No bragging about the hardcore quality of your supportership, Matt, until you drag your ass to PGE Park for a Timbers match....

I've actually talked footie with the estimable Ms. Fritz, and she kens well whereof she speaks. This Forfar business reveals hidden depths of character that truly impress.

Well in, lassie!

Yes. Well. I promise to make it to a Timbers game, eventually.

And I promise to swim the English Channel in January...

wankwankwankwank...wink...

Here's your political context in the Forfar Athletic history for the 1970s, Matt. "Great Britain struggled as well with inflation reaching 25% at one point, strikes galore, four General Elections and the end result the triumph of Mrs.Thatcher. Football suffered as gates dropped and interest lessened dramatically, a factor in this decline being quite simply than men with long hair and moustaches do not look like athletes."

In 1974-5, Forfar won only one game the entire season, in 38 matches. That's when (and why) my brother and I started supporting them.

Some stuff matters, other stuff doesn't, that's the main relevance to my political philosophy. But I suppose my enduring fondness for Forfar Athletic does show consistency in my history of empathy for people struggling to compete.

And Amanda Fritz knocks it out of the park...

"And Amanda Fritz knocks it out of the park..."

(to mix sports metaphors)

Like I said, mate....

Amanda,
sounds like a good reason to support a team.
when I was a kid I used to be a big fan of the (NASL version) Portland Timbers. due to some bad choices by management they never seemed to do as good as they should. they even had some fairly decent players play for them, Ali Brown from West Bromwich Albion, Yung Chung Cho of the South Korean Olympic team, Mick Poole, Robbie Rensenbrink (Ajax) and local hero Clive Charles spring immeadetly to mind.
Matt,
any time you want to go to a game, give me a call, I would be happy to go with you, Soccer is a blast live.
thanks
Patrick

a few years before Amanda & her brother turned to Forfar, i had seen Leeds United play Arsenal in the FA Cup final on Wide World of Sports. knowing neither team, nor the sport of soccer, i chose, for reasons i know longer recall, to support Leeds. maybe i decided that i had supported them after they won the Cup.

a few years later, i spent 6 weeks in London where my dad was doing research for a year. at one point, we went to see a soccer match: Leeds at Arsenal. now, had i chosen a few years earlier to support Arsenal, i would have enjoyed the kind of fan glee known to Yankee fans. but alas, I was a United supporter. we lost that day, 2-0, but i gotta tell you: there's nothing like standing in the terraces at an English football match.

a few more years down the road, and i'm in England serving in the Air Force. still a Leeds fan. (and learning to love cricket, btw, but that's another whole bottle of ale.) i stayed on in England for a while after leaving the AF, and with a friend who was a West Ham supporter (I'm forever blowing bubbles; go google it), we went to Leeds and saw, at Elland Road, United. i know we won that day, but that was over 25 years ago. i have no idea who we beat.

in recent years, Leeds built up a mighty team -- going into massive debt to do it. the hope was that great victories in England and Europe would pay the bills, but the victories didn't quite happen. and when the piper came to collect, Leeds went down. hard. into bankruptcy, and into the second-lowest division. imagine the Boston Red Sox spending all that money, not winning, and being forced as a result to play in Double-A.

Leeds have finally put together a solid club, both on the field and in management. better days are coming. there is nothing like being a fan of a British football team. lots of people "support" Man United; that's easy enough to do. but to support Forfar, or Bury, or QPR, or Leeds -- you gotta love not just the game but the ways of human life to really enjoy soccer in that way. when a single victory, or even a draw, is the difference between a team being in a top division or being relegated, then sports takes on a whole new meaning.

"Like West Ham, they fade and die...." (didn't have to Google it, thanks for the reminder....)

That is quite a coincidence, t.a. -- Forfar was the team my brother Peter and I chose to support for fun, when hardly anyone else did, but Leeds United... well, the greatest football team in all the land. I grew up in Leeds, standing behind the goal every two weeks for years. I remembered 9 of 11 names on that 1972 Cup Final team, before looking it up to check. My brother sent me the Forfar link this morning, for the good writing and the comforting knowledge that they're back in their old spot, but he tells me the Leeds score every Monday.

And I do have a political strategy thought connected with Leeds United, Matt. Our great captain, a short red-haired Scotsman named Billy Bremner, wrote a book after he retired. It was titled, "You get nowt for being second".

Well, Leeds is where we part company (though I am a long-standing Dennis Wise supporter).

For one thing, there are the self-inflicted wounds of 30 years of the worst kind of real and wannabe hooliganism. Milwall is a poor relation, frankly. And then there are the Revie years of which the faithful speak so fondly: I only just last week read David Peace's "The Damned Utd.", a brilliant novel about Brian Clough's 44-day tenure as manager of the club after Revie got called up to England (and how *did* that turn out, he asked obnoxiously...). The phrase "dirty cheating bastards" is pretty much stuck in my head. And your Mr. Bremner comes in for particular approbation.

But: you were there and I wasn't, fair play, and I still think the fella who chose Leeds over Arsenal did the right thing. Because the post-Nick Hornby Arsenal supporter is a bandwagoneer of the lowest sort.

Oh, and Ken Bates is a poison pill sent from Stamford Bridge and Wembley to destroy you.

TTFN!

PS: The same writer and director who made "The Queen" and "The Deal" are adapting "The Damned Utd." for Michael Sheen (who played Tony Blair in the other two) to star in as Old Bighead: brilliant.

Leeds=bad bad bad. On all sorts of levels.

Awesome! Whenever i think about all the things needed throughout Portland, I can always think about AF concerning herself with shitty non league football. Yay!

Hang on Jake, it may be shitty but it's not non-league. Non-league is the next level down. And it's not that shitty either, which was part of the point of the original article. One of the beauties of sport is that it works at every level; a game on the park can be just as good in its own way as the NFL, English Premiership, whatever.

I'm Amanda's brother. So this is all my fault, sorry! Matt, are you up for Brentford v Wycombe on Boxing Day?

If you do get to Brentford, be sure to have some fab fish & chips in Albany Road, just down from the club.....

Jake, if I'd known Matt was going to post this, I might not have sent him the link to the article about Forfar in the first place. You're right, "Vote for me because I've long supported some obscure Scottish sports team hardly anyone has heard of" is a totally lame campaign theme. But candidates, like voters, are complex people. If a conversation on sports trivia talking about soccer or college football can help even a few people connect with me and understand a little more about who I am, maybe they'll then visit my campaign web site or current issues blog, and find out more about the important reasons I'm running.

Portland City Council candidates have to try to reach 350,000 voters. So often I go where I'm invited, and talk about what the people inviting me want to talk about.

I'm in this picture.

http://worldofsven.co.uk/theology/images/scousers.jpg

Christ: did I say Bremner received "approbation"? (I did, didn't I?)

I meant: REPROBATION. (Posting far too late into a long day...)

The fight with Kevin Keegan in the Charity Shield, complete truculence toward Clough's (admittedly cackhanded) management, the awful tackle on Dave Mackay (how cool is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Billy_Bremner_Dave_Mackay.jpg ): I know he's a Leeds legend, but it's not hard to spin his story into something sour.

But, as I say, if you were there and they were wearing the badge you loved, well, so be it.

Oh, and for the record, anyone who criticizes a politician, activist, journalist, doctor or anyone else for having a passion outside work is a jerk.

Amanda, you are a marketing genius. I fell for your "under the radar" soccer story hook, line and sinker. My advice: make soccer a central campaign message. Embrace the Timbers! Bring pride back to our terraces!

Leeds past is their past. they were the worst of English hooliganism, but no more. and it was their real fans as much as anyone who took care of that. the fans work with the team to make sure it's only fans who travel with the team -- away matches used to be the major problem. when they had that awful incident in Turkey, where a Leeds fans was attacked and murdered, there was no retribution. that's when you knew the fans had changed things for themselves.

the biggest cause for British football hooliganism, i think, was Maggie Thatcher and the way she demolished the economy and the support base for the unemployed. hooligans tended to be permanently unemployed, nothing to do but find ways to act out their anger, and they'd take what money they had and use it to get drunk and fight other "fans". football was just the excuse. it's also not really a part of British soccer these days; for one thing, the security measures they've taken at most stadiums is amazing. but with the big money involved, the entire football structure has done what is needed to clean up the game.

i'd rather support Leeds with their ugly past than Man United. or Arsenal. might as well be a Yankees fan. gag. it's new Leeds, and a future that looks better each week.

Billy Bremner is like one of those baseball players from the 40s, tough and nasty if need be but passionate for the game. you hate him on the other team; you love him on yours. those guys are long gone. Beckham, like A-Rod is the ultimate modern player. except that Beckham's won championships. A-Rod's gonna get himself an o-fer. exactly what he's worth (he said, with a sigh of relief that the Dodgers didn't buy him and make him eat his words).