorporate the correct terminology, meaning Molina didn't know the severity for several more minutes.

"The pressure suddenly goes up," she says, "but I had all that experience to deal with this inconvenience. At least, I thought it was just an inconvenience at first. But then there's a moment of powerlessness, sadness and frustration that I had to pass through. That's when the plane goes off the radar, and the first thing is to call emergency services."

Nelson Castrillon of the police was one of those in the emergency services that night.

"When we arrived, there was a thick fog," he says. "The plane looked like a white spot, but as we got closer, I saw it had been totally shattered. I stood there looking for who was alive, trying to hear if someone was breathing. But body by body, none had vital signs.

"Suddenly, I heard someone's voice. 'Please help. Help.' I took a flashlight and lit his face and he held out his hand. 'Please, I do not want to die.' And I answered, 'Calm down, my friend. I am the national police. You're already saved.' There was a dead body on top of him, and I moved the corpse and stayed with him talking, to calm him. And at that moment, I found out this was Jakson Follmann, the Chapecoense goalkeeper."

Arquimedes Mejia of the fire brigade was one of those in the emergency services that night.

"A week earlier, we'd been running drills around a plane crash, but training isn't like reality," he says. "The crash was up in the mountains, and as we got close, it was just the sound of dogs barking through the night. Then Ximena Suarez was heard shouting, and her voice guided us to her and other survivors.

"They were in the upper part of Cerro Gordo, where the landing gear hit. The bodies of the dead were in the canyon below. It took an hour-and-a-half to rescue Ximena, as she was stuck in a tree, screaming about the pain and asking where the captain and crew were."

Police officer Marlon Lengua was one of those in the emergency services that night.

"I heard a lot of despair over the radio, but the first image of the plane left me in shock," he says. "I just put my hands on my head, too traumatised to speak. By then, they said all survivors had been taken, and with a strong storm coming and 250 rescuers in this terrain, they were scared of an avalanche and withdrew all but five of us who were left to keep watch.

"We camped under a part of the plane—the cold was unbearable—but I started walking around asking, 'Why did this happen?' I saw cones, jerseys, boots, and as a football lover, this was torment.

"I even heard a noise and thought I was going crazy, but I heard it again. We did not know if it was a flight attendant, a journalist or a player, but we knew it was a guy called Neto because we found his name on his ID, and we talked all the time to him. 'Neto, we are with you.' He was alive but he had an open wound on his head, right through to the skull, which was horrific. We just wanted to get him out of that hell."

It was a hell that had come to their part of South America, but it had yet to reach another.

---

Susana Ribas was never much of a football fan; thus, it wasn't Willian Thiego's job that impressed her. He may have been a physical defender on a three-month trial at Gremio, but it was the person and not the player who captivated her when they first met at a birthday party.

"I still remember the day," says Ribas, "28 October, 2006. We got talking, and after that, we never left each other."

Over the next decade, Thiego's career had come a long way. Before the accident, he had signed a deal with Santos, the club of Pele and Neymar, for the 2017 season. His family life had come a long way, too, as he married and had a little girl. When he set off to Sao Paulo and on to Colombia, the child's age meant it was too early to wake her, so he whispered a goodbye that become a forever farewell.

"I kissed him and told him to go with God and to call me when he arrived," Ribas remembers. "Everything was working so well for the team, in all the games. Thiego used to tell me, 'Today, if we played against Barcelona, we would beat them.'

"They were all in tune: the squad, the fans, the city. And we were all really close to each other. I am telling you this because we were going on holidays together, 10 couples and kids, to Punta Cana after the final.

"But he called when he got to Santa Cruz, and that was the last time we talked. He was boarding and said, 'Sweetheart, this is the last trip this year. After this game, we're going to enjoy our holidays, and next year we will be in Santos.'"

When Anderson Donizete got in touch with his wife, Jacqueline Madrid, that final day, his words were a mix of the marvelous and the mundane. They'd met when he'd gone to Uruguay to do some missionary work, but his other passion (sport) eventually got him the job of Chapecoense kit man three years prior. His dream, though, was always to some day do the job with the Brazilian national team.

"We talked on the morning when he was in Sao Paulo," Jacqueline says, "and he said happy anniversary, as it was our 14th anniversary on 27 November. He said he was hungry as he didn't have time to have breakfast; they were having problems with checking in due to documentation issues and the flight was delayed. After, when he got to Santa Cruz and called again, it was just normal. Why wouldn't it be? There should be nothing abnormal about it."

So many cling to those last calls, but for Matheus Saroli, it was the lack of a call that troubles him. He had told his father to ring when he got there. When he didn't hear from him, he presumed he was too busy and went to sleep. Then there was a flood of activity on his phone that awoke him.

PING. "Answer my calls."

PING. PING. "Turn on the news." "Are you seeing this?"

PING. "Please answer your phone."

"I was living in an apartment by myself," he says. "My mom lives across from me in another one. It was unusual he didn't send a message saying he'd arrived, but I went to sleep around midnight, and by 2 a.m., my phone was blowing up. I finally took a look and from then I started following anything I could. The phone, the TV, my computer. Anything.

"I did that for two hours and went and woke my mom up, and we sat watching the news. I don't think we moved for the next 48 hours. You know, you don't believe it. You are in shock. You can't process anything. It's terrible, but you still have hope. There are survivors. There are survivors. ... They're still finding people. ... He got away from the plane in case of an explosion. Your mind goes nuts. Horrible, and it was only the start."

Rivas had just finished up a barbecue to celebrate her father's birthday and had spent the night packing luggage for her family's upcoming holiday. With no call from her husband, she simply thought they had no internet connection and fell asleep without worry.

"But I woke up with my sister calling me, and my mom just said the Chapecoense plane had crashed," she says. "When I saw on television that there were survivors, I was sure Thiego was alive. I only accepted it when they showed me the list of deceased. That was the worst week of my life, going to Chapeco to get his body, bringing it to his home city of Aracaju to bury him. I didn't sleep once even though I was taking pills."

She didn't tell their daughter directly, either. Instead, she explained that her father had gone to play football with Uncle Kleber in heaven and that every time she sees a star in the sky, her father is up there watching her.

"Now she knows her dad won't come back, so she doesn't ask about him, but she talks about him all the time, mentioning the memories she has, things they used to do," she says. "But after the accident, everything changed. I feel a hole in my heart, and it doesn't go away, it gets worse. I have to keep a smile on my face for our daughter, but I can't move on."

After talking, she sends on photos of the three of them together with a message. "To see those pictures again is painful. I miss him so much. This hurt is a knot in my throat. It's all too hard."

---

On the night of the scheduled game in Medellin, a touching ceremony took place in the usually intimidating Atanasio Girardot Stadium as burning passion became stunning peace, and the best of humanity emerged from the misery.

Dressing in white while carrying flowers and candles, Colombian fans filled the bowl while tens of thousands more gathered outside. Back in Brazil, the station scheduled to broadcast the game left the screen black, with the score and the clock ticking away in the corner.

Meanwhile, Atletico Nacional awarded the title to a team that no longer really existed.

Moments like these brought it home to many and inspired others. Gabriel Andrade had never been to Chapeco and wasn't a fan of Chapecoense, but he was friends with striker Tulio De Melo, who had left the club before the accident.

"He called me, and he was very emotional because he had loads of friends on the plane," Andrade says. "He wanted us to help the families of the victims."

They came up with the idea of Abravic, a nonprofit association for those left behind, which Andrade presides over. It began last March, but bureaucracy and chaos meant vital results have only recently started to come through.

"From the beginning, what I could see was the desperation of the families—and the club as well," Andrade says. "It is a humanitarian tragedy, and it brought a lot of commotion. It was a mix of despair and a lack of coordination. And when I came to the club, it was easy to see they were lost—without direction, without structure, not knowing what to do. It wasn't deliberate, but they helped sparingly and didn't create an accident committee or have crisis management."

It may feel inappropriate to talk about money, but as much as life changes, it goes on. As do the costs. Recently, the association helped broker a deal where each family received R$11,000 (around $3,360) from a couple of friendly games abroad, which was half the income. That 50 percent will continue to flow from special events.

In October, a monthly R$28,800 started making its way to the association as well for projects such as partnerships providing therapy for the families of those who died, health insurance and medical supplies to parents who may have relied on their sons' incomes via what was more than a game and money to send their kids to school.

"You can't overlook that aspect," says Susana Ribas. "We used to have a comfortable life, and now with the state pension, what we get is not even 10 percent of what we used to get. However, the association helps, and the club helps us to try to get on with our lives in some small way."

Jacqueline Madrid agrees and can't thank the club, where she works as a secretary, enough. "I left Uruguay, and here my husband was my only family. It's been so hard. I've had my birthday, my wedding anniversary and the one-year anniversary of losing him all in such a short space that this has overwhelmed me.

"I remember that I was told what happened by an Argentinian reporter who had been here with River Plate, and I did some translations. At three that morning, he told me. But we never had a lot of money, and since then, the club and Abravic have paid my rent. But it's not just money, either. To stay sane, I've just put all my energy into the club. They've been so good to me."

With the investigation not closed in Colombia and difficulties around documentation in Bolivia, insurance has still not been paid, though.

"Like any person involved in an accident or murder, investigators need answers, too," Andrade says. "But the families will get their insurance—it is their right—and we will continue to do all we can to make life more bearable each day."

Andrade is an example of the selfless good that emanated from what happened a year ago, but let's not pretend there hasn't been a dark side, too. After all, where there is yang, there is yin.

Take Luis Ara, a Uruguayan documentary maker who had followed the team's rise for many years on a personal level. He says he approached the club shortly after the accident, asked for permission to tell their story and agreed to give half the proceeds to the families.

He has invested much of the last 12 months into The Miracle of Chapeco, traveling from Medellin to the friendly in Barcelona, shooting exclusive footage. Ara says Chapecoense told him the donation would be handled by them, and so production began. But upon release, an injunction came.

"It was from the club," Ara says, "and it was because they messed up. I cannot say a lot as it's in court, but basically they forgot to tell all the families, so those families were baffled as to why they didn't know about it. And so was I."

According to Ara, the club made three specific complaints against him. First, that he had no permission, even though he says he has the release forms. "And how could we not have," Ara says, "we were in the stadium, in dressing rooms?" Second, they claimed it was sensationalist, when Ara says that complaint was filed on a Friday and he only sent the club a copy the next day. "Besides, the families said it was anything but." And third, the club weren't informed of the release date, when he says, "I have emails to the contrary."

There's been plenty of other unpleasantness, too. By the new year, in the state championship, when a new and quickly assembled Chapecoense side traveled to nearby Criciuma, the home fans chanted, "Ao, ao, ao, abastece o aviao," which roughly translates as "refuel your plane."

Meanwhile, some spoken to have also bemoaned the commercialisation of the accident and said the integrity of grief has been compromised by the marketing of death. The club itself refused all requests to speak to any of its employees.

Matheus Saroli has taken issue with Chapecoense. Back in April, a cutting post went up on his Facebook page.

"The club's focus is on reconstruction. Let's make it clear though, reconstruction is something built exclusively on people who are no longer among us. I'm talking about the president, financial director and soccer director, among others who created this project from scratch years ago, and who took Chapecoense from a club level practically non-existent to a Serie A team... Today the club is managed by people without any connection to the victims. Their connection is to marketing, expansion and profit... It is impressive how much they are worried about the club reconstruction but not about constructing an image of all the warriors who gave their lives to the club... They hire an artistic director, sponsor race cars, do pyrotechnic shows, for this vital 'reconstruction'.

"My question is if the club took the year to give sole and exclusive attention to the victims, would we have a different scenario? Would we have media giving attention to those who deserve and need help now? Would we have the people required to help children with psychological treatment and countless other situations? Would we have people to resolve all bureaucratic issues involving of more than 50 families that have not at all been resolved to date? But no, hiring an artistic director for an absurd party and a whole new cast is a priority in this rebuilding."

You ask him about this. "There's not much more I can say," he says. "I felt like at the beginning rather than reconstructing the team, they should have focused more on the people that had lost so much. It is what it is. We are doing the best we can, but we don't have a relationship with the club anymore."

Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

---

There's an uncomfortable truth and an uncomfortable feeling provided by anniversaries such as this one.

From the outside, it feels like we're rubbernecking at grief, voyeurs peeking in on misery, raking over the cold coals because of the convenient date. Did you care last week? Will you care next week? For the rest of us, it's been a cosy round number to revisit. But for those left behind, it's been 365 days, 52 weeks, 8,760 hours, 535,600 minutes of physical and mental suffering.

"After an event like that, your life changes completely," Yaneth Molina, the air traffic controller, says. "Personally. Professionally. Psychologically. I've been questioned by everybody, they all look in my direction."

The 47-year-old only recently returned to work, but she knew from that night she'd have to live with that radar screen and the call sign of Lima Mike India and those victims forever. In the airport, after finishing her duties, it caused her to run to a toilet and lose it before finally calling her husband. "I just told him, 'I lost a plane.'"

When she got home, she broke down again before a doctor arrived to evaluate her. "I found myself crying inconsolably in my bed. The diagnosis of the doctor did not surprise me. Post-traumatic stress. In aviation, that's really post-accident stress. It was a diagnosis that required the people around me to be watching over me in case they noticed any significant change in my mood or any behaviour that was too aggressive or too passive." But she admits much of this year has been spent with the repetitive, rhetorical question: "Why me?"

Where there is dark, though, shards of light shine brighter.

Jakson Follmann for instance, a 24-year-old athlete and one of the six survivors of the crash, started his 2017 with a prosthetic lower right leg—and within a week of physio, he had beaten all odds to merely take a step.

"I cried a lot," he told the New York Times. "But the few times I think about the accident, I try to turn my mind around. I try to think about everybody’s happiness, and this is good for me because I only think good things about those who are gone. And this strengthens me. The image that stays with me is of everybody’s smiles."

Of the two other players who survived, as they were also sitting near the wings, Alan Ruschel has returned to play with the team, starting as captain in the friendly with Barcelona in August.

Meanwhile, Neto has added, "I'll be back in 2018" with a club that has maintained its top-flight status. "I'm like an old car," he joked, "it's giving a lot of trouble. My gall bladder was operated on, now I'm going to have knee surgery."

Across the year, those who saved them also had a chance to meet the individuals they kept alive, which has made a massive impact. Small mercies. Little victories. Nelson Castrillon, who found Follmann under a corpse, describes it "as the most beautiful" when the goalkeeper arrived in Colombia to meet up.

"He hugged me and thanked me," Castrillon says. "I think it was the most spectacular thing I have ever had in my life that Jakson Follmann from the beginning acknowledged that the national police were the ones who rescued him. That's what he said in the interviews from the very beginning until today."

Marlon Lengua also clings to seeing Neto in the hospital in the days after the rescue.

"I believe it was the reward for everything that was done," Lengua says. "My eyes watered. It was the happiness to know that all the effort was for something. 'Thank you very much,' he told me. When I arrived at the hospital, his father and brother also hugged me in a surprising way with a kind of affection that a person knows is sincere. They did not want to let me go.

"It was really difficult, the first month. I did not sleep calmly. When I did my job every day and I heard a plane, I thought immediately it was going to fall. It was really difficult to think of all the people I met there dead. I still see them."

Saroli still sees his father, too, in the pictures he has dotted around the house. But more recently, he's tried to see his father when he looks in the mirror. That's because he just had a child of his own, and that is how he can carry on the good name and the good work of Caio Junior.

"He had a life with a lot of obligations, yet he was always present," Saroli says. "He was charismatic. He was always close. He participated in my decisions. For us, we lived our whole lives around my dad. We all moved with him, so as you can imagine, that is what our identity was. That was taken, and although he may be gone, he set the example for me to follow in every way, and we chose to remember him through his decency and his love.

"But what happened, it's unbelievable. The crash was greed. I believe there's a scam behind it to recommend the company to football teams, but still we don't know."

After the pause of that night last November, such unknowns have provided the choking frustration.

Air crash investigators did, however, know what had happened within days, despite the reports searching for positives in the media. Initially, some major newspapers even celebrated the captain, suggesting he was circling to dump fuel due to another issue when the Avro RJ doesn't even have a fuel dump facility.

It was clawing for a hero in the plane when there were just victims. On the ground, that quickly became clear, as there wasn't the tell-tale smell of jet fuel. The fact the engines hadn't ingested the hillside showed they weren't running at the time of the collision.

If they are the cold and surgical facts around how this happened, though, some still await the reason why. Maybe it doesn't exist, and that's just a way to put off dealing with it. Maybe there's no more to it than penny-pinching, which in itself might be impossible to deal with.

            

All quotes and information obtained firsthand unless otherwise indicated.

Alan Ruschel will feature for Chapecoense against Barcelona in a friendly on August 7, after surviving the plane crash that killed 71 people last November.

Squawka News confirmed the player will return for his team at the Camp Nou, as the defender resumes his career.

Per ESPN.co.uk, the 27-year-old recently made his comeback for the side in a friendly against Brazilian club Ypiranga, coming on as a substitute in the second half.

Chapecoense tragically lost 19 players as their plane crashed in Colombia on their way to the Copa Sudamericana final.

The Brazilian side will take on Barca for the Joan Gamper Trophy, which is traditionally played for before the Blaugrana start their La Liga season.

Chapecoense's hopes of Copa Libertadores glory have been ended after they were docked three points for fielding an ineligible player.

The Brazilian club were punished by CONMEBOL for playing Luiz Otavio, who should have been sidelined through suspension, and their 2-1 victory over Argentinian side Lanus on May 17 was changed to a 3-0 defeat, meaning Chapecoense cannot advance to the knockout rounds, per Reuters (via MailOnline).

Otavio had netted the winner against Lanus, but it has been ruled he should have been suspended, having been sent off in the previous fixture against Nacional.

Per FourFourTwo, Chapecoense plan to appeal the sanction. 

The tragedy-stricken club lost 19 players in a plane crash late last year, which also claimed the lives of club officials and journalists.

Chapecoense beat Venezuelan side Zulia 2-1 on Tuesday thanks to two stoppage-time goals to finish third in Group 7, meaning they will return to the Copa Sudamericana.

The team were on their way to Medellin for the final of the Copa Sudamericana against Colombian side Atletico Nacional when their plane crashed.

Chapecoense were subsequently awarded the trophy by CONMEBOL, which saw them gain entry to the Copa Libertadores for the first time. 

Fans of Brazilian football club Criciuma were reportedly heard chanting taunts toward Chapecoense supporters regarding the plane crash that killed 71 players, coaches, journalists and staff members last year.

A report from Ed Malyon of the Independent detailed how Criciuma fans were heard chanting "'ao, ao, ao, abastece o aviao' (oh oh oh, refuel the plane)" during a match Chapecoense won 1-0.

Malyon revealed how Criciuma moved quickly to admonish the supporters involved in a club statement condemning the chants:

Criciuma Esporte Clube does not condone and repudiates the chants of fans that took place on Sunday night in the Heriberto Hülse stadium, during the match against the Chapecoense Football Association, in the final round of the Santa Catarina Championship," they said in a statement on Monday night.

This type of chant from a small number fans does not express the principles of the Criciúma Esporte Clube and its great fanbase, that has enormous respect not only for Chapecoense, but all the clubs in Santa Catarina, Brazil and worldwide

The song chanted by half a dozen fans is of deeply bad taste and does not match the sporting spirit that guides Criciuma Esporte Clube.

The club also said they will assist in any investigation: "The images in question will be forwarded to the competent authorities for liability."

There were only six survivors when a plane carrying the Chapecoense team and various staff and media representatives crashed into a mountain on the outskirts of Colombian city Medellin last November.

The Brazilian club subsequently revealed how La Liga giants Barcelona were the only club to pledge financial support in the wake of the tragedy, per another report from Malyon.

RIO DE JANEIRO — It’s the kind of story that doesn’t bear thinking about. It's nigh on impossible to transcribe the feelings of grief, desperation and bereavement that have been brought to an entire city through fatally thoughtless behaviour.

By now, of course, the story of flight LaMia 933 has reverberated around the world. The plane carrying the Chapecoense team, along with non-playing members of staff and a group of journalists, ran out of fuel and crashed close to Medellin, Colombia. All but six of the 77 on board lost their lives.

As the story continues to develop, there has been the slimmest of silver linings hanging over Brazilian and world football. Full-back Alan Ruschel was able to squeeze his father’s hand and move his legs. Brazilian journalist Rafael Henzel’s condition is slowly improving.

On Saturday, a minute’s silence was held prior to the game between Atletico Nacional and Millonarios, in the quarter-finals of the Colombian championship.

Bodies have started to be returned to Brazil, and while this whole sorry event will never truly be put to rest emotionally by those most closely affected, at least some answers are being provided.

Confusion and grief have slowly given way to resentment and anger over the past few days, with the revelation that the airline, LaMia, opted to fly regardless of the flawed flight plan, per the Associated Press (h/t CBS News). That has been widely publicised in the Brazilian media, showing that the duration of the flight and the amount of fuel on board amounted to the same amount of time: four hours and 22 minutes.

The singularity of this horrific happening was highlighted on Saturday, when the collective wake at Chapecoense’s Arena Conda was held. Were you to look at the stadium on any given day, you could be forgiven for thinking you were not looking upon a top-flight arena in the country of the five-time world champions.

The stands have seen better days; they are steep, rickety old things that look like they could blow over with the right strength and direction of wind.

The Conda would typically not even come close to being full to its 22,600 capacity. In the 2016 Campeonato Brasileiro campaign, an average of 7,619 have come through the turnstiles to watch Chapecoense steady themselves in the top tier of Brazilian domestic football, where they have resided since 2014 in relative comfort despite an operating budget far below that of many of their fellow competitors.

That number doesn’t even put them in the top 20 if you take into account the first three divisions of the club game in this corner of the world. Their biggest crowd of the season, just over 17,500, came in the goalless draw in the semi-final of the Copa Sudamericana against San Lorenzo of Argentina, putting them into their first continental final, as well as making them the first club from the region to reach one.

On Saturday, it was estimated that around 100,000 arrived in Chapeco to pay their respects to those who lost their lives. In a show of how this story has reverberated around the world, around 1,000 of those were journalists, who descended on the rural southern Brazilian town to take the story around the globe.

And what they have witnessed is the coming together of people, of spontaneous harmony in one of the darkest hours in 21st-century Brazil.

Leandro Webster is a member of Gremio supporters' group, Gremio do Prata, which was founded in 2008. He described the mood at the club and among the fans.

"We Gremistas were preparing for what should have been the greatest week in the last 15 years for the club," he said. "We would play the Copa do Brasil final at home with an advantage (3-1 from the first leg against Atletico Mineiro), which made a title possible, as well as the probable relegation of Internacional.

"All this expectation was forgotten on Tuesday morning, when we received news of the tragedy. The feeling is one of sadness, and no one is speaking of the relegation of a rival or the hunt for the Copa do Brasil."

On the surface, that may not seem surprising in the slightest. It would be seen as the natural reaction to an occurrence as extreme as this.

But that outpouring has stretched to every club in the Brasileiro Serie A and to the tiers of the football pyramid below. Well, almost all.

Ignoring the crass comments from Internacional vice-president Fernando Carvalho, who considered it acceptable to voice his concerns about his side’s relegation prospects following the air crash—going so far as to compare the two scenarios—the solidarity has been unanimous.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, Corinthians, the 2015 league champions, changed the colour of their webpage to the green of Chapecoense.

Corinthians’ main rivals are Palmeiras, who also play in green. The day before the crash, Palmeiras had been crowned 2016 Brazilian league champions, following a 1-0 win against, in one of life’s inexplicably ironic twists of fate, Chapecoense.

As torcidas organizadas se uniram para homenagear as vítimas do acidente aéreo na Colômbia. #ForçaChape 💚 pic.twitter.com/jx5vnnGz2F

— Corinthians (@Corinthians) December 4, 2016

The Corinthians-Palmeiras rivalry is one of the fiercest in Brazil. The idea that one of these clubs would switch the colours of their online pages, just days after those rivals had been crowned national champions, would previously have been considered unthinkable. But these are unprecedented times for the Brazilian game.

Immediately after the disaster, the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) declared a seven-day period of mourning in national football. National president Michel Temer declared a three-day term for the country.

That meant the second leg of the final of the Copa do Brasil was postponed. As was the final round of national league matches, with both being put back a week.

Yet could we see a more profound effect than this initial period? Could these events be the trigger for a significant change in the attitudes of fans across Brazil and, in particular, the notorious torcidas organizadas, the organised factions who could reasonably be compared to the hooligans of the English game 20 to 30 years ago?

Andre Schmidt, a columnist for Brazilian sports daily Lance, has his doubts: "[The plane disaster] is something that changes the concept of life for everybody, even those who are not close to the victims or football.

"But unfortunately, I think that on the whole we will not see big changes. Proof of this is that two days after the plane crash, 70 Flamengo fans were arrested for fighting at a basketball game—among themselves."

However, the journalist went on to say that while the most fanatical may see no need to alter their behaviour, what we could see is changes among other supporters, both in the stadiums and in the petty bickering you are likely to encounter on social media.

"I believe that the posture of the common fan, who can sometimes be overzealous and exaggerate with a friend during a discussion, can change," he said. "They may think twice before swearing at a rival on social media or something similar. But the fans who go to the stadium to fight and cause confusion, unfortunately this won’t change."

Meanwhile, Globo Esporte writer Bernardo Pombo believes this whole sorry affair could change Brazilian football, if not perhaps quite in the way of the organizadas.

"This tragedy could change a lot of attitudes in Brazilian football," he said. "However, this initial impact could camouflage the true face of many of our directors. The fact that the vice-president of Internacional complained about the postponement of the final round of matches, comparing the Chapecoense tragedy with his club’s battle against relegation, shows the all-too-selfish face of a good number of our executives."

Pombo went on to make a poignant argument regarding former player Dener.

"It’s worth remembering that one of the greatest players in the history of Brazil, Dener, died in a car crash in 1994, and for a long time his family were helpless," he noted. "We have to wait for the true reactions. This initial union can be great. But Brazil usually has a short memory. And in this case, the most beautiful example has come from the fans of Atletico Nacional."

Pombo is referring to the actions of the Colombian club in the aftermath of the tragedy. Atletico told CONMEBOL, the South American football confederation, that the Copa Sudamericana title should be awarded to Chapecoense. Even despite the circumstances, it was considered a huge gesture.

CONMEBOL have since confirmed Chapecoense will indeed be champions.

CONFIRMED: Chapecoense are the Copa Sudamericana 2016 champions 🙌🏼

(📷 @CONMEBOL) pic.twitter.com/cvVOgMPZDD

— B/R Football (@brfootball) December 5, 2016

The winners of the Sudamericana—the continent's equivalent of the Europa League—earn a place in the following season’s Copa Libertadores, the South American answer to the Champions League. In other words, it's the most prestigious club title up for grabs.

As if backing up Pombo’s assertion, Vinicius Follmer, formerly part of one of the supporter groups linked to Internacional, Gremio’s biggest rivals, stated: "I guarantee you that if the opposite had occurred, no Brazilian club would have done half of what Nacional and its people have done for us Brazilians and for Chapecoense. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank these fantastic people."

Old habits die hard, the adage goes. And while there may be a temporary reprieve, even an event as shocking as this one may not live in the forefront of the collective memory for a tellingly long time. After all, Liverpool and Manchester United fans continue to taunt each other to this day over the Munich and Hillsborough disasters.

Relatively recently, Corinthians fans mocked Internacional supporters during a league encounter over the premature death of club idol Fernandao. The former Inter player and coach died in a helicopter crash on 7 June, 2014.

Extra columnist Gilmar Ferreira succinctly summed up the mood. Having lost colleagues and friends in the plane crash, I asked him, rather futilely, how he was. "That’s difficult to answer, Robbie," he responded. "But I’m alive, and that’s already a piece of good news."

How long that sentiment will last on Brazilian terraces still seems up for debate.

      

Robbie Blakeley is a journalist based in Rio de Janeiro.