Football is America’s fall sport played on the college gridiron and is reinforced by NFL games on TV, where hardened professionals clash, egged on by the partisan hordes in the arena, in a bloodlust not unlike the mayhem witnessed in the ancient Roman Coliseum.
When I think of football, my mind wanders back to the days of my youth when we played with a round ball on the streets, in the alleyways and parks of my hometown, in Dublin, Ireland. By definition the football is kicked and is also directed with the head to shoot, pass to a teammate or cleared from the danger areas in front of goal.
I couldn’t believe my good fortune when the NBC Sports Network (NBC/SN) began televising Barclays Premiership League (BPL) football from Britain three years ago. I spent five very happy years as a student in London, standing on the concrete terraces, watching BPL teams, such as Arsenal, Chelsea, Tottenham Hotspur, Fulham and West Ham United.
I lived near East London at the time and watched the Hammers on Saturdays playing at the Boleyn ground. The ground got its name from Anne Boleyn, who allegedly lived in a castle near where the stadium stands today, before her unhappy relationship with King Henry VIII ended badly on May 19, 1536.
Not everyone gets a second chance in life to vicariously revisit one’s misspent youth, but with the click of the TV remote, I can watch up to six BPL games over a weekend. It’s an embarrassment of riches, and I have to get up early for the privilege, but the experience brings back fond memories.
While America’s game is immensely popular here at home, the BPL has worldwide appeal. Soccer is played on almost every continent, which probably explains why NBC has invested so much in its future. All one needs is a handful of players and a reasonably flat surface to get the ball rolling. When we played, a garage door often acted as a goal. Makeup teams took turns playing defense and attack. That’s how many of today’s stars learned the tricks of the trade.
In my mind, there is nothing more exciting in all of sports than watching a great shot from the edge of the penalty area, curling toward the top left-hand corner of the goal and the goalkeeper at full stretch, flying horizontally almost four feet off the ground, barely tipping the ball around the upright to safety.
Rebecca Lowe, sports anchor at NBC/SN, said that the average number of viewers who watched the Chelsea-Manchester City game on Super Bowl weekend this year went from 340 thousand five years ago to 1.35 million today, a 316 percent increase in the number of people who watched the same two teams play in 2010. By any measure, the increase in audience size for that one game on US television is staggering. NFL Commissioner, Roger Goodell, can only dream about and envy such numbers.
With the end of the season now in sight, Chelsea has already won the 2015 BPL Football Championship. The four top finishers out of 20 teams in the league, Chelsea, Arsenal, Manchester City and Manchester United, are also eligible for the lucrative European Championship competition next season.
With the roar of the partisan crowd, the communal singing and taunting by the fans slowly fading away as summer approaches, I eagerly look forward to the annual return of ‘the beautiful game’ very early on that Saturday morning in mid-August, when the new BPL season begins.
