notes from the pitch, number 89
i’ve spent most of the past week in a car careening down the wrong side of the road across central england, on a train, walking block after block of neighborhoods from nice to scummy, in a pub, or at a soccer match. i’m exhausted. fortunately, work seems rather quiet, so i may as well tell my solitary reader about it.
the highways in england utilize large signs with hugely impressive forks and circles and arrows to tell you exactly what the road is going to do. it’s superfluous in many places, but useful once you’re accustomed to it, in the same way that it’s nice to see on google maps not just that there’s an interchange, but what those onramps are going to do to you.
speaking of google maps, it let us down big time, particularly on the drive to reading. near as i could tell, it omitted a whole street and a rotary, which was enough to put us way off-course.
reading is a spectacularly good drinking town. it’s a college town, for one, but beyond that, there were numerous truly unique pubs there, some old, some ancient, serving excellent varieties of cask ales and bitters. one claimed to have had in excess of 5,000 guest ales in the past few years, and to prove it, took the placards from the front of the tap, and pasted them to the walls. and the ceilings. and basically every surface of its cozy, meandering hallways and alcoves.
finding a pub to eat dinner at was all but impossible for us outside of london; but the lunch was practically drinking nirvana. pint after pint of ale, a yummy steak pie, a comfy wooden bench, and football highlights in the background.
liverpool is an eerily quiet city; you can tell that a bunch of people live there, but they move about like ghosts when outside; they’re there, but there’s no commotion, no bustle. plenty of cars on the street, but a lack of real traffic. row after row of houses that are occupied, but don’t look terribly lived-in. and plenty of bombed out, boarded, or even bricked-up neighborhoods. don’t get me wrong, it’s a perfectly lovely place, with plenty of stuff to do; the pubs are mellow, and the few people we did talk to (a lot of bartenders, go figure) were fairly friendly. but in retrospect, something about it just seemed somewhat off.
the exception to that, of course, is around goodison park, which was roaring with life on wednesday night for the everton-tottenham hotspur match. skinny entrances (every soccer stadium i’ve been to has a very narrow entry passage and turnstile, less than half the width of a normal doorway) directly upon the sidewalk and street, with the stands rising vertically, with tens of thousands crammed into an ancient structure that has the same kind of load-bearing paint that fenway park does, only it’s blue and white. the corridors are crammed with people before the match (you can’t drink beer in the stands) drinking their beer, eating their meat pies, and placing their bets. walking up the ramp into the seats is every bit as electric as you’d expect, the more so since our seats were in the second row. their side was depleted, but the everton fans gave a pretty good show, with ample singing, shouting, swearing, and a really brilliant flipping off of a spurs player readying for a corner kick.
dmitar berbatov is amazing to watch in person.
the night before, we’d seen fulham at bolton wanderers; it was probably a letdown, for my dad’s first premiership match. i was all in favor of trekking up to bolton to see a top-flight match rather than seeing charlton play stoke down in london, but neither of those two teams played like they really deserved or cared to escape relegation. we did have great seats, and talk to some really friendly bolton supporters, though. they’re a really nice bunch, even if they’re not terribly boisterous. one thing that was cool was to see a match wherein an american (our boy clint dempsey, whose notoriously elbow-y behavior i jokingly apologized for to our new friends) was far and away the best player on the pitch. bolton’s stadium is new and nice, but much smaller than it looks on television, and stranger still, is in the middle of what is basically a big-box store mall. on the other hand, so is gillette, now.
interestingly, the premiership does not permit cameras into stadiums. nobody searches you, but you wouldn’t be able to hide an slr. so i didn’t try. my old casio is mostly dead, leaving me with my iphone. which actually did an okay job with some of them. amusingly enough, while using it as a camera, i got a useless voicemail from my landlord and an interesting text message. i wonder what the charge for that’ll be.
instead of basketball courts or tennis courts, public parks have 6-on-6 soccer courts. awesome.
we didn’t spend a lot of time in manchester, but it seemed to live up to its reputation, in that people were seen lined up outside of clubs at midnight on a tuesday, and that the residential areas outside the downtown were not terribly appealing. it was smaller than i expected, but the architecture was kinda cool.
reading’s madjeski stadium is 2 miles outside of the city in an industrial park. it’s small, modern, and comfortable, insofar as any english soccer stadiums are comfortable (the seats appear to all be of the same manufacture, of thin, cheap plastic that i suspect wouldn’t support your stereotypical fan of american football, much less fit them); it’s a very suburban experience. we saw a bunch of american flags draped over the stands at the end of the game (some with the reading logo superimposed—the english love to write their football team across the flag, something which we don’t do so much here), saluting their longtime keeper, marcus hahnemann, who had a good match in a losing effort.
when we arrived at craven cottage on sunday, we knew that we’d be in for a treat, given the number of aston villa supporters we saw on the way in. we were sitting near the away stand, at the end of the field. filled with probably 5000 singing, stomping, shouting villa fans in great voice. somewhere in the middle of the match came a hissing noise, as they ceased their singing and said shhhhhhhh. the stadium was strangely silent, and it was damned obvious that fulham’s support was fucking shit, at least on that day.
second best moment of that game was when fulham’s mascot had to get shoved off the field by the referee. the english don’t stage that sort of thing, it actually happened.
unexpectedly enough, fulham actually pulled out a win. it’s important for american soccer for them to do well, as they have five americans on their roster, and right now they’re fighting to climb out of the drop zone. they’re not a good team (and it’s the supporting cast that’s the problem, say i, quite biased), but they might survive.
people kept trying to get us to sign up for credit cards and cell phone service everywhere, for some reason.
i did not try prawn-flavored potato chips, but they have many other innovative flavors there that we enjoyed while watching the day’s highlights after being shooed out of the pubs at closing.
watching the super bowl in england is weird. i can’t tell whether the english care about american football or not; goodness knows i didn’t stay up for the end of it.
suz and i took a field trip to islington to go stop and see emirates stadium so she could pick up some arsenal stuff. after that she indulged me a trip out to floyd road to go pick up a new charlton jersey.
two hours after landing, i was playing soccer. had a good game, actually. perhaps i was literally full of piss and vinegar, given my diet over the previous week.
