Thanks, this is useful. The piece is intended for people who may not be all that interested in sports, so it’s good to know that you connected with it. I appreciate the review.
—d
Journalism / The Quixotic Quarterbacks of Finsbury Park (Analysis)
The field used to be an anti-aircraft battery during the blitz of World War II. When the war ended, it was grassed over for use as an athletics field, complete with a running track on the outside. They lay down eighteen inches of soil and sodded it over, which means that during a rainy period it’s prone to flooding – they have to drain it, disturbing the ducks who come over from the man-made lake by the public toilets. During a hot, dry spell, the field becomes hard, like concrete, and the players have to wear shoes intended for astroturf. They rent it from the Haringey Council, who have to coordinate the scheduling with a youth rugby league and a kiddie soccer team. The only reason it has goal posts is that the coach of the London Capitols, a 90’s-era youth team, persuaded the council to put them in, and they were set in concrete. When the Capitols folded subsequent to that coach’s arrest (“I don’t think it had anything to do with football”), they couldn’t be removed, as they had been set in concrete, and digging them up would have damaged those 18 inches of soil. And so the London Blitz American football team inherited Finsbury Park Stadium.
The Blitz are the only London-based team in the British American Football League’s Premiere division now. The Olympians, from the south end of the city, informed the league in the final weeks before the 2008 season that a series of factors had rendered them unable to field a team. Most of the players joined the Farnum Knights, about forty minutes south of the city by train. To reach North London’s Finsbury Park, where the Blitz practice and play, from South London requires a byzantine journey that involves at least one city bus, one overground train, and one underground train.
As a result of the slew of former Olympians who joined Farnum’s organization, the Knights were elevated from the BAFL’s Division I to the Premiere division, and last week at Finsbury Park handed the Blitz their second loss of the season, a 34-23 loss that wasn’t even as close as that makes it seem. Not that it’s something that broke a lot of hearts in Finsbury Park that weekend – while the Blitz don’t charge admission and are unable to track attendance figures, this author’s estimate put the crowd of spectators in the mid-sixties; Robin Pierce, chairman of the Blitz organization and assistant defensive coach, thought that number was too low. In lieu of tickets-sold, the Blitz gages the attendance for their home games by the success of their cookout booth, where fans can pick up hamburgers, hot dogs, crisps, and Cokes – all the American hallmarks. The week of the game against Farnum, Coach Pierce said they took in nearly £800.
The Blitz’s third game, the loss to Farnum, was on a Sunday afternoon, which is the day BAFL teams typically play. Game four, however, was played on a Saturday. A kiddie soccer league had already booked the field for Sunday.
If there are as many people at the stadium as Coach Pierce believes during the match-up between Farnum and the Blitz, many of them aren’t there to watch the game. The area surrounding the field is pretty, and behind the Blitz sidelines a karate instructor is leading several students in katas. During a tense moment of game play, as the Knights make a red-zone push to score on the far side of the field, a woman leads her kids to the exit by walking them across the field, from the fifteen yard line through the end zone, as if she hadn’t noticed the dozens of American football players using the field.
You can see into the stadium from the duck pond in Finsbury Park, or from the bowling green, or the flower garden. Curiosity leads a lot of people ambling by into the stadium – the sight of so many men in full American football uniforms is a unique one in a Victorian-era London park, and perhaps some of Coach Pierce’s burger-buyers had just finished a rowboat rental and had to check out for themselves what it was all about as they made their way to Manor House underground station.
The rest of the spectators, the ones who weren’t there incidentally for karate practice or because a strange sight piqued their curiosity during an otherwise nice day in the park, tend to be the friends and family of the players. It’s hard to tell if they’re enthused, or if they’re even following the game. Nobody has their faces painted Blitz navy blue; there are no foam fingers, no strident, angry guys yelling at the refs for blown calls. Emirates Stadium, where the Arsenal soccer team plays, is a mere half mile away, but anyone expecting to see even a dozen people decked out in the same spirit as English soccer fans would be disappointed. Hooliganism is out of the picture.
That said, there are die-hard Blitz fans, but many of them are children. The Blitz organization has both Youth (13-16) and a Junior (16-19) teams, and the kids view the Blitz Senior team players as heroes. They hang around the sidelines before the game starts in slightly outdated officially-licensed NFL jerseys or in Blitz merchandise ordered off of the Internet, run out for passes. A boy in a Donovan McNabb jersey races out for a pass while another boy, in a white London Blitz Britbowl XXI National Champions, plays defense. A blonde kid in a Michael Vick jersey throws a good spiral, but the defender knocks it down. Number Thirty on the Blitz senior team, watching, gestures to Michael Vick for the ball, who immediately hands it over. All three boys run out for a pass, and Number Thirty lands it in the hands of Britbowl XXI.
During the game, the boys are the most passionate and enthusiastic Blitz fans in Finsbury Park. While everyone else sits quietly, as interested in their picnic lunch or kicking around a soccer ball, they chase the action down the sideline, following closely and shouting encouragement.
“Go Blitz! Knights are rubbish!” Right now, in 2008, these boys may be the biggest football fans in all of England.
American football came to the UK in 1983, the year of the first broadcast on terrestrial television. Most casual fans you meet tend to follow the NFL, rather than the college game, and a disproportionate number of them are Chicago Bears fans. The first Super Bowl broadcast in the country was the 1985 Bears trouncing of the New England Patriots, and the sight of William “The Refrigerator” Perry scoring an offensive touchdown delighted many a young British boy.
The first American football teams sprang up almost immediately after the game made its television debut. Robin Pierce – chairman of the London Blitz American football club, and an assistant defensive coach for that team – started off as a player, a defensive end for the Slough Silverbacks.
“There were about a hundred and fifty teams that first year,” Coach Pierce said during a Blitz practice session the week after the loss to Farnum, “all of them with varying standards of incompetence.”
And most of them didn’t last. The first team that Pierce – a tall, stout man who looks like what a former defensive end should look like – had tried out for was the Windsor Monarchs, but rivalries and politicking forced a split, and neighboring Slough formed the Silverbacks. It was a common story throughout the country, as the fad of American football brought out a variety of characters – trend-jumpers, con artists who saw a way to score a few easy quid, “people who just thought they’d look good in shoulder pads”.
This was a time when both Slough and Windsor, three and a half miles apart, could each support their own American football teams.
It didn’t last, as the fad cooled and the con artists realized there were better ways to make some money. The people who just like the way they look in the uniform are still around, but they’re a small part of the game now. When most of the amateur leagues and local teams faded away, the hangers-on found themselves with nothing to hang on to, and they moved on to other pursuits. At this point, only the truly dedicated are involved in the game, and they’ve almost all found themselves involved in the BAFL.
The BAFL plays a version of the game with a hybrid of NFL and collegiate rules. The quality of play in the Premiere division is roughly on par with what you’d see in the lower levels of the NCAA Division II; they’d get clobbered by Valdosta State, but be competitive on the field against Saginaw Valley. There are, of course, individual stand-outs within the league. If former Blitz wide receiver Roderick Bradley had been born in Texas, Coach Pierce would lay odds that he’d be in the NFL right now. Instead, he stars as “Spartan” on UK Gladiators, and, as of the 2008 season, is contractually prohibited from playing football.
Bradley moonlighted as a player for Great Britain’s national rugby team, the Great British Lions, before taking up with the Gladiators, but there’s not as much crossover between the two games as one might think. Generally speaking, rugby enthusiasts would rather be playing rugby than learn a strange American game and strap on eighteen kilos of protective equipment. In the UK, there’s something of a rivalry between rugby and American football, and it’s the subject of some piss-taking between rugby fans and visiting Americans. On Thanksgiving, a conversation with a friend’s husband in which this author expressed curiosity in how the Dallas Cowboys were faring was met with a disdainful laugh. “I played rugby in school,” he said, popping his shoulder to show off an on-field injury he had ostensibly sustained. “American football is for girls.”
Coach Pierce doesn’t find that line of thought convincing. “Most of the people who dismiss the game as ‘just rugby with pads’ wouldn’t play rugby, either. Pro rugby players, who have absolutely nothing to prove to anyone in the entire world, have nothing but the utmost respect for the game and its players.”
But still, the fact that it even needs to be defended gives you some perspective. In America, the star quarterback is an archetype so thoroughly mined as to be a cliché – in a movie or a television program, if a lazy writer wants to use shorthand in portraying a male character as the consummate insider, popular and admired by his peers, the odds are he’ll be wearing a letterman’s jacket and carrying a football. Whether it’s Jason Street on Friday Night Lights or current Patriots’ star Tom Brady, famous for dating supermodels and starlets, the quarterback is the quintessential All-American Boy.
But what does that mean for a quarterback who isn’t American?
Lining up under the center for the London Blitz is Stuart Franklin, a fair-haired 31 year old who had previously led the city’s other BAFL team, the London Olympians, to eight consecutive championships. His first year after moving to the Blitz, the Olympians were overthrown and Franklin captured his ninth BAFL title with his new team.
Watching him on the field, he cuts the right figure – he’s tall, got a strong arm and good pocket presence, isn’t prone to boneheaded mistakes. Coach Pierce considers him the best native-born quarterback in the country, and he may well be. When he strides over to the sidelines at the conclusion of a drive, he removes his helmet to reveal clear blue eyes and a strong jaw that complement his blond good looks. He’s like a quarterback out of central casting, but only if it’s not a speaking part.
Once Franklin opens his mouth and his London accent comes out, you realize that for all his athleticism, Stuart Franklin is not exactly in his element.
He hesitates when asked about what his friends think of the game, of the time he puts into it. “Most of my friends, at this point, are my teammates. I spend a lot of time practicing, and a few of us train together on off-days, work-out. Honestly, I don’t have many friends from outside of football.” It’s important to note that almost to the person, people in the Blitz organization refer to the game as football, and call the other one, with the black-and-white ball and the attention of pretty much everybody in the country, soccer. But Franklin can tell what the question is getting at, and he opens up a bit. “They respect the dedication,” he says finally, “my family, or my colleagues at work. They see how hard I work, how much time I put in. A lot of people my age, they haven’t got hobbies anymore, don’t keep active. They can respect my dedication to the game.”
But why this game? Franklin is a stellar athlete at thirty-one, and his eight championship titles with the Olympians clearly suggest that he shone on the field throughout his twenties. So why wasn’t he on the soccer pitch, showing his friends and family what he’s capable of in a context that they’d understand?
It’s at this point that the conversation with Stuart Franklin seems to be taking place in a strange alternate reality. In this world, the star quarterback with the cannon for an arm is an awkward geek, obsessed with the minutiae of a culturally irrelevant game that might as well be Dungeons and Dragons for all of the interest that the average sports fan or pretty girl might be interested in it. Asking Franklin why he plays football even though most of the people he shares a carriage with on the underground couldn’t be bothered to take the piss out of him for it is as pointless as asking a tournament-winning axe-thrower at the Kentucky Highland Renaissance Festival why he bothers with it, when he could, like, be really popular if only he tried playing baseball. The answer is obvious, and the question is vaguely insulting.
“I’ve been playing football since I was seven years old,” Franklin says, “I’ve done training camps with the NFL Europe and the CFL. I love the game. It’s the ultimate team sport – in no other game do you put your body, physically, on the line for ten other men every play. And there’s something for everybody. You can play a position no matter what your body type is, or your size. I’ve been a fan of the Dallas Cowboys since I was a kid, since I first saw Herschel Walker on TV. There’s no game like it. That’s why I play.”
In late 2007, the attention of English sports fans was held firmly by the Rugby World Cup as the national team succeeded in the tournament, until losing in the finals to South Africa. The United States had fielded a team, which had two surprising victories over Uruguay that qualified them for the same pool as England and South Africa. The American team was clobbered by England and English sports fans considered them a joke, but it’s only a funny one to a certain type of fan. Any American who is aware that their country fielded a team for the Rugby World Cup is also aware that the results would have been very different if LaDanian Tomlinson and Brian Urlacher were not tied up in the NFL.
The relative merits of rugby as compared to American football are frequently debated among the English sports fans and their American counterparts. The passions are rarely so strident among other Europeans. A large part of that seems to stem from the common language between the two countries. In Germany, where soccer is known as fußballspiel, and American football is simply football, there’s no conflict. Similarly, in Australia the word football can refer to soccer, two different versions of rugby, and Australian rules football, but the American game is known as gridiron.
But in the UK, they already have a game they call football, and it involves a round ball that gets kicked a lot. From that perspective, the idea of Americans taking a modified rugby ball and a whole mess of padding to play some game where the players don’t even use their feet and insisting that it should be called football, too, comes off as typical American arrogance.
What might also be characterized as American arrogance is at least partly the reason the NFL Europe failed in the UK. At its inception in 1995, the league consisted of six teams, including two from the UK. In addition to the London Monarchs and Scottish Claymores, there were teams from Spain, Holland, and Germany. By the time the league folded at the conclusion of the 2007 season, it consisted of five German teams and the Amsterdam Admirals. Football is more popular in Germany than it is in the UK, but according to English fans and players, that wasn’t the reason the country failed to support the Monarchs, who folded in ‘98, or the Claymores, who were replaced by the Hamburg Sea Devils after the 2004 season.
“They were mercenaries,” Coach Pierce says. “They didn’t put any nationals on the field, hardly at all. Just kickers. It was just a bunch of Americans coming over to play their game. We had no participation, no one to identify with.”
Blitz players and their coaches have a different perspective on what this means for the prospect of future success. Coach Pierce, when talking about his dreams for the game’s future in the UK, envisions a day when the BAFL can develop toward semi-pro, emulating the success of the German Football League. The GFL, Germany’s premiere league (what they call a bundesliga), is a now-professional organization with roots in an amateur organization, and a match-up between two of the most popular teams – say, between the Braunschweig Lions and the Hamburg Blue Devils (not to be confused with the defunct NFL Europe Hamburg Sea Devils) – can draw up to 35,000 fans.
The better of the Blitz players, however, aren’t waiting for a sea change in the public interest in the hope that they might still have a few years of quality play left in them by the time the league can start doing things like drawing a crowd and paying them – their vision of the future involves getting to America and having the chance to succeed on the game’s own turf.
A few Blitz players occasionally flirt with this sort of success. Two players on the current squad have been scouted by NFL teams and have been invited to NFL tryouts; Another will be leaving London in the fall to attend the University of Maryland on a football scholarship.
Stephen Hutchinson is thirty-six years old and a player/coach with the Blitz. He understands both sides of the dream very well – in addition to working with the Blitz, he spent five years in the NFL Europe, playing with both the Monarchs and the Claymores, as well as a year in the GFL, lining up as both a tail- and fullback for the Hamburg Blue Devils. He was aggressively courted by several North American teams, including the Washington Redskins and the CFL’s British Columbia Lions but never received the requisite playing time to show them what he was capable of on the field.
“NFL Europe training camp is like window shopping for recruiters – they can see what they like and get a bargain, sign a great player at the league minimum. I was approached by the Washington Redskins and the British Columbia Lions in the CFL at camp with the Claymores. They saw me out there, and they couldn’t believe it when I started talking and they heard my accent. They were like, ‘you’re European?’ They asked me where I went to college, and I told them, ‘University of Middlesex’. They couldn’t believe it. They told me that they’d be watching me throughout the season, that they liked how I looked at camp. And then the season started, and I didn’t ever get on the field.”
Hutchinson blames the problem on politics. “We were just there for marketing. They just wanted to say they had some Europeans in the league. It was all politics.”
At thirty-six, Hutchinson’s best years as a runner are certainly behind him, and he stepped away from the game once the Claymores folded in 2004, only returning at the beginning of the current Blitz season. The time off helped him transition his dreams from those of a player, waiting for Redskins owner Daniel Snyder to hand him a contract, to a coach’s vision of a future for the game in the UK that may be able to draw a sustainable audience.
No one knows better than Hutchinson exactly how hard the road is for an American football player in the UK. He was clearly an exceptional talent as a young man, able to walk on to three different professional teams more or less at-will, and he trained alongside players like future Kansas City Chiefs Pro-Bowler Dante Hall in the late 90’s. With a talent like that, he could have probably taken the same route as former Blitz wideout and current UK Gladiators’ star Rod Bradley and opted out of football to pursue rugby or another route to athletic stardom. Instead he continued to play the game until it broke his heart, took a few years off, and then ponied up the three-hundred quid in subscription fees to join the Blitz. What brings an Englishman back to an obscure game that has done nothing but disappoint him?
He starts to talk like a coach, to envision a great future for football in the UK. “I think the younger players – I’m here for them, so they can build on what guys like me did. I can be a good influence, share some of what I know…” And then he breaks, looks down, and smiles. “But I just love to play,” he says. “I just – I love to be on the field. That fire will never go out.”
That fire is what gets East Kilbride Pirates tight end Mark Murphy out of bed at two-thirty in the morning so he can get to the butcher shop by three. He had to come in to do the overnight because they were short-staffed and needed the preparations done for the day to come, or else his request for time off wouldn’t be granted. After three hours, he completed his tasks and was released, at which point he got in his car and began the drive to London.
It’s six and a half hours from Hamilton, Scotland to London, and the East Kilbride Pirates’ game against the Blitz was set to kick off at half past two.
Murphy is the starting tight end for East Kilbride, and he had a long day. Football is an exhausting game to play, but most of the time the men on the field didn’t have to drive into the city an hour and a half before kickoff after a six and a half hour commute, only to play the game and then get right back in the car to drive home, hoping to get in with enough time to spare that maybe they’ll be able to get a decent night’s sleep before going in to work in the morning.
Julie Kyle, whose son Blake Kyle is a running back for the Pirates, knows Murphy, and most of the players on the Pirates’ squad. Her nephew, Scott, is also on the team, a defensive back who spends much of the game against the Blitz lining up at safety. Julie, too, had spent the morning driving down to London, along with the boys and her sister-in-law, Scott’s mother.
East Kilbride is the northernmost city to field a BAFL Premiere division team. This makes for complicating situations – like today’s game in London, in which the bleary-eyed tight end is without backup at the position, because the second-string, like ten other members of the Pirates’ 35-man squad, was unable to come up with the time or money to get down to London. It also means that their home field makes flood-prone Finsbury Park Stadium look like Fed Ex Field in Washington DC by comparison – Julie expresses her admiration for what she calls the “football pitch” by explaining that the Pirates’ previous week’s game, against the dreaded Coventry Cassidy Jets, was held during a downpour. With no covered areas, the few dozen East Kilbride supporters were left in their wellies, holding umbrellas and hoping that the clock would tick just a little bit faster.
Scott and Blake have been playing since they were teenagers. Scott, who moved last year to Cumbria, in England, drives 280 miles round-trip to practice with the Pirates and play home games. Before the boys developed an interest in the game through its television broadcasts, Julie was largely ignorant of the game.
“I used to see it on the television,” she says, “because my husband liked to watch it, and I just thought it was dreadful. You know, ‘why do they keep stopping? Just get on with it!’ I understand it better now.”
And she’s got enthusiasm for it now, too. Like any supportive parent might, she buries her face in her hands when the Blitz pick off a poorly-thrown pass, letting a very Scottish “oh, shite!” escape her lips as it happens. It’s not really any different from the parents of kids who get into punk rock and subsequently find themselves hosting vegan potlucks, or the straight-laced fathers of girls who love figure skating and by extension start to tune in to Sunday afternoon exhibitions on the television. She may not understand the appeal herself, but she’s certainly willing to try for their sake. Her Super Bowl parties, now in their seventh year, are apparently, the stuff of legend back in Scotland, with hot dogs and hamburgers and popcorn prepared for guests, which mostly consists of Blake’s teammates.
As is typical in the UK, people involved in the Scottish and northern England teams resent the hell out of London. Both Julie and her sister insist that, while they have to do everything themselves, London is constantly feted with heaps of cash from outside sources.
It’s not true, of course. The Blitz are funded by their hamburger sales, as well as the £300 per player they take in as a subscription fee, as well as a few oddball one-offs – the Blitz has become the go-to organization among London theatre companies putting on productions of The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas, for the scene in which the Aggies change from their football uniforms into cowboy outfits, and they’ve occasionally done photoshoots for American advertisements that require an anonymous football team. Only the Coventry Cassidy Jets, funded by local construction company Cassidy, actually receive outside funding for their team. Nonetheless, fans from East Kilbride looks at the Blitz organization and see something they can only aspire to.
The loss to the Farnum Knights is forgotten as the Blitz warm-up. The team is enthusiastic and well-rested, fired up and eager to play. At kickoff, there are maybe half as many spectators as had been in attendance at the game against the Knights, but supporters of Farnum had only an hour and a half’s journey to Finsbury Park Stadium to watch the game, while friends, family, and fans of the Pirates had to make a six and a half hour trip down from Scotland. The players for East Kilbride, while they look good during their warm-ups, can’t help but seem a little tired.
As the game continues, the crowd seems to dwindle even further. The fact that the Blitz run rings around the exhausted and under-staffed Pirates team and are up 35-0 at the half probably doesn’t do much to engender enthusiasm, either.
The Blitz had scored their first touchdown very early on, and the cheerleaders took to the sideline to show their support. There were ten of them, ranging in age from seven to the mid-forties. By the time they score their first touchdown of the second half, there are only six left.
The cheerleaders got involved with the Blitz organization in January 2008. They were invited to participate by Coach Pierce, who contacted Sandy Donnelly, of Angelis Cheerleading out of London to see if her group would travel with the team to Paris for a pre-season exhibition match against the French Templiers d’Elancourt. Donnelly agreed, and the two organizations have been collaborating throughout the regular season.
Like the London Blitz, and the BAFL in general, Sandy Donnelly’s cheerleading program is something of a labor of love. Six years ago, she learned of a program through the United Kingdom Cheerleading Association to become certified as an instructor in Manchester, and decided that it was not too late to realize her dream to become a cheerleader. Working previously as a fitness lecturer and personal trainer, she’s taken her experience and chosen to pursue her dream.
The group she’s put together are a fairly rag-tag bunch, with two women in their late twenties, four teenagers, and four girls much smaller, the youngest being seven years old. Donnelly is optimistic, however, that the teenagers will bring their friends into the activity before too long.
“I think they’re a little shy at first,” she says, “because it’s a little bit different, but it’s a lot of fun. And who hasn’t wanted to be a cheerleader? Once they see how good they look in the uniforms, and how much fun we’re having, I think they’ll stop being so shy.”
For now, though, Donnelly’s out there with the five girls who haven’t left yet, celebrating the Blitz’s 42-0 victory over East Kilbride. And while she’s excited to be out there lending her encouragement and support to the team, she’s not exactly a fan. “I don’t really know anything about American football,” she says, echoing a sentiment that most of the people in the park, the ones who just walked past the stadium and shook their heads, probably share. “It’s kind of hard to follow, and I wish the game wouldn’t last quite so long.”
But the Blitz players are celebrating, congratulating one another on a perfectly executed game plan, as they head off to the stadium’s locker room, while the Pirates skulk off the field, anticipating the long journey home. Today, at least, they don’t need the support of their country’s sports fans, or even the enthusiasm of their own cheerleaders, quixotic fellow-travelers in the world of American sports culture in the UK. Today they’re winners. Tomorrow, they’ll be back at work, unable to explain to their colleagues exactly what it is they won.
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Caroline24 reviewed Version 3 -
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“I don’t think…football” Drop the quotation marks. The brackets are enough and it’s unclear whose quote that is.
“Eighteen” and “18”. Keep numbers consistent.
“in the mid-sixties” could be misconstrued. “Mid-anything” is often used to denote age. I would change it to “put the number of spectators at 60 odd…” (or “something”) Again stay consistent with how you write numbers. The general rule of thumb is use numerical form is there are a lot, and there are a lot of numbers in your piece.
”...off of…” This is just my personal take. I don’t like this term. “Off the internet” is sufficient.
”...run out for passes.” Unclear. Preface it with “and” perhaps (?).
This whole sentence needs restructuring: “While everyone else sits quietly…”
Here’s what I suggest: “just as interested in…picnic…as kicking around…,...the boys chase the action…” Maybe I have the wrong meaning, but you see why?
“Asking Franklin…” sentence has a clause that needs commas: ”...football, even…piss out of him for it,...”
This is an incredibly comprehensive piece of writing. You have done a magnificent job. I am a British ex pat, living in Canada and I found it fascinating. It is very long, though. This may be daunting for some hardened sports fans. Perhaps break it up. There are a few smaller stories that could be extracted for sidebar additions. An organizational chart may be helpful, or a chronological history. I wanted to hear more on cheerleaders (I was one for my high school team). You could also include some financial stats on U.S. football, such as their funding sources (beer sponsors and ticket sales, etc.).
All in all, fantastic job. Best of luck.
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oknapp reviewed Version 3 -
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You are lucky i am a journalism minor.
“In America, the star quarterback is an archetype so thoroughly mined as to be a cliché – in a movie or a television program, if a lazy writer wants to use shorthand in portraying a male character as the consummate insider, popular and admired by his peers, the odds are he’ll be wearing a letterman’s jacket and carrying a football. Whether it’s Jason Street on Friday Night. I like this anology.
Football”just rugby with pads” A good description. IEven though i don’t know alot about football i find it interesting how other countries view it and how its compared to rugby and called soccer in Australia/I didn’t know that. Good quotes and interviews.
Hey i know nothing about sports even though i was a cheerleader and my son a football player. DON’T GET MAD .However, i do know about journalism and a good piece of work. I liked this very much. I liked the interviews and the description of the old feild where it was played, I know a little about Blitz i think it is a shorter form of football but nevertheless just as respectible. I do wish though that you would have ended back at the beginning when you were describing the old feild that used to be an anti aircraft. outside of that i give it a 10 Thanks Sandi
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