theparkerfamily.org

Tag: Sports | Tottenham Hotspur

  • preview: tottenham hotspur @ white hart lane

    white_hart_laneit’s hard to explain what it means to follow Tottenham Hotspur Football Club … but i should start at the beginning.

    before 2005, it doesn’t matter how much of a soccer fan you were, because it was pretty hard to follow the English Premier League from the States. media coverage was absolutely non-existent, and the matches themselves relegated to premium channel (Fox Sports World) that practically zero cable systems carried.

    but by 2005, i had moved to a more benevolent cable monopoly, was able to start following the Premier League, and set about finding a team to follow.

    there were ground-rules in my search:

    • character — good team, but not too good. great players. storied history. good stadium. great fans. (a low bar, i know.)
    • no “big” teams — the are four teams in the league that even the uninitiated have heard of (manchester united, arsenal, chelsea, liverpool) because they win everything that isn’t strapped down. you can’t pick one of them, because everybody hates someone who jumps on to a winner.
    • team that you can watch — following a team means being able to see them, both this season and those to come. if the team is too crappy, they won’t make it onto the telly. Worse yet, each year the bottom three teams get kicked out of the league … so a really crappy team won’t even be around to be followed.

    … and said ground-rules led to Tottenham.

    at the time, they were good (finish in the top 10 more often than not), but not too good (no major championships since 1991). they have great players (at the time, more members of the England national squad than any other), a storied history (first team to win two championships in one year, and first Brit team to win Europe), great fans (loyal through decades of mediocrity), etc.

    fortunately they are still good (won a league championship in 2008 while we were in Australia) but not too good (were in deep, deep danger of relegation as late as February this year) and my healthy interest in Spurs has grown into an obsession.

    and, of course, at the center of this obsession is Tottenham Hotspur’s 109 year-old stadium: White Hart Lane.

    … and we got tickets.

    ever since we found out we were going to Scotland (or more importantly, London) the one place at the top of my list has been White Hart Lane. unfortunately, it’s a bit out of the way … and seats a ridiculously small 36,000 fans each match day.

    the weekend we are in London (may 2nd) there is a home match against West Bromich Albion, but it sold out even before tickets made it to general sale. turns out West Brom sucks, and everybody wants to see Tottenham beat up on the sucky team.

    as for me, i’d love to see them play a sucky team, but i really needed to see them play in the next year, because they are getting ready to rip beautiful, historic white hart lane and replace it with a new, oval monstrosity that we can only hope will have more character than Fed Ex Field.

    so, it took about two weeks and more than a dozen visits to Spurs ticket site, but a couple seats finally came open on their ticket exchange (from people selling tickets they bought but can’t use).

    of course, the two seat aren’t together, so i gave the lady sparkler the option to drop out — and spend the day at the spa — but she’s become sufficiently fascinated by Spurs (including steamy Robbie Keane and young/virile Gareth Bale) that she wanted to see what all the fuss was about in person.

    such a good wife.

    she did mention that she didn’t want to be seated with a bunch of drunk hooligan Brits, so I am giving her the fancy pants ticket, in the new (west) stand with completely unobstructed views, and its cucumber sandwich crowd.

    i, however, will be in the east stand … with it’s obstructed views (two large posts hold up the roof over the stand) and it’s (hopefully) drunk, merry and singing Tottenham fans. apparently, it’s the east and south stands that have all the “character” and my wife is married to enough of a character to not seek out more in the English capital.

    so, if you happen to subscribe to a channel that carries it, look for us. we will be in section 30, row 1, seat 189 and section 10, row 9, seat 37. i have no idea where they are, but sure am (incredibly) excited to be there.

    UPDATE: and here’s what happened.

  • preview: scotland

    trip
    i don’t even know where to begin …

    ever since we got back from our honeymoon, the lady sparkler has been planning her next trip. then australia fell into our laps, and (once she got back) she began planning her next trip.

    to be fair, she was actually more monitoring the currency markets than planning, per say. screw civil liberties, what really got my beloved’s blood boiling was when bush pushed the dollar sink into the commode.

    so, when the bottom fell out of the european currencies last summer, the joy on her face was palpable. london. paris. wherever.

    now, conveniently, my parents have always wanted to go to scotland (my grandmother was a clan donald lass) and with their 45th anniversary coming up this year and the exchange rate going our way for once, it’s was looking like this could be the year.

    never one to pass up a chance to leverage synergies, the lady sparkler suggested that the two should become one. (never argue with a wife who *wants* to travel with her in-laws…)

    and so it will be, the last week of this coming April.

    we’ll start out with a couple days in Edinburgh (The Castle, Holyrood Park) before renting a car — more wrong side of the road driving! — and heading into the hills. we’ll do a driving tour of Glen Coe (where the noble Donalds were massacred by the dastardly Campbells while they slept).

    we’ll take a drive west passing by Loch Ness (Expedition Center, Urquhart Castle) which has fascinated my father and I ever since our first trip to Busch Gardens Europe. finally, we’ll swing through the Isle of Sky — including Armadale Castle, the ancestral home of Clan Donald — before heading back in London for the trip home.

    now, London is where things get interesting. we have just about 48 hours to do the whole city, including St Paul’s Cathedral, Tower of London, London Bridge, Kensington Palace, Hyde Park, Buckingham Gates, the Sherlock Holmes Museum and Parliment. and a partridge in a Pear tree.

    oh, and I want to see White Hart Lane (home of Tottenham Hotspur) before the 100+ year old stadium gets torn down next year, and replaced by a 60,000-seat monstrosity.

    so, my mother gets the isle of sky, my father gets loch ness, i get london, and my beloved gets … Paris?

    as if the british isles weren’t enough, my beloved and I “gave each other” two days in Paris for Christmas this past year (and then gave it to ourselves again for Valentine’s Day once we realized how much it cost).

    so, besides the *VERY* palpable guilt of traveling in such horrid economic climates, life is feeling pretty good.

  • i love hope solo, and harry redknapp, and not necessarily in that order…

    after a lovely Saturday of belated anniversary present shopping (we settled on a one-third off console table from pottery barn) the lady sparkler and I settled in for a long evening at home … watching two-month stale coverage of the Beijing Summer Olympics.

    a couple things, looking back two months:

    • it’s been at least a week since I had heard any one say “michael phelps,” which made me wonder if he had fired his agent considering his best post-Olympic gig has been for Rosetta Stone.
    • It seems like (back then) John McCain actually ran ads that weren’t entirely focused on trashing Barack Obama. heck, August was so long ago that I didn’t even know that MILF had a political context.
    • I once again contemplated changing my celebrity exception clause to be U.S. Olympic indoor volleyball team silver medalist Logan Tom, but quickly realized I am already married to some one who can kick my @$& so what would the point be?
    • Whichever Olympic scheduler put synchronized swimming, canoeing, water polo, and rhythmic gymnastics in the same four hour block should be fired … or shot.

    • I got to thinking about politics, the economy and my 401k, and actually got nostalgic for a minute, thinking “wow. that was a simpler time, wasn’t it?!?”. yeah, way back in august.

    so, back to the present. much of our weekend was spent on the couch watching soccer.

    the taped USA vs. Brazil woman’s gold medal match was one of the best this year. goalie hope solo (I heard she is Han Solo’s niece) pitched a shut out over 120 minutes, making her world cup benching last year — and USA’s subsequent 4-0 drubbing at the hands of Brazil — that much more inexplicable.

    but perhaps the best news of the weekend came from the English premier league, where my team (Tottenham Hotspur) finally won their first game after nine attempts (that, and the midnight firing of the entire management structure.) while the win wasn’t enough to get them out of last place, they are now just one win away from a once unthinkably-good 15th place. (weeee!)

    to be fair, Tottenham could have actually been the second best news of the weekend … the best may have been the news that the Anchorage Daily News endorsed *Obama,* saying something about “putting her one … heartbeat from the leadership of the free world is just too risky at this time.”

    in the words of conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan, the Anchorage Daily News editorial board is obviously filled with “goddamn East Coast elitist hippies.”

  • the “silly” season

    so, i don’t know about your team, but mine spent $121 million this offseason to grab nine players off the open market.

    sound too “spendy” to be true? not in brave new world that is the english premier league.

    as a long time footy player (mostly in goal) and footy fan (college, national teams, d.c. united), i always wanted to follow the epl … but it wasn’t until recently that state-siders had the means (via two dedicated cable channels and al gore’s birth of the interweb) to actually follow an english club.

    so, for the last three seasons, i’ve been following Tottenham Hotspur, a side from North London that is probably best compared to the pre-2004 Boston Red Sox … a storied club, with a good bit of success early in their history, but lately there’s been a lot of, um, “potential.”

    quick detour …

    so why pick the Spurs, as oppose to one of the more successful english clubs?

    well, there’s manchester united … who are the new york yankees of the league and they annoyingly win pretty much everything (well, “the yankees” back when they actually won things). there *is* a good club in liverpool, but they are, well, in liverpool.

    there’s chelsea, which is funded by a vaguely scary russian oligarch who spends money as if his team were the yankees (but they aren’t, which makes the spending that much more offensive). then there is arsenal, a team staffed almost entirely by the french.

    as you can see, the decision wasn’t terribly hard at all.

    back to the $121 million …

    as you might guess there isn’t a salary cap in the epl, but that’s okay because the money we are talking about isn’t actually the player’s salary — it’s the money that the team spends to get permission to sign another team’s player. (yes, you read that right.)

    for example: some bureaucrat at Tottenham watched the European footy championships this summer, and noticed that one of the Russian players (Roman Pavlyuchenko) scored a lot of goals. well, “we like scoring goals,” mr. bureaucrat thought, so he rang up Pavlyuchenko’s team (Spartak Moscow) in Russia and gave them a lot of money ($25 million) for the right to sign Roman to a contract worth even more money (5 years, at $100,000+ a week).

    now, if you made it past the made it past the “veritable orgy of money” part and noticed that we had to bring in *nine* players this off season … you may have thought that so much turnover could be good (boston celtics!) but probably isn’t (florida marlins).

    right now, only eight Spurs (out of 40+ on the expanded roster) have been on the team for longer than two years. and, (oh, by the way) we are on our 6th manager in ten years.

    fortunately for spurs-fans’ sanity, there are only four months out of the year when players are allowed to transfer between teams (three in the summer, one in January). the summer transfer window just closed, which should bring much needed (if temporary and obligatory) stability to the team. so, for now, no more “silly season” and we’ll have to shut up an play, for better or worse.

    while we gained a bunch of good players during this window (a keeper from Brazil, midfielders from Croatia, Mexico and England, that Russian striker I mentioned) we lost two players who scored more than half of our goals last season. (ouch.)

    if i was a cubs fan, i’d say “well, there’s always next year” …

    … except that’s actually not always the case in the epl. as a special brand of torture for english footy fans, if your team finishes as one of the three worst teams in the league, you are “relegated” down to a lower league and have to win your way back up some later season.

    imagine the washington nationals getting booted to the minor leagues, the memphis grizzlies getting demoted to the nba’s “developmental” league, or the miami dolphins playing a year of college ball next season (… yes, they’d all still lose).

    so, *hopefully* there’s always next year …

    (oy, vey.)

  • Travel: It’s a mad, mad, mad world …

    [Photo]
    IMG_7976, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    AUSTRALIA (DAY TWO) — I woke up this morning, and the world was on its head. I’m 12,000 miles from home. People drive on the wrong side of the road. The land is impossibly beautiful. People are nice. Water flows around the drain the other way. Internet access costs $26 for 2 hours. Tottenham Hotspur actually won something. The sky is down, and the ground is up. the lady sparkler doesn’t mind if I wear the same clothes day after day. 

    About that: I should have mentioned that while we made landfall yesterday, our luggage didn’t. the lady sparkler being a smart girl has two changes of clothes and four pair of underwear in her carry-on. I have 10 pounds of camera equipment. The most beguiling thing about this parallel universe we find ourselves in is that neither of us seem to care about the state of our baggage.

     

    About that: Tasmania is just devastatingly beautiful. Since Australia is the original continent — and there hasn’t been much in the way of earthquakes, volcanoes or glaciers to stir up the ground — much of what you see has been that way for the last billion or so years (give or take).

     

    The place we stayed last night was at the entrance to Cradle Mountain National Park, and so we began the morning hiking through the temperate rainforest at the mountain’s base. The youngest trees looked 500-years old, and there was a *thick* carpet of moss on anything that wasn’t moving.

     

    After our morning in Eden, we bustled ourselves off to Strahan (the ‘ha’ is silent) on the western coast of Tasmania. The last quarter of the pictures are from the city’s “park,” which seems a mild understatement as it is big enough to house a 40-minute walk through rainforest to a trio of stunning waterfalls.

     

    It’s a mad, mad world.

    Explore the Photo Set:
    Travel: Cradle Mountain National Park, Tasmania