About the Blog

So yeah... You want to blog?

Let me get this out of the way first thing, yes I'm an American, and we call the game soccer, and our men's national kits don't have any stars on the crest (our women's do because they are awesome), but I do know a thing or two about the game and more importantly, I do have opinions about it that I want to express publicly. Plus, I'm really good at run-on sentences. You don't have to agree with them, that's okay, I can't force you to be correct, but maybe, just maybe I can inform you or change your mind on a given topic.

I started out playing Club soccer. Boys & Girls Club soccer that is. I only played one year but I was a stand-out central defender, at least in my own mind. My favorite memory was tracking back against a forward, his name was Mike Bitter, making a desperate tackle to keep him from being in one-on-one with our keeper. The reason it's a fond memory wasn't the tackle itself (although it was glorious), it was that it made him cry. It was truly most foul, but I'll get to the name of my blog later. He was a tough kid and we all know there is no crying in soccer, or baseball, or something. Wuss.

A broken foot ended my short career, I didn't get it on the pitch, rather from some douche-bag who pushed me off of a sidewalk, but I missed a season, moved from Scottsdale to Phoenix and that was that. I'd like to thank my friend and teammate Paul for getting me interested in the game, an interest which was sparked in 4th grade and has only grown since then.

So I followed the USMNT as best as I could (there was no real Internet back then, Al Gore's invention was still in its consumer infancy) and, like most Americans, I was more into readily-available sports like Baseball, Hockey, Basketball and American Football. In 2009 we visited Ireland and I was determined to see real English Football in a real Irish pub. I saw on the telly, er TV, that Arsenal was going to be playing Manchester United while we were in Galway and I enlisted my always-willing Dad to accompany me to a pub to watch it. I knew virtually nothing about the English game at that point and decided to root for Arsenal because I did know that Manchester United was very popular so I figured I would root for the underdogs. Of course I now know that Arsenal is one of the best teams in the FA, but they were still underdogs that season. "We" lost to United thanks to a penalty and a Diaby own-goal (Arsenal wasted way too much time and money on that scrub, it took five more seasons for Wenger to realize it and dump him, but I started to think it that very first match).

When we got back to the States I realized that ESPN was carrying one match per week and I started getting up early to watch it. The advent of DVRs and Fox Sports picking up coverage of the league as well as Serie A and the Champions League allowed my love of the game to blossom and my knowledge to grow. Fast forward to today, the inception of my blog. Things haven't changed much for my Arsenal side, we just can't seem to get out of our own way, even in a season that has seen all of the big Clubs falter. Successive FA Cup titles haven't slaked our desire for hardware, they have only fueled it. Meanwhile the USMNT continues to struggle to find its own identity, thank God for the women's side propping us up and giving us a little International relevancy.

So, the full name of this blog would be Heinous F***ery Most Foul Soccer Blog, a descriptor taken from one of my favorite authors, Christopher Moore. Read him, you won't regret it. If you're into Goth start with Bite Me, religion, start with The Gospel According to Biff (Christ's Childhood Pal) or literature, Fool.