Forest are Magic! (or, So Long and thanks for all the Fish)

Source: fourFourTwo.com

Lower tier football fandom from across the pond has been a work in progress these last many years... I've been a fan of international soccer since 1990, when I was in Germany with my family during Italia '90 (the first World Cup Final that the United States had qualified for in my lifetime {and in fact the first time within the living memory of almost all Boomers!}).  The US fared poorly in that tournament, but West Germany ended up winning, and we were staying in West Berlin on the night that Germany qualified for the final.  There was an impromptu parade of joy and humanity that lasted all night, and I remember waking up in our hotel room, brushing my teeth on the balcony and looking down on the Ku'damm the next morning as the festivities continued, and some German fan who'd been partying all night raised his beer can to me.

The concept of club soccer first occurred to me, I think, on my visit to Nottingham, England nearly a decade later, when I had a stopover at the start of a spring break in Europe, and we watched a match out at the pubs. It's only now, 23 years later, that I'm realizing the match on TV had to be a Notts County affair (because Forest didn't have a match that mid-week that I was in town).  Watching a fan base come together over soccer felt different, because of the limited chances and scoring within a match, so I decided to become a fan of Nottingham Forest, and they were subsequently relegated from the Premier League a couple months later.  Following a Premier League team in 1999 and into the early 2000s was hard enough, but lower tiers - forget about it, so yahoo.sports.co.uk became a near constant tab on my computer for the next decade or so, repeatedly refreshing the browser during big matches to get score updates.

Meanwhile, I spent the remainder of that football season in Münster, Germany, which is Borussia Dortmund country, so I selected them as a Bundesliga club that I would follow, although I was never as invested in their success. But I did enjoy their success, and when their bad-ass manager, Jürgen Klopp, moved into the Premier League in 2015, I decided I should be a Liverpool fan for the Premier League - because clearly, Forest were still a long long away from top flight competition, and as much as I was enjoying following Forest's progress (now on Twitter instead of Yahoo), Liverpool had matches I could actually watch on a regular basis.  

Just a couple years later (at the start of the 2017-2018 season), ESPN+ started to show matches from the lower English leagues, so for the first time, once every 4 or 5 weeks, I got to watch a Nottingham Forest match.  It was also the first season under the new ownership of Greek oligarch Evangelos Marinakas (he bought it from Kuwati oligarch Fawaz Al-Hasawi in May 2017), and in just over five short (long, long, long) years - we are back in the Premier League!

And so it is, that I have to say goodbye to a "favorite" team.  While my selection of Liverpool was fairly arbitrary - a coaching hire - I've come to appreciate their fan base (not least here in Milwaukee!), and to cheer alongside them.  Thus, my (sub)title - which I now understand to be a malapropism - Scousers (people from Liverpool, but also more specifically Liverpool FC fans) are named after a local stew called scouse (or originally lobscouse), which I mistakenly thought had fish in it, but instead is a beef (or lamb) stew that is traditionally eaten while out to sea!

So, while I have been a lousy under-performing fan of Liverpool and Dortmund (and don't even get me started on Minnesota United FC!), I've been here for some years now of Nottingham Forest, and watching nearly every match these last several years on iFollow and ForestTV (with full, elaborate, BBC Nottingham radio commentary from Colin Fray).  The Garibaldi Red Podcast has also been a huge friend since it started in early 2020 - just before the world went bonkers, and I hope you will follow along with me at Three Lions Pub in Shorewood, or wherever we land to watch matches: MKE_nffc on twitter...