Dave's random mumblings…

A word that’s been thrown around a lot in my life recently is “context”. I’m trying to put events in their correct context, or others are trying to understand my emotions and give them some context.

There are times over the last year or so where the regular rules have been thrown out the window and I’ve been working on pure emotion, occasionally successfully and other time not so much.

I thought I was prepared for mums passing, we all knew it was coming, but all this time later I’m still working through the grief. There have been moments in the last year that I’ve been in some dark places, others when it was about pure unadulterated joy.

It’s strange when those moments of joy have come, especially as they often seem to be dependent on factors outside my control.

I’m talking about sport, the Sounders, In-ger-land, Team GB, Coventry City and the Olympics.

For sport to be meaningful it requires us to accept that a mere game has significance. If we are realistic it matters not that England beat Mexico 3-1 tonight in their final home game before the World Cup, and I’ll admit that in the big scheme of things to most people it does not matter.

But to me it does, I can’t dismiss the inner child that makes this game played by grown men to mean something significant. I agree with the cynics that no one is worth the $150000 per week some people are paid for kicking a ball around, but the market disagrees with the realists in me and the cynic in others.

The players may be over-paid men who blow their money on Bentleys and are given an importance and gravitas way out of proportion to their contribution to society. They are held up as role models, a role they are totally unqualified for.

There are a couple of things that we require to enjoy sports, professional sports at the highest level we are talking about here.

You must suspend that cynic and allow the innocence or childishness to take over and give 22 men kicking a ball around significance way beyond what’s reasonable.

I think this is one reason why events like Hillsboro, Heisel and the Bradford fire are so tragic and they leave such a mark on us. It’s not just the death, its that death came to so many while pursuing something that required this childishness to enjoy fully.

The second part is the community that grows up around these events. It gives us a sense of belonging. On game day there are almost 36,000 people in Quest Field wearing “Rave Green” and screaming for Seattle. For those few precious hours we are in this together, we live and die with the fortunes of 11 professional athletes we’ve paid good money to watch.

There have been moments in the last year where I was so detached by a combination of grief and pressure that little moved me. Thinking of my mother reduces me to tears at moments. The images of my father in a hospital bed this week bring out the same intense emotions.

I’m not minimising what’s gone on, the grief is very real, but there are moments inside the grief and mourning where the normal rules are suspended. Fulham taking out Juventus is one of those moments. Seattle clinching playoff football in style in Columbus was another.

Sport, and that’s sport that I feel emotionally invested in, allows me to suspend the dark places and revert back to innocence. When it does it feels so good move on, even if it’s just for a brief time and enjoy the moment.

I can’t put these moments into context because they just don’t fit. And I feel good about that.

Freddie on the Houston game.

Mandatory gratuitous Ljungberg ab shot for Heather…

It started going right shortly after the franchise was awarded, this was a different type of ownership group because they listened to the fans when they announced the name of the team.  This was followed up with the signing of Schmit, Ljungberg and Keller.

The fans responded by buying 22,000 season tickets.

A good foundation, but as the national media kept reminding us we were an expansion team whose stadium will be filled with latte sipping soccer mums.

I think we kinda disproved those theories during the opening game against New York… The atmosphere was incredible and the win convincing.

There were some high points. We won the cup, we saw Barcelona come to town and put on a clinic, we showed we can come from behind to get points when it mattered and ended the year the way we started it, with three wins.

The team matured in front of us and it kept getting better and better. There were a few down moments, the game at San Jose was just atrocious, giving three goals up against DC at home was another. As a fan you suffer through these moments, they give

Tonight is the first playoff game. And it happens at home in a sold out stadium, under the lights on national TV, against a very good team that we’ve beaten twice this year already.

As a sounders supporter these are the nights that are important, win or loose this where our team history is written. This is why we buy season tickets.

A quick read through the ECS forum shows a lot of pumped up people. This is going to be fun, it’s going to be loud and I will be giving my full 90.

In the mid 80s, English football was in deep crisis. For years those in charge of the game and the clubs themselves had invested very little into the game. At the center of all of this were the fans, and being a football fan in 1985 was similar to admitting that you spent Saturday afternoons fighting dogs, it was something to be slightly ashamed of.

Football supporters themselves had an appalling reputation. Some saw fights between home and away supporters as part of the game. Looking back this fight sub-culture had been around for at least a couple of decades, the difference was the media took notice of it and splashed it across the front pages. I recall the Daily Mirror newspaper published a tongue in cheek “English-Spanish phrase book for hooligans” prior to the World Cup in 1982.

It all changed in 1985. On May 11 a wooden stand at Bradford City caught fire and 56 died as a result because of inadequate training of stewards, crown control fencing and locked exit doors. While this tragedy had nothing to do with hooligans, it fitted into the emerging media picture of football grounds as a place of danger. I went to a game at Aldershot the following Saturday and I’ve never experienced an atmosphere quite like it.

Just a couple of weeks later Liverpool and Juventus fans clashed inside the Heisel stadium before the European Cup Final. 39 people were killed and 454 injured, most of them Juventus fans. The subsequent report put the blame primarily on the Liverpool fans, but went on to say the terrible state of the stadium and the inaction of the police had been serious contributing factors to the disaster.

These events along with the media coverage of the hooligan problem gave the government all the moral authority to act to rid the game of what the newspapers named “the English disease”

The government proposed a scheme that required anyone attending a football game would first have to acquire an identity card. This was unprecedented in a country that even today people do not routinely carry any form of picture ID. The Thatcher government assumed there would barely any opposition to their idea from a football fans themselves, a group it regarded as uneducated, apolitical and unorganized.

The game itself was in no to position to argue. Spectator numbers as well as television viewing figures had fallen dramatically during the past few years. The BBC and ITV, had reduced their football coverage and very few investors were willing to put any money at all into the sport.

The renaissance of the sport came from two rather unlikely sources. First the supporters, for possibly the first time there was something that required them to come together to defend the sport. This change was huge and millions of supporters spoke with a single voice.

This single voice was aided by the growing number of football fanzines, Fan produced magazines that could be irreverent, critical about underperforming players, gave real interviews and told it how it is. Realistically maybe a couple of thousand people who spent their Saturdays in the shed end really cared how defender Glen Burvil was still being picked week-in-week out for Aldershot Town (speculation at the time was that he had pictures of manager Len Walker with a couple of sheep), but there was photocopied fanzine for us to disagree with.

Today fanzines have largely gone from the game with one notable exception, When Saturday Comes. WSC still has some of the edgy, irreverent coverage of the game, but it also has consistently good writing and a great understanding of the world game at all levels. For fans of the game it’s well worth the money for a subscription (www.wsc.co.uk).

The second (and even more unlikely place) was Rupert Murdoch and his fledgling satellite broadcasting company, Sky. Rupert Murdoch was one of the three or four media tycoons that controlled the newspapers in the UK and one of his papers, The Sun, were probably the most vocal critic of the fan and supported the introduction of ID cards.

Murdoch satellite channels needed something that would get people to buy dishes and subscribe to premium channels. Sky successfully went after football and signed lucrative deals to show live games on Friday night and Sunday afternoon. Sky put money into the game, a lot of money. The premier league was formed and 15 years later it was by far the richest league in the world.