Football: Angharad's Saga
or, Why I'm a Werder Fan (Despite Never Having Been to Bremen)
Anna was asking me how I got into football, or at least German football, being a Brit and all. I admit it, it's rather strange. By all the rules of sport, I should be supporting my hometown team, or at least population-center-nearest-my-hometown-large-enough-to-have-a-football-team's team (which I think would be Caernarfon). Or if I don't feel like getting sucked into the highs and lows that is Britain's League Two, I should at least be a Liverpool fan. Like, you know, the rest of my family. (Traitors.) But I'm not. I follow the league of another country, a country I have only spent a short amount of time in and don't know the language of and don't have any particular loyalty to. More than that, my number one team of all time belongs to a city I've never been to (although I hear it's pretty). At least I've been to Munich. Why, then? Why the Bundesliga? Why Werder Bremen? Why, ultimately, football?
I grew up a football fan. It's hard to be British and not. I was as crazy a Klopptomist as you'll ever find, although that was pre-Steven Gerrard/Xabi Alonso-on-fbslash days, so it's not quite as nauseating a thought as it is now. But the attitude of the EPL, even then, was one of arrogance and willfull blindness, and the money was creeping in, spreading its tentacles everywhere. As I grew older and more aware of the world, more able to tell what was going on behind media reports, more interested in what was going on behind media reports, my love for football turned to hate. I saw the rise of the Big Evil attitude, and it sickened me. Beyond that, the English game is and has always been thuggery -- it is not a kind of football I enjoy watching, and I could no longer bring myself to support it. I fell out of love with football, violently, as such breaks must needs be. I scorned it, and all sport, calling it an opiate for the masses, a pathetic excuse for a war substitute, a place where all the base instincts of humanity can come out to play. Nothing for the well-bred, the educated, the self-aware. Every insult the intelligentsia has heaped upon football, I believed in, every argument against it ever spoken, I put forth. I despised it, and those who bought into it.
Then, at university, I acquired a German boyfriend. Michael something, I don't even remember his last name, we dated for a few months and then fell out of interest with each other, went our separate ways. But he was from Stuttgart, a serious VfB fan, and while we were dating he insisted I sit down and watch Bundesliga matches with him. This was in Stuttgart's Junge Wilde I days, and I did fall in love with Stuttgart, just a little bit, because of those young boys on the pitch. I will always love the VfB, no matter what happens, for that one thing: Philip Lahm's cheeky grin in front of Timo Hildebrand's big, capable hands in goal. Oh, Stuttgart.
But while my hatred for football in general, at least my hatred for not-English football was abating, it still remained strong. I could acknowledge that I liked watching VfB matches, that I liked the way the German league played football, quick and bright and not too open (like the Spaniards or Italians) but not so close and rough it turned into thuggery (like the English), but I still was not willing to become a football fan again. There was too much about it I hated, too much that was ugly, and even the Bundesliga's relative innocence (at least compared to the EPL) was not enough to change my mind. I had sworn to hate football, and so I did.
Then, one day in the fall of 2004, I sat down to watch a Werder Bremen match on the telly. I have not looked back since. Oh, the K&K. There is no way to describe what that was, what an overwhelming shock it was, to watch beauty come to life before my eyes. It was like nothing I had ever known before. I suddenly understood what football was supposed to be, why it can consume the heart and soul of so many people. I understood everything that I had lacked as an EPL fan as a child, without even knowing I lacked it -- I understood that the lack was what drove me away from football, that even without knowing what I was missing I knew it was not there, and that when everyone was telling me to give my soul to football they were telling me to give my soul to something empty, that nothing I had known in the EPL was worth giving my soul to, and that therefore I had believed football was not worth giving my soul to. Oh, how wrong I was. Football is beauty, it is ninety minutes of pure, heart-stopping life, and I had never known it to be that before. Werder Bremen, the K&K, green-and-white on a moving field, don't blink, don't look away, your heart is in your throat because right here, right now, you are alive. This is what it means to be human.
I have never lost that. I know what football is now, I know what it is supposed to be, and even though the K&K are no more, hell, even though I'm still pissed as hell at Miro for being an ass, it doesn't matter. I have become football. I know what it is, so that if I ever lose it again, I know what to look for. I will be forever grateful to Bremen for that, to the K&K, because they allowed me to give my soul over to football without feeling dirty and used, they enabled me to realize why we love sport so strongly.
Football was dirty and ugly then (it was only three years ago). It is dirty and ugly now. It is everything that I hate, everything that drove me away from it in the first place. But now I know it doesn't matter. Now I know nothing matters, because we have ninety minutes, ninety minutes where the rest of the world ceases to exist, ninety minutes where we become shockingly, brilliantly alive.
Football, I have said, is human passion in physical form. It is what makes us, us -- both the good, and the ugly. I would never have known that, except I saw two men on a field one day, taking the Bundesliga by storm. I am Werder. I will always be, because that, that is beauty.
Anna was asking me how I got into football, or at least German football, being a Brit and all. I admit it, it's rather strange. By all the rules of sport, I should be supporting my hometown team, or at least population-center-nearest-my-hometown-large-enough-to-have-a-football-team's team (which I think would be Caernarfon). Or if I don't feel like getting sucked into the highs and lows that is Britain's League Two, I should at least be a Liverpool fan. Like, you know, the rest of my family. (Traitors.) But I'm not. I follow the league of another country, a country I have only spent a short amount of time in and don't know the language of and don't have any particular loyalty to. More than that, my number one team of all time belongs to a city I've never been to (although I hear it's pretty). At least I've been to Munich. Why, then? Why the Bundesliga? Why Werder Bremen? Why, ultimately, football?
I grew up a football fan. It's hard to be British and not. I was as crazy a Klopptomist as you'll ever find, although that was pre-Steven Gerrard/Xabi Alonso-on-fbslash days, so it's not quite as nauseating a thought as it is now. But the attitude of the EPL, even then, was one of arrogance and willfull blindness, and the money was creeping in, spreading its tentacles everywhere. As I grew older and more aware of the world, more able to tell what was going on behind media reports, more interested in what was going on behind media reports, my love for football turned to hate. I saw the rise of the Big Evil attitude, and it sickened me. Beyond that, the English game is and has always been thuggery -- it is not a kind of football I enjoy watching, and I could no longer bring myself to support it. I fell out of love with football, violently, as such breaks must needs be. I scorned it, and all sport, calling it an opiate for the masses, a pathetic excuse for a war substitute, a place where all the base instincts of humanity can come out to play. Nothing for the well-bred, the educated, the self-aware. Every insult the intelligentsia has heaped upon football, I believed in, every argument against it ever spoken, I put forth. I despised it, and those who bought into it.
Then, at university, I acquired a German boyfriend. Michael something, I don't even remember his last name, we dated for a few months and then fell out of interest with each other, went our separate ways. But he was from Stuttgart, a serious VfB fan, and while we were dating he insisted I sit down and watch Bundesliga matches with him. This was in Stuttgart's Junge Wilde I days, and I did fall in love with Stuttgart, just a little bit, because of those young boys on the pitch. I will always love the VfB, no matter what happens, for that one thing: Philip Lahm's cheeky grin in front of Timo Hildebrand's big, capable hands in goal. Oh, Stuttgart.
But while my hatred for football in general, at least my hatred for not-English football was abating, it still remained strong. I could acknowledge that I liked watching VfB matches, that I liked the way the German league played football, quick and bright and not too open (like the Spaniards or Italians) but not so close and rough it turned into thuggery (like the English), but I still was not willing to become a football fan again. There was too much about it I hated, too much that was ugly, and even the Bundesliga's relative innocence (at least compared to the EPL) was not enough to change my mind. I had sworn to hate football, and so I did.
Then, one day in the fall of 2004, I sat down to watch a Werder Bremen match on the telly. I have not looked back since. Oh, the K&K. There is no way to describe what that was, what an overwhelming shock it was, to watch beauty come to life before my eyes. It was like nothing I had ever known before. I suddenly understood what football was supposed to be, why it can consume the heart and soul of so many people. I understood everything that I had lacked as an EPL fan as a child, without even knowing I lacked it -- I understood that the lack was what drove me away from football, that even without knowing what I was missing I knew it was not there, and that when everyone was telling me to give my soul to football they were telling me to give my soul to something empty, that nothing I had known in the EPL was worth giving my soul to, and that therefore I had believed football was not worth giving my soul to. Oh, how wrong I was. Football is beauty, it is ninety minutes of pure, heart-stopping life, and I had never known it to be that before. Werder Bremen, the K&K, green-and-white on a moving field, don't blink, don't look away, your heart is in your throat because right here, right now, you are alive. This is what it means to be human.
I have never lost that. I know what football is now, I know what it is supposed to be, and even though the K&K are no more, hell, even though I'm still pissed as hell at Miro for being an ass, it doesn't matter. I have become football. I know what it is, so that if I ever lose it again, I know what to look for. I will be forever grateful to Bremen for that, to the K&K, because they allowed me to give my soul over to football without feeling dirty and used, they enabled me to realize why we love sport so strongly.
Football was dirty and ugly then (it was only three years ago). It is dirty and ugly now. It is everything that I hate, everything that drove me away from it in the first place. But now I know it doesn't matter. Now I know nothing matters, because we have ninety minutes, ninety minutes where the rest of the world ceases to exist, ninety minutes where we become shockingly, brilliantly alive.
Football, I have said, is human passion in physical form. It is what makes us, us -- both the good, and the ugly. I would never have known that, except I saw two men on a field one day, taking the Bundesliga by storm. I am Werder. I will always be, because that, that is beauty.