English Football

Have I said enough great things about Denmark on this blog? I think not. Here's one more thing that's awesome about the home of Hamlet: breakfast. Here's a Danish breakfast that Danny and I tried to recreate at home:

This was inspired by the discovery that we could buy traditional Danish 100% rye bread (rugbrød) at the farmers market. I can really only speak for breakfast as it existed at my host family's house, so that may not be completely universal, but I like to think that all Danes sit down to a breakfast as complete as we did in Jyllinge. I guess that first I should specify that the version that Danny and I created was more of a mix of breakfast and lunch. What's more typical is that breakfast would involve some plain white rolls, with many options for toppings: solid cheese, cream cheese, 2 kinds of jam, butter, and Danny's favorite, thin chocolate wafers. On weekends breakfast was expanded to include yogurt and soft-boiled eggs. Weekend lunch would be rugbrød with cheeses, many kinds of herring, hard boiled egg slices, and liver paste. Danny and I threw in poached eggs because we just can't get enough of them. Importantly, it was in Denmark that I learned that putting jam on top of a slice of mild cheese is delicious. Seriously. Try it.


But right, back to English football. In some ways, I can't believe it's taken us until February to write about football, but actually this makes sense for several reasons. In Europe, football is a winter sport, so the season didn't start until some time after we'd been here. Then for most of the early winter we were totally preoccupied with The Ashes, and we weren't paying attention to the football (on a related note, the cricket world cup starts Feb 19th!). Then our first foray into going to a football match - an England vs. Montenegro Euro cup qualifier match at Wembley - was perhaps one of the most boring soccer matches you could have asked for. It was a 0-0 draw. Seriously. Do you know the population of Montenegro? Less than 700,000. You'd think that England could have at least gotten one goal in, you know? Anyway, English fans booed the team at the end of the game because they had played so badly, and honestly, they deserved it.

This experience left me assuming that the old days of English soccer hooliganism were completely over, and that lack of crowd-control and mugs of beer had been replaced with calm, serious fans and mugs of tea. And while I was happy there were no riots or broken beer bottles or destruction of stadium property (seriously, click on the link above - it used to be bad), I was a little disappointed by the lack of passion from the fans. But it turns out we just hadn't been to the right game yet.

On Sunday we took advantage of a friend-of-a-friend connection to get cheap tickets to a Queens Park Rangers game. In order for this to make sense, let me take a minute to explain the workings of the English football league. According to wikipedia, there are about 7,000 clubs that are technically members of the league. Let's just pause on that number for a minute. That is a huge number. Not all of these clubs are professional, of course, but the defining characteristic of the football league is that it is completely fluid. As in, if your team plays really well one season, you get bumped up to a higher division the next season. And vice versa. So theoretically, some local team of guys who play football in their spare time could become amazing and one day be playing against Arsenal. Theoretically.

The highest division is the one you hear about - the Premier league, which contains well-known teams such as Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal. There are always 20 teams in the league, which is sometimes also called the premiership. The second highest division is called the Championship (not to be confused with the champions league, which is a Euro-wide competition between the best club teams from each country). Below the championship are League One and League Two, which, confusingly, are actually the 3rd and 4th levels, but whatever. At the end of every season there is a well-regulated method of moving teams up and down between divisions. And sadly, it looks as if our localest team, Barnet, will be moving down out of league two after this season, currently being in 24th place out of 24.

Alright, all that was just background, so that me saying that Queens Park Rangers (QPR) are currently in 1st place in the championship and will likely be moving up to the premier league next season will mean something to you. Between this fact, and the fact that Sunday's rival Nottingham Forest were not far behind at 4th place, the atmosphere at the stadium was great. The stadium was packed - topping out at over 17,000 fans. We happened to be sitting very close to the Nottingham fan section which led to some amazing heckling. Well, I don't really want to call it heckling, because it was much more that that. Each fan base has a full arsenal of songs and chants that went on for the entire game practically non-stop (many of which are the same, just with their team name thrown in), and their comments are quite pointed.

I could talk about intra-England prejudices for quite a while (and don't even get us started on intra-Scottish factions, which neatly break down along Catholic-Protestant divide), but for the purposes of this game, it's enough to know that to Londoners, anyone from north of Cambridge is a rural country idiot or a grimy former miner who's living on benefits, neither of whom ever learned to speak proper English. And to anyone from the North, Southerners are posh elitist snobs who stupidly pronounce R's as W's. (Note: the Southwest doesn't fit into these categories, and people there talk like the Irish. but I digress). Of course these are huge generalizations and there are many people who like and respect their Northern/Southern compatriots, but for the purposes of the QPR match, Nottingham fans were referred to as a bunch of "sheep shagging c**ts". And as for what the Nottingham fans were calling the QPR side, I couldn't understand it at all; you know how funny those country folk talk.

QPR and Notts drew 1-1, though with Notts playing with only 10 men for the last 60 minutes of the game, QPR really should have won it. We'll see about that promotion...