It’s safe to say that I am a sports fan. No, I’m not the type of sports fan who will spend huge amounts of money to get the best seats, or pay an enormous premium to see the biggest games, or travel across the country or the world to see my teams play, but that is because I’m cheap, not because I’m not a fan. And in my younger days, pre-2004, I was a pretty angry fan. I never have, and never would, start a physical altercation over sports—too wussy— but in the months and years before the Idiots changed history, I’d certainly seen my fair share of Yankees caps after a tough loss and fantasized about taking a swing. Yes, I am a cheap, wussy hardcore sports fan.
And I’ve been in some angry crowds. I was there for the 1999 phantom tag game when fans (note: though not me) showered the field with garbage, and for Game 3 of the ALCS in 2003 when everything looked lost. I wasn’t even going to the game, but being in a bar near the Garden before game 1 of a Bruins-Canadiens series was one of the most intense, and scariest, sports crowds I’d ever been in. And yet, I’m not sure I’ve ever been in a sports crowd with the raw energy tinged with the slight sense of menace as I was last night in a game between two soccer clubs I’d never heard of two weeks before battling for the right to get absolutely stomped in the UEFA champions league.
The home team, in maroon, was Servette FC, a venerable Genevois club with a rough recent history, or so I’m told. In the video below, their fans are throwing colored paper, used to make pretty stadium scenes onto the pitch—before anything has even happened. Please recall that when Sox fans threw empty water bottles on the field in the aforementioned phantom tag game, it was treated as a sign of national decay and regional shame by sport reporters (note: other than Will McDonough, who was too busy reporting that Whitey Bulger had nothing to do with throwing the bottles on the field, and if he had, it would have been okay.)
The visitors were the Rangers FC from Glasgow, Scotland. They are, frankly, the more interesting story, at least for a political analyst, what with the potential for violence and deep socio-political narratives. (Note: Though in fairness to the Swiss, their supporters are capable of thuggery too.) In advance of the game, a Scotsman on sonsofsamhorn.net explained to me that Rangers are a loyalist club that oppose Scottish independence and a united Ireland and would be singing songs about battles fought and won 300 years ago. They may well have been, but their enunciation was terrible, so I didn’t understand what they were singing any more than I understood the French songs. (Note: I do not particularly think politics need to stay out of sports in the U.S.—if someone cares enough to use his platform to make a political statement, he should and should then be judged on the nature of the statement, not whether he had the right to make it. But I am relieved that the clubs themselves are largely free of partisanship. I understand that in the old days, the Yankees, with their pinstripes, were the team of Wall Street Republicanism, but I don’t really need that as a reason to hate them. I have enough.)
An Englishman (with some Scottish Catholic heritage) sitting next to me explained, after a bit of a lecture on the long history of discrimination against Catholics in the UK (note: like I’d never heard that in Boston!), that “yes there’s all of this Catholic-Protestant stuff, but none of these people have been to church any time lately. The Scottish clubs focus on religion and nationalism to distract from the fact that the football is shit.”
The visiting fans, clad in blue, were largely relegated to one section off of the corner of the pitch, separated from the other 30,000 fans rooting for the hometown team by a sliver of an empty section. In most of the stadium, the beer flowed freely, with patrons buying cardboard sleeves that allowed them to carry five at a time from the concession stand. (Note: As a citizen of the max two beers at a time U.S.A., this was stunning… and alluring.) In the Rangers section, however, no beer was allowed. What were, if not allowed, at least tolerated, were flares. And at the start of the game and after the Rangers’ game-tying goal, they burned brightly (note: as they did for Servette’s most ardent fans as well). My understanding is that flares are forbidden at all UEFA games for the reason that allowing something that burns at 1600C in a stadium full of people is insane, but it didn’t seem to have much impact on the crowd. Post game Rangers fans were remanded to their section until the rest of the stadium had emptied out.
The result was a 1-1 draw, which was a win for Rangers, who had taken the match in Glasgow 2-1, and in this particular part of the soccer world, they simply take two games and add the scores to determine who advances.
It was, simply, the most exciting sporting event I’ve ever been to where I could not name a single player on either team. As an American, it’s kind of perplexing. Neither team has a hope in hell of winning the Champions League, or probably even of making much of a run, yet the intensity of the desire just to play with the big teams is enormous. The best American comparison I can come up with is March Madness, where small schools with absolutely no hope of winning go absolutely berserk at the possibility of winning a chance to lose to Kentucky by 50 points. I suppose it’s the magic of hopeless causes. You’re definitely going to lose…. but what if.
You join the league of great sports writers.