Name:
Location: Seattle, Washington, United States

What you have here is an old guy. In education for 30 years, started teaching elementary, ended as library and media director of community college. I've enjoyed mountain climbing, sports car rallying, was pipe major of a bagpipe band, played guitar and sang during the folk revival, walking and hiking later in life. Now fairly sedentary. Enjoy reading, esp. mysteries and fantasy, but my reading is pretty eclectic. Enjoy movies, giving Netflix a workout.

Wednesday, April 13, 2005

A Soccer Story

Thank you, ESPN2, for giving us a soccer game once a week. These games are chosen from the Premier League in England with such sterling teams as Chelsea, Arsenal, and Manchester United. I happen to like soccer and I like Manchester United, primarily because I saw a game they played in Seattle a couple of summers ago. This week the game was Manchester United vs. Norwich City. Norwich City is a town in the Norfolk Broads in the eastern part of England. And of course Manchester is a large city in the industrial north of England.

British soccer leagues, and there are many, have a system of promotion and relegation. The bottom two or three teams at season’s end are sent down to the next lower league the following year; they are relegated. At the same time the top two or three teams from the lower league are promoted. Quite often this works out that they only stay for one year and are relegated back down at season’s end.

I watched Norwich City claw their way to the top of theChampionship League last year and they were promoted to the Premier League. They are currently standing in last place in the Premier League, the 20th position. Manchester United is in 3rd place. This was a game of David vs. Goliath. The Canaries, that’s Norwich City, won the match 2-0. The last 20 minutes of the match were marvelous, with Manchester throwing everything they had at Norwich and the Canaries defending furiously. In spite of my liking Manchester United I couldn’t help but cheer for Norwich. The city is a lot smaller than Manchester. They don’t have nearly as much money to spend on players. They probably still won’t stay at the Premier level, but for one glorious afternoon, in front of a hometown crowd that was delirious with the win, they challenged the big boys and came away winners. Way to go, Canaries.

1 Comments:

Blogger adamosf said...

I always thought that American sports should use that same tiered system where, for example, one conference could be "elite" while the other was "premier" and the borderline teams switched conference every year. That way the small-market teams which are at a great disadvantage could at least have a chance of winning their own league every year.

1:24 PM  

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