Football (not soccer!)

I don't think any blog about America from a foreigner's point of view would be complete without at least one post on sports. I've long been a baseball fan and always looked forward to spending a few weeks each summer watching the Red Sox play just about every evening. It was a treat this year to follow them from start to uneventful finish and get to know the players (and even get to a couple of games!).

However, I wanted to write about football (and for the duration of this post I mean what in my head I still call American football, rather soccer which is what I normally mean when I say football). It's hard to avoid given that the season starts around the start of the school year, and just about every boy in my class is a massive fan. Living in New Hampshire means that there's no towns big enough to have their own pro sports team, so you'll find most of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine all support (or pull for as the Americans say) the Boston/New England teams. This means that I've become immersed in the New England Patriots, and can now proudly name more players than just Tom Brady, the quarterback.

Just on that note; there are a couple of kids who support different teams through their dads (one Green Bay, one Philadelphia) and it does make me wonder what Jake and Sophie will do about non-US sports teams (Soccer. Mainly soccer). Will they find their own way and end up cheering for some Premier League side that they see on TV or follow me with my hopeless following of Luton Town (currently struggling in League 2 after many years in the non-league wilderness). It's a sadness that we'll end up going back to the UK over the summer most years when there's no soccer worthy of the name, so the kids' first experience is likely to be the MLS, and I'm not sure it'll be the same without pies and Bovril...

Anyway, back to the Patriots. Up until this year, I usually caught one game over the Christmas period when we visited, and I still had my soccer superiority head on, full of stereotypes about too much padding, simplistic game play and too many commercials. This season, I've sat and watched a couple of regular season games and now both post season games (Super Bowl is next!) and the more I watch, the more I'm beginning to enjoy myself. My brother-in-law, who is incredibly knowledgable about all things sport, has been coaching me a little and made the analogy between football and a chess game, where everything is planned out and you're trying to read your opponents to gain an advantage. When you watch the game through that lens, it becomes incredibly tactical. The big blokes pushing each other around suddenly have multiple purposes and the padding is there to protect the necessarily hard tackles that stop a runner and push them back vital yards. You realise that the long touchdown passes of the highlight reels are rare and that the scores are usually made up of much smaller runs and passes.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to get to the same level of interest and understanding that I have about soccer and the Premier League, but it's been an education in sport and a revelation to finally get what all the fuss has been all about. Whether the Patriots win or lose the Super Bowl (or Superb Owl as my friend Linz refers to it), I'll be watching and learning, getting ready for next season.