When fandom feels right

By Emerald Gao
Written on January 20, 2007

For the past X years, I've had to content myself with being a cross-Atlantic fan, that girl who is crazy enough to wake up at absurd hours on weekend mornings to huddle over a live score updater on the computer. I got so sick of the distance, the isolation that I even gave the sport up for a year, partly to see if I could, partly out of despair. Then Istanbul happened, and on that day the pride and the passion of the game gave my willpower a spanking, and I felt reborn. Only in the past year and a half have I figured out how to actually watch games, and even then it's a frustrating mixture of solitary rapture and time-lapsed absurdity. I realize now that my penchant for writing long, rambling match reports with hardly an audience to speak of was my way of coping with the lack of immediacy. Using words and pictures, I tried to vault myself through space and time, to relive the games over and over. The end result was academically satisfying, and yet, there was something terribly missing.

Now I am in Barcelona, in the right time zone, and I can wake up at normal hours, or go see a game live if I wanted to. I've been going to a bar called the Shamrock twice a week, and the employees know me, they know my love for Cornish pasties and pints of Murphy's and that I have an unhealthy devotion to more teams than necessary. I've met a handful of Scousers already, including a man who has held season tickets at Anfield for thirty-three years (his two sons are split red and blue, which I found endearing and real). He and his wife were celebrating their shared birthday, and I had a brilliant time explaining the rules of American football and defending our nation's unshakeable dependency on statistics.

This anecdote only goes to illustrate how much I'm loving the experience. I haven't written a single thing since getting here, or at least nothing focused or in-depth, but I'm happy. I drag my classmates to the bar, happily rattle off football trivia, and analyze the game afterward with anyone who will listen. Not that different from my previous routine, but now it results in a palpable sort of devotion, the kind that the Scouser must feel every weekend when he sits down in his Anfield seat that he can call his very own. I'm not quite there yet, but these past two weeks of being here, of being able to have a routine that doesn't involve sleep deprivation or the loneliness of being an outsider, has made me want it even more: Everybody loves football here; it feels like home, and I feel like a fan instead of the fanatic.

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