Welcome to The Pride of the East End, a blog about a novice soccer fan in Chicago who roots for West Ham United. You may be familiar with my first blog, Exile in Wrigleyville, a blog about the White Sox written by a North Sider. (Much of this post, incidentally, came from a post that I wrote for Exile in February.) I hope you'll follow along as I shift gears to write about a game that I didn't grow up with, unlike baseball.
Until recently, I'd never been much of a fan of soccer -- I'll call it football from here on out. Other than a few times in gym class, I never played the game. The game wasn't on television much, and I didn't watch it when it was. In 1998, my friends and I went to a Chicago Fire game. It was my first professional football game. We went because we wanted to watch Bo Deans perform after the game.
Six years ago, I went to London with a couple of former co-workers. One of them had spent a summer studying in London when she was in college, and we stayed with an Englishman, named James, whom she had befriended during that summer. A few months after our trip, James visited Chicago, and at his urging, he and I went to a Fire game. He taught me a few things about the game that night. For instance, he explained the offsides rule to me. Having watched a fair amount of hockey, offsides, to me, had to do with a line on the field. It just had to. So I was wondering as we watched the game: Is it the center line? Is it the bigger box in front of the goal? (Yeah, I didn't even know that that was called the penalty box.) The game made a whole lot more sense to me after I stopped expecting the players to clear the offensive zone when the ball passed over the center line. James roots for Queens Park Rangers, which has improved its results of late to put some distance between themselves and the drop zone in the Coca-Cola Championship.
That was it until I watched some of the 2002 World Cup. I even got up early to watch the U.S. team play in the quarterfinals against Germany. The American team lost 1-0, but it was quite a game. They had plenty of chances, including one near-miss that I thought had gone in for the equalizer. I leaped out of my recliner and yelled, "Gooooooooooooooooooal!" It looked like it was in the back of the net, but the ball was just sitting on top of the side netting.
After that, I didn't watch much football over the next few years. I recall tuning into a Fire playoff game a couple of years ago. I was just flipping around and stopped on the game, as there wasn't much else on. I think it went to extra time and the Fire won. I think. If I recall correctly, Justin Mapp came on as a substitute and made a great run down the right sideline and a good cross to the front of the net on the winner.
It was a similar situation last spring that brought me to watch West Ham United. I was just flipping around the dial on a weekend morning last spring when I came across an FA Cup match involving West Ham on Fox Soccer Channel. It's a part of my basic cable package on RCN. I decided to watch the game because I have a good friend named Phil who roots -- no, lives and dies -- with West Ham. Phil is an Aussie, but he lived in London for a few years and became a West Ham fan. "I'll watch Phil's team play," I thought. The Hammers won that day. I'm probably lucky that I didn't watch the heartbreaker in the FA Cup 2006 finals against Liverpool.
I watched some of the World Cup last summer, too. My girlfriend (whom I refer to as The Marquette Grad online) and I watched the second half of the England-Portugal quarterfinal match in a bar near Wrigley Field on my birthday, which happened to fall during the Cubs-Sox series at Wrigley. We went to John Barleycorn to have lunch and meet some friends who had tickets to give us for the Sunday game. The England-Portugal match captivated the entire bar -- and if you've been in the Wrigleyville John Barleycorn, you know that's a pretty big space. It was a scoreless tie after 120 minutes (90 minutes of regulation plus two 15-minute overtime periods). Portugal won on penalty kicks, but TMG and I had headed home by then to make the first pitch of the crosstown game. Still, the match reminded me how much fun it can be to watch top-notch football.
Late last year, I started watching Barclays English Premier League matches on FSC, including the Irons occasionally. I tuned in to watch the last 15 minutes of the West Ham-Manchester United game that marked Alan Curbishley's start at Upton Park. It was thrilling to watch the Hammers hold off Man U. About the same time, TMG and I began talking about visiting her sister and brother-in-law in London. They are about halfway through a three-year work stint for an American company's London-area operations. So as we were trying to pick a long weekend to make the trip, I consulted the West Ham schedule. West Ham's home match against Watford on Feb. 10 fit our schedule. Losing to Watford was a brutal, but perhaps appropriate, introduction to being a Hammers fan.
I'm at a stage where I'm soaking up information about the game as rapidly as I can. I watch as many games as I can through FSC and ESPN's coverage of the UEFA Champions League. I'm a newly minted subscriber to Four-Four-Two, a copy of which I picked up in London and read nearly cover-to-cover on our flight home from London. (Unfortunately, I'm still waiting for the first issue to arrive.) I am reading The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Football. The reviewer in Four-Four-Two made it sound like something that I couldn't pass up as a new fan of the game. I'll share my thoughts when I finish it. One of the things that I really appreciate about English football is the long history of the clubs. It reminds me a lot of baseball. This book is providing me with some of the background that can enrich the watching of a sport, when you know the historical basis for various rivalries that go beyond mere geography.
This blog probably isn't going to provide sophisticated analysis, at least not for a while. The game is still new to me. What I hope I will be able to do is use this blog as a vehicle to learn more about the game and to share that discovery process with readers. I welcome you and appreciate the time you took to visit the site.
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