Soccer-pocalypse: The English Soccer Experience for the Unitiated

This post will be a bit off topic for this blog, but we are going to do it anyway, since we are in a slow period for actual football news.

On November 21, I attended a major sporting event. I sat with 88,091 fans and cheered and booed the ups and downs of the team we were there to watch.

What game was this? I was at the England vs Croatia UEFA Euro 2008 Qualifier match at Wembley Stadium in London. Wait, wait, before you check out of this, thinking, “Oh, this is just a soccer post, I am not reading this,” read on a bit. I am a soccer fan, yes, but not one of those ones that thinks that if you don’t like soccer you must be a sporting Quasimodo. So hang with this.

I am going to try to describe the entire game experience in a narrative form, with my comments interspersed. Hopefully, part of this will reveal why soccer is so popular worldwide-I have a theory on this that I will present later.

So, on to the game…..

We (Me, my friend Steve the Viking, and his friend Branwell, who is English) left Oxford around 2:15 pm (KO was at 8pm) and caught the train down to Paddington. From there we rode the Tube Bakerloo line north to Wembley Central station, which is very small – this will be important later.

A few notes on the location of the stadium – Wembley is in northwest London, well out of Clark Griswold territory (“Look kids, Parliament, Big Ben”). I have been to London tons of times, but have almost always restricted myself to those areas most frequented by loud Americans and photo-mad Asians. After all, I have no reason to go to Finsbury Park, or Ealing, Hillingdon or any of those boroughs. So, the foray to Wembley would be to areas of the city that I had not seen. It’s not in a bad neighborhood; just not someplace you would go without a specific reason for being there.

We emerged from the Tube station to be staring at a Tennessee Fried Chicken restaurant. Tennessee? Steve was somewhat tempted, but we decided against giving it a try, with its special blend of 12 herbs and spices passed down by the Major.

We continued and happened upon a pub, entered and bought a few beers. The pub was filling with English fans, except for one quarter where there was a small Croatian contingent. As OH molecules were consumed, the Croatians began to get vocal, the English got restless, and we got the hell out of there. It seemed mostly good natured, but with English soccer fans, you never really know.

From there we headed over to Wembley Stadium. The whole area was filled with soccer fans milling about, drinking, singing and generally getting good and lubed for the game. We got to the stadium about 6:15 or so, and were in our seats for 6:30, 90 minutes before kickoff. This didn’t bother me, I like to get to games early to watch the players warm up, to get a good look at the pitch and at the stadium, and just generally to soak up the atmosphere that comes from a big sporting event. This was different from going to, for instance, an NBA or NFL game, because of the national aspect of the match. This was England playing against Croatia, two nations, two populations, two historic powers….er ok, 1 historic power and one nation created by the UN less than 20 years ago.

Our seats were in the upper tier, the third, but the first row of that tier. As such, they were great seats. We were right above one of the corners, the right corner as you faced the goal at that end of the stadium. We had an excellent view of the entire field.

I knew that international soccer matches are a big deal in England, and who hasn’t heard of English soccer hooligans being banned from other countries? But I hadn’t really given it much thought before Wednesday. But English fans, alcohol, the national soccer team, and the nostalgia for long-gone empire are a combustible mixture, a fact that became clearer just before the kick-off.

The Croatian contingent was sitting below us and too the right, divided into two sections. Many were wearing their red and white checked gear, and they were very vocal before the game. I found that interesting, because their team was first in the group, and had already qualified for the Euro finals next summer, and so the game was essentially meaningless. England, on the other hand, needed a draw to guarantee themselves a spot in the finals. It was also a poorly kept secret that if England did not get the draw and qualify, that their coach, Steve McClaren, would be fired.

The English fans reacted to the Croatians vocal support with some chants of “Who are ya?” and “Vindaloo”(Wikipedia entry here; Original video here; and Video of English fans signing it here). English football chants are different from American sports chants. Whereas Americans are tempted to spell out the team name (J-E-T-S Jets! Jets! Jets!), string some meaningless words together (Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer, Give ‘em hell, Alabama) or taunt one particular opponent in song (“Saw Varsity’s horns off), English chants tend much more often to be in song form. Even a repetitive chant of “who are ya” is sort of melodic. The second major difference is the complete lack of rhythm in these chants. Even in “who are ya” which could be a simple staccato three count cheer (Who. Are. You., repeat) English fans kind of do with a sing-songy style in which none of them are really saying it at the same time. And the culmination of the Vindaloo chant is where English fans yell: “We’re gonna score one more than you!” Methinks that if this was an American chant, it would be something like “We’re gonna score 10 more than you!” But the English only aim to barely win, I guess.

Then we came to the national anthems. The Croatian national anthem was first. And the English fans booed it. Lustily. Paradigms of enlightenment and tolerance, these English. And it is ironic that Americans are viewed by the English as weirdly patriotic, but when one glances around during “God Save the Queen” at an England soccer match, one notices that everyone is singing. Belting it out, really. Eyes closed, triple-forte, really letting it go.
One other pregame note – the starting lineups were introduced, and Croatia’s went like this: Vidic, Biblic, Olic, Cilic, Kranjcar, Sivic, and da Silva. Huh?

Kickoff.

England seems to have the better of play for the first few minutes, but…

Kranjcar in the eighth minute hits a shot from outside the box that dips just in front of rookie keeper Scott Carson, caroms off his left arm, and into the top of the net. Croatia 1-0. The mood in the nine-tenths of the stadium goes silent and then turns ugly. There is some booing.

Play resumes.

Croatia strikes again. Eduardo da Silva (born in that far-flung Croatian province called Brazil), breaks free, slots a pass to Olic, who slides it past Carson in the 14th minute. The mood in the stadium is now downright black. Angry. Vengeful. Except for the red and white checked section below us and to the right. They are jubilant, to put it mildly.

Play continues for the rest of the half, but England looks spooked, and doesn’t really mount much more of an attack. When the half-time whistle goes, the team is booed off the field.

Halftime passes in a futile search for a men’s room that isn’t mobbed by pissed English fans pissing. We return to our seats for the second half. There are two substitutions for England. Jermaine Dafoe comes in for Barry, and Shaun Wright-Phillips is replaced by David Beckham. This last introduction elicits a huge roar from the crowd, as the blond Mr Spice is still viewed as a savior.

And early in the second half, it seemed that the subs had given the team life. Dafoe was dragged down in the box and a penalty was awarded. Frank Lampard banged it home and the English fans came to life. Now they just needed that one goal to tie it.

A little later, in the 65th minute, Beckham one-touched a perfect cross from the right side onto the chest of Peter Crouch who chested it down and put it in the back of the net. And here we get to my theory about why soccer is so popular. It has three principle components:

1. It doesn’t require much equipment – just a ball.
2. The rules are pretty simple – just don’t use your hands.
3. The most important part is that goals are rare, and when they happen, it is so fast and so unexpected, that the joy that results is nothing short of orgasmic. There is no description of the joy that overcomes fans when their team scores. I have been at College football games when last second touchdowns and field goals are scored, seen last minute baskets in both college and NBA games, home runs in baseball, just about all of it. But nothing compares to the 30 seconds after Crouch’s goal went in. People jump up, scream wildly while waving their arms as if they are having some sort of seizure, with no thought of anyone around them at all.

After that second English goal, the mood in the stadium was ecstatic, and a new English chant introduced itself. To the tune of “Guide me on thou great Jehovah” the English pointed at the Croatian fans and sang:

You’re not singing
You’re not singing
You’re not singing any more
You’re not singing any more

And it was true, the Croatians were silent. But only for 12 minutes, until Petric put a shot past Carson into the side-netting to put Croatia up 3-2. The last 15 minutes of the match passed relatively uneventfully, with England unable to mount a truly threatening scoring opportunity.

And the mood inside Wembley grew blacker and blacker until the final whistle blew. I witnessed a few fans shouting tirades at the field as the English team quickly withdrew to it’s locker room, except for a solitary David Beckham to walked in a circle, saluting the fans by clapping over his his head at each stands in turn. In turn, he received love from the crowd, too.

I am not qualified enough to discuss precisely what the problem with England’s play was. Suffice it to say that Croatia looked like the better team for pretty much the whole match.

We left the stadium only to discover that that every person was being forced to exit the area through one street, which was packed and immobile. If a mal-intented individual wished to do harm, this would have been the place. There was no escape, nowhere to go, and tens of thousands of people crammed together and not moving. Eventually we were able to get out of that morass and get back to the Tube station, where we were forced again into a similar situation. We were forced to stand outside the station crammed between two crowd control barriers for a good 20 minutes to a half our, because the station was so small that it could only fit a few hundred people at a time.

You might think that the Metropolitan police or someone would have realized that there were going to be 90,000 fans in the area that night, and that perhaps it would be a good idea to run some extra trains, or maybe facilitate the exiting, but no. It was a total mess.

We made it back to Paddington soaked, stood in the aisle halfway to Oxford on another packed train, and got home a little after 1 in the morning.