Colombia national team: the last time two Bogota soccer players from Millonarios played | Colombia selection

The recent friendly of the Colombian National Team against Honduras left several aspects to highlight. Reinaldo Rueda‘s idea was to find variants for the next Qualifiers duels and find new talents that could help in the future.

In the middle of the experiment that ended with a 2-1 victory in Florida, a curiosity filled Millonarios fans with nostalgia and highlighted the great problems that Bogota soccer has had in its history.

For 24 years, two Bogota soccer players from Millonarios did not play with the National Team. Almost a quarter of a century for something like this to happen again. In itself, the last time an ambassador player played a match with the national team was 12 years ago (2010), when Rafael Robayo entered the second half of a friendly against Venezuela.

All this ‘curse’ ended on Sunday, when, curiously, also in the final 45 minutes, Andrés Felipe Román and Andrés Llinás from the capital entered for Yerson Candelo and Yeimar Gómez respectively.

The last time something like this happened was in September 1997 and precisely against a Central American team in a friendly match. According to data from Jose Orlando Ascencio, that day the National Team equaled two with El Salvador and both Jhon Mario Ramírez and Ricardo el ‘Gato’ Pérez were starters. Even the latter scored the first goal of the match and played the 90 minutes. ‘Jhonma’, meanwhile, was substituted at 78′.

The other piece of information that links January 2022 with that September 1997 is that it was the last time that three footballers from Millos played with the National Team. In addition to Pérez and Ramírez, Flaminio Rivas also played that day; This Sunday, in addition to Román and Llinás, Stiven Vega was also the starter.