British soccer rough and tribal

By Darrell Laurant

Published: March 9, 2008

Don't take this personally, soccer moms and dads, but I've never been able to get excited about your sport.

It is, I'll concede, a great game for kids. They get to run a lot, and it doesn't expose them to the individual pressure of baseball or

basketball.

Like most Americans, however, watching soccer without having a kid involved puts me to sleep. There simply isn't enough scoring, and a lot of the action happens in the middle of the field. Back and forth they go, like a metronome. Z-z-z-z. Maybe if they got rid of those annoying goalkeepers …

To my friends Jenny and Bill Haynes, my joke has always been: "You know why they have all those fights between fans at soccer matches- It's because they're bored."

"You should come over to our house and watch a match sometime," Bill always replied.

Finally, he wore me down. So on Sunday morning (the time difference), I found myself sitting on a couch in the Haynes' Forest basement, watching the telecast of a Tottenham-West Ham match beamed in to their flat screen TV via an Irish station.

Bill grew up in Philadelphia but spent much of his working life in England. There, he met Jenny, a native Londoner who worked in public relations and lived for the Tottenham Hotspurs. They married, and moved to Lynchburg when Bill retired a couple of years ago. But the Hotspurs - and Bill's favorite club, Chelsea - came along with them.

"In England, soccer is tribal," Jenny said. "You decide what tribe you're in, and all other tribes are suspect."

This caused her some problems when she was growing up.

"I lived in West Ham," she said, "but my brother was a Tottenham fan, and so I became one, too. And I got threatened a few times when I wore my Tottenham scarf to school."

English soccer fans are a little like the Crips and the Bloods - display the wrong colors, and you could be in serious trouble.

"They separate fans of the different teams at a lot of matches," said Jenny.

I asked her if they sold beer at those events, and she looked horrified.

"Oh, God, no."

Apparently, the only thing more fanatical than a British soccer fan is an inebriated British soccer fan.

How fanatical- Well, since Tottenham was once considered a largely Jewish club, the team and its supporters often hear shouts in the heat of battle about the Holocaust. Manchester United, perhaps England's premier club, lost its entire team in a plane crash 50 years ago, Jenny said, "and the other side still stands up and moves their arms like an

airplane."

On Sunday, I noticed immediately that the background noise at the Tottenham pitch (that's British for "soccer field") tended to be either a low, ominous humming sound (like the sound of a disturbed hive about to spew out angry bees) or a boisterous chant.

"They sing songs," Jenny said. "Every team has a theme song. With Tottenham, it's 'When The Saints Come Marching In.' For West Ham, and I've never been able to figure this out, it's 'We're Forever Blowing Bubbles.'"

Childish theme songs notwithstanding, though, this is no game for sissies. The players grabbed, smacked and flattened each other with enthusiasm, often with no penalty being called. When someone fell down injured, play continued until the victim either got up or got someone's attention by screaming in pain.

Here's one very good thing about British soccer telecasts: No commercials during play. They don't stop for anything.

"This is Tottenham's best player," said Bill as Dimitar Berbatov appeared on the screen.

He seemed an unlikely star. Besides possessing perhaps the worst haircut I've ever seen on a sports hero (a modified comb-over), the imported Bulgarian wore an expression of bored detachment.

That is, until the soccer ball appeared in his area.

Boom! He headed a pass from Michael Huddlestone into the West Ham net. A couple of minutes later, he ricocheted another goal off his noggin. That probably explained the rumpled hairdo.

Jenny was in ectasy, because West Ham usually wins these encounters.

"I'll have to call my brother," she said. "He lives six miles from the Tottenham pitch, but he doesn't have a television, so I have to call him to tell him how the team did."

This definitely wasn't ESPN. Besides all the commercials that couldn't run before, the 15-minute halftime was filled by a soccer call-in show hosted by a couple of puppets.

And the Tottenham coach didn't have anything to say after the eventual 4-0 victory.

"He's Spanish," Bill explained, "and he's still learning English."

I could actually grow to like this.