King Athelstan

Hey all two of you potential readers, how're you doing? I'm a fan of football (or soccer as you Americans put it), and while over the years my active interest has gone up and down, it's on an upward trend for the past year or so. The club dearest to my heart is West Ham united, and I'll start this blog series with a bit of background, and why I'm into the club.


Now, there's many a club around and there's a lot of reasons one might end up supporting a certain club. It could be friends liking it, you liking a player for a club, a club winning that you end up watching (plastics). Or in my case, it could be in the blood. While I'm a Norwegian bloke who've lived in Norway all my life, I'm also English. My dad was from east London, and West Ham was his local club. Thus, I went to my first game as a wee lad back in 2008, and I still have fond memories of the game. It was a friendly in the Bobby Moore cup, honouring the West Ham and England legend who held the World Cup trophy high back in '66. I remember being there with my late grandfather and late father, and seeing that there weren't any giant screens up to watch if you sat at an akward angle from where the ball was on the pitch, like they had at my local club back home, which I'm also fond of though I shan't go into depth on it here. Maybe later, who knows. Anyways, the game ended in a draw after a disallowed goal that shouldn't have been, unfortunately, bouncing at the crossbar and over the line before going out, bit like that one England v Germany 2014 world cup one. Oh well, I still remember the game fondly and the match program proudly sits somewhere in my bookshelf.

As some of you may know if you've frequented certain threads of the PH&A forum you might my father passed nigh before my tenth birthday. He left me with a lot, and a fondness for the club being one of them. For me, watching West Ham play, whether they win or lose (usually the latter) it's like part of him lives on, I'm continuing his legacy. Quite frankly, it's just a small thing, but it helps with a loss that'll never fully heal.

I don't have much time at the moment so this won't be the longest of blog posts, but it's a beginning. In the next ones I'm planning on filling in on the squad, the team, the pitch, everything wrong with the club, how to fix it and how the weekly matches go, and what they mean, and how it affects me, if at all. Football is a symbolism for life really. This weekend has been brilliant for me, and coincidentally West Ham won a game, for the first time in 7. Probably unrelated, but when you invest a lot of time into something, even if it's just watching the game, or looking at tweets, makes you care

And a bit of passion goes a long way for a great many things.