My First Blog

November 2017

First, a little about me. I’m a soccer fan. More specifically, I’m a Seattle Sounders FC soccer fan but I also like following the English Premier League, USL and even indoor soccer. We call “football,” the sport played with your feet, “soccer” in the USA. Here, the NFL is generally referred to as football so I’ll stick with calling the sport I love, “soccer.”
My wife and I went to our first Sounders’ match back in 2012. We heard about how Drew Cary, best known from Whose Line Is It Anyway, was a co-owner of the Sounders and we had also heard about this thing called “The March to the Match” which sounded kind of fun. We went to one game and were immediately hooked. The March to the Match was sensational and the match was mind-blowing. The level of crowd involvement was incredible, and not just yelling and screaming but coordinated communal chants and cheers. These people were crazy and I wanted to be one of them. Weird.
I played soccer when I was in school and for a season in a recreational league in the Navy, but I have to admit that soccer was a bit hard to “get” at first. The offside penalty too me about 6 months to learn again. And to this day, I still don’t understand how some things can be a foul and others not. Even with the new video assisted referee (VAR), whether or not something is a foul has not become any clearer to me which is also weird.
I am lucky to be a Sounders fan. They’re a good team, maybe even a great one. The Sounders entered MLS in 2009 and have been in the playoffs every year since, winning the MLS Cup last year. They’ve also won the Lamar Hunt U.S. Open Cup four times and the Supporter’s Shield one (2014). The Supporter’s Shield is given to the team that finishes with the most points at the end of the regular season. Only the LA Galaxy has won the Shield and the Cup in one year (2011). Toronto FC has won the Shield for 2017 and it looks like they may also be on their way to the Cup, unless the Columbus Crew stop them, or whoever wins the Western Conference Seattle/Houston match up.
A lot of people want to see a rematch of last year’s MLS Cup, Toronto vs. Seattle because of how Seattle won the Cup with ZERO shots on goal. Of course, there are many that feel the Sounders should not have won with zero shots on goal but they did, after overtime and finally in penalty shots, and that’s how that works. You get the ball in the net and it counts. If you don’t then it doesn’t. They say “defense wins championships.” I don’t mean to gloat. TFC had a great team and do again this year. Last year, Seattle came from the bottom and surged at just the right time. Honestly, TFC should have won but they didn’t, and that, my friends, is sports.
Then there’s the US Men’s National Team…not going to the 2018 World Cup. How did this even happen? I don’t know but you may want to ask Italy, Chile, Canada, Ghana, Greece, Holland, Honduras, Hungary, or New Zealand, to name a few. They aren’t going either. ☹ But that’s sports.
More to come…

Dennis