By @pvo78

As a 36-year-old (almost 37) guy who’s lived in the 716 my entire life, minus one year in the dorms at the University of Virginia, I don’t need to tell you how many disappointing sports moments I’ve seen. I know of no other fan base that has put up with as many gut-wrenching moments then we have. I’m not going to rehash them here. You’ve all heard about them or lived them, and the only thing relevant to my point is that I have, and always will continue to support the Bills and Sabres no matter what. As Red Redding said in The Shawshank Redemption, hope is a dangerous thing, but it is also a very beautiful thing to have.

Unfortunately, my “Buffaloness,” for lack of a better term, has carried over into my soccer fandom. I was introduced to the game at a young age, and became interested in the professional game when the USMNT finally qualified for the 1990 World Cup following a 40-year absence, and the subsequent 1994 World Cup held in the U.S. When satellite television and the Internet made it much easier to follow leagues overseas, I felt obligated to pick a team. English football was the optimal league for me, as I fell for the much-marketed “best league in the world” gimmick. I tried the EPL for a bit, but quickly lost interest when it became a race to sign the world’s best players for huge transfer fees. As a Buffalo fan, I couldn’t get behind that. I may be a Yankees fan, but I’ve also criticized them for overspending on free agents (i.e. Kevin Brown, Carlos Beltran, et al.).

Therefore, I tried my luck with the Championship, the second level of English football some time ago and loved it. Every team had more of a chance to win it, and the lack of huge transfer budgets made it a much more pure game to me. The next step was, of course, to pick a side. While reading up on the different teams, one immediately stuck out at me, Millwall. There were several reasons for this. First, Kasey Keller and Bruce Murray, two of my favorite USMNTers of all-time, played there in the 1990s. When I began to follow them closely, American John Berylson had already taken over as chairman, and fellow American Zak Whitbred was on the roster. Secondly, the fans of Millwall share many similarities with Buffalo’s, and I felt a kinship with them. As I’m sure you all know, we Buffalonians have an “us vs. them” attitude when it comes to sports. We may be uncouth, to say the least, at times, but no one can fault us for not being passionate. We care. A lot. It means the world to us. Just as we can be heard cheering on our boys at the Ralph or the FNC, Millwall fans can be heard singing “no one likes us, we don’t care” at The Den as well. It means the world to them too. We know they’re going to lose as much as they win, if not more so, but we can’t help ourselves. Those who have played for the Bills, Sabres, or Millwall, even if only for a short while, always rave about the passion and dedication of the fans. I can take solace in that. No one can call us fair-weather fans. And thus my journey as a Millwall fan began.

As I write these words, Millwall is, unfortunately, going in the seemingly opposite direction of the Bills and Sabres. While the Bills and Sabres have hopefully entered a new era under Terry Pegula with his passion and deep pockets, Millwall has just officially been relegated to League One, the third tier of English football. The seeds of this relegation were planted several years back. It was a slow, steady process, like watching a snake slowly devour a mouse right before your very eyes. Millwall used to be managed by a fine man named Kenny Jackett, appointed in 2007 after having seen nine men precede him during the two previous years. Millwall were in League One at the time of his appointment, but quickly turned it around under his leadership. In the 2008-2009 season, they finished fourth in League One, but suffered a heartbreaking loss in the playoff final to earn promotion to the Championship at the hands of Scunthorpe United. Lesser teams may have folded, but after missing out on automatic promotion by one point on the final day to Leeds United, Millwall won the playoffs via a 1-0 win over Swindon Town to earn promotion. Things were good then. Jackett had total control over the team and the roster, and did a phenomenal job. It was like June 30, 2007 in Buffalo Sabres history, and the fall was just as slow and gutting.

Millwall did finish ninth in the Championship table the next season, but slipped to just barely survive relegation in each of the next two seasons. An FA Cup semifinal appearance in 2013 was exciting, but also merely papered over the cracks temporarily. Jackett left after that season for greener pastures and disagreements with the board.

As fans, we knew hiring the likes of Sir Alex Ferguson or Jose Mourinho was out of the question, but we did want a manager with Championship experience. What did we get? Steve Lomas, former captain of Millwall’s greatest rival, West Ham United. For me, it was like hearing that Zdeno Chara was going to coach the Sabres, or Bryan Cox was going to coach the Bills. WTF?!?!? Needless to say, things didn’t go well, and Lomas was sacked after winning just 6 of 24 games. Eventually, Jackett recommended his good friend Ian Holloway to manage. Holloway did manage to narrowly escape relegation again last season, and had a hot start to this season. But the signs were there. The board had made the mistake of thinking both Lomas and Holloway were capable of running the squad from top to bottom, which they were not. So it’s now back to League One.

Though it’s certainly depressing, Millwall does have some bright spots to talk about. After a brutal stretch when the team lacked commitment as well as talent, Holloway was finally let go. Youth team manager and former player Neil Harris was given the interim job, and immediately put his stamp on the team. Players on loan were left out of the side, and several younger players were given a chance to play. As a former player, Harris knows what Millwall means to the fans, and instilled this attitude in the players. They were much better during the last spell of the season, but still lacked the talent to stay up following years of mismanagement and poor transfer decisions. While being relegated is never fun, I hope Harris is given the job full-time (and have no reason to believe he won’t at this point given the squad’s improvement). He has much talked about having a young side that is hungry to win next season and the seeds of that have already been seen at the end of this season. Also, the board appeared to have learned its lesson, and are now seeking to help Harris out by appointing a director of recruitment so he can just concentrate on managing as he’s still young and relatively inexperienced. So here we are. Like the Sabres, and Bills it’s a fresh start with new players and a new coach. I’m excited for the future despite Millwall’s relegation and the utter horror that was the last two seasons of Buffalo Sabres hockey.

You see, while hope can inevitably lead to disappointment, it can also lead to sheer euphoria when things go well. Having something to be proud of means more when you’ve witnessed the valleys that came before the peaks. I was tickled to death while listening to the Achtung Millwall! podcast the other day and hearing that fans “expect the worst and hope for the best.” That sums up being both a Millwall fan and Buffalo sports fans up perfectly for me. We brace ourselves for the inevitable disappointment, but are always there to support our team. No matter what happens next season for the Bills, Sabres, and Millwall, I’ll be there cheering every step of the way. And until next season, go Red Bulls!

Kicking off a second season of this soccer-themed podcast, after a baffling hiatus during a massive soccer tournament this summer, The Barrister is joined by The Defenseman to talk Liverpool, the Premier League, vicious dictators, the Bills (barely acceptable tangential takes), and exclusive information about Liverpool's recent signings. Little known fact: The Defenseman has an uncanny ability to research the back stories of European footballers. 

Musical fire courtesy of OK Go and RJD2. 

Download here or here, stream below, itunes link below, and RSS feed here. Respect. 

The Barrister


I have a lot of feelings after what went down these past couple weeks, and past couple years, and past couple decades. I am unabashedly and undeniably in fucking love with U.S. soccer. I cherish it.... the team and the players and the games and tournaments and fans. It all just does it for me. I love singing the songs and chanting the chants and gearing up for gameday. It's part of my identity and, with my miniscule contribution to it, I am a very small part of its. 

With no small amount of regret, I'm not in as deep as many others are. I haven't traveled to see the team, though I should. I didn't go to the World Cup, though I might have under a different set of financial and familial circumstances. I'm not a sterling example of the ideal U.S. soccer fan, but just a guy who played some as a kid, got into the game progressively through the 90s, latched onto an English club team in 2002 and has progressively grown into a massive fondness for the sport and for the men and women who play the sport wearing the Stars and Stripes. I screamed and cheered in '99 when Chastain won it in PKs. I laughed with uncontrollable emotion in 2002 when McBride put the US up 3-0 to Portugal.  I wept with joy when Liverpool's mighty Reds shook their fists at fate and won the Champions League in 2005. I sat, stunned and sullen, on the floor of Nag's Head in Hoboken last Sunday when Christiano ruined our night, only to smile as he repaid the debt days later when with his winner against Ghana. 

Sports. They are individual, yet communal. They happen to us and with us and with those we are lucky (or unlucky) enough to be surrounded by as we watch.  

With predictable regularity, the World Cup cycle gives me immense joy and excitement, coupled with the equally regular insistence of various onlookers that soccer, and particularly soccer for Americans, is something to be defined in certain, concrete terms. Is it arriving? Has it arrived already? Are the fans getting better or worse or are they destined to be a group subject to hearty and deserved derision? 

So we get, even from people who feign "not to care," various bullet-pointed lists of the things that make the sport wrong for America, only to be countered by lists proclaiming the various reasons that it is superior to every other option available on the country's sports landscape.  We get anger and defensiveness and writers scrambling for page views (not unlike myself, perhaps) and fans of all sports standing up to tell each other why their chosen sports pastime sucks and, while they're at it, to clarify to those other fans that it's entirely possible they suck.

It's a bigger conversation this year because so many people have chosen to care about the sport in America - not just fans but, perhaps even more so, detractors.  Lost in the conversation, however, is an appropriate recognition that, despite the varied attempts to define the sport and its fans in America, what we've seen over the past weeks and years and decades is overwhelmingly un-definable.  The AO movement has started something great, one could say, but that "something" wasn't created out of nothing; it existed before anyone was an Outlaw. Sure, America is experiencing a rising tide of new fans, but not all are new fans of the sport, and not all will continue. Some have been watching games for years and find themselves more able and more eager to let the excitement wash over them because, well, we have a critical mass.  Some have finally been convinced of the sport's beauty and likability, and some just like to yell USA!

Some fans are dicks to new fans and some of those dicks might only be dicks on the days that they happen to be in a sour mood or didn't eat lunch or whatever and now whoever is sitting next to them at the bar thinks all soccer fans are the pits. Some fans are entirely lovely and sometimes that's because they hate the idea of soccer hipsters and want to counter it, and sometimes it's because they're just fucking great people.  

Some fans grew into their love of the American national team through their love of the more-developed game in Europe, such that their idea of being a fan is that of being a supporter and wearing scarves and using the same terms that they hear announcers use when calling a Tottenham game. 

Maybe it's easy to forget that sports culture is far from homogeneous since America's professional sports and the way in which most people digest those sports has become so packaged.  After all, it's way easier to have an accessible product for consumption when that product is predictable and easily defined and consumer friendly. So, when Keith Olbermann and others state that they want soccer to be more American, they fail to realize that there's no such thing. Football isn't American because it has any intrinsic quality that makes it so; football is American because it's been around long enough and been popular enough that the idea of "American" has grown to include football as its own.  Football and baseball and basketball and hockey are American because they've all been on American TV every week, sometimes every night, with such regularity that to call them un-American is altogether foolish.  Our culture has expanded to accept the sports beloved of our people, as it should, but the idea of making soccer a quintessentially American sport is far too vague a concept to be a guidepost.

People are coming to soccer and to their support of the U.S. national teams in very different ways, with a variety of different perspectives on the sport and what it means to be a fan, such that it surely seems to many to be an altogether foreign enterprise.  Supporters of soccer in America and of the national teams bring their cultural baggage and assets and songs and passions, and their different ideas on what the sport should be in this country.  We didn't invent the sport and we surely didn't get in on the ground floor, so we're putting the product and our experience together with the pieces of soccer culture that we have available and that we enjoy.  And onlookers are left trying to make sense of what soccer will be for sports fans in this country. Is this genuine? Or are we all just trying to latch onto other countries' sporting exports? 

How about we, maybe, don't try to define this, though? How about we enjoy the fact that the sport and its American cultural niche are hard to pin down in any way other than by simply stating that it's all tremendous fun? 

We've got plenty to be proud of without having to worry about whether this sport, this passion of ours, will succeed in our country; whether it will ever be accepted as an unquestioned part of national life without a thousand writers and hacks telling us why it - and by extension, we - are incompatible with the pre-existing sporting cultural identity of the Unites States. We don't need to worry about finding a discernible American identity for our national team and its supporters. In fact, with the cacophony of cultural influences on our sport and our support, it all may just be American enough.

Barrister and Phil (@Mechaphil) talk Premier League and Liverpool and laugh about Vincent Tan and make jokes and then everything gets fucked with technology so our Manchester City-supporting special guest has to wait until next week. 

It's all a little bit of a mess, but that's typical at this point. 

Music courtesy of Matt and Kim, DJ Format, Audiomachine and Lauryn Hill. 


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As always, all of the DGWU Sports podcasts are available via the tab on the top of our site and also our host site, http://deargodwhyussports.libsyn.com/.

Obviously this monstrosity - and I mean that in a good way, I promise, this is great! - couldn't get edited and uploaded in time, so obviously that meant it going live after the match yesterday, but them's are the breaks with amateur, poorly crafted, digitally recorded, oral sports takes.

Barrister and Phil (@Mechaphil) linked up again to re-hash the joy of winning at Old Trafford and look forward to Liverpool's trip to Cardiff. In the middle of it, we talk about Julian Green committing to the U.S. Men's National Team, FIFA corruption, and the glory of American deliberate indifference. 

Bonus clip at the end of this massively long episode as we welcome the hottest of takes from Rochester's biggest (only?) Cardiff City supporter, recorded before the game, at halftime, and immediately after Cardiff's 6-3 loss to the Mighty Redmen. /farts

Download here or here. Stream below. Subscribe via the RSS feed here, or iTunes button embedded below. You want options? There are your fucking options.

As always, all of the DGWU podcasts are available at deargodwhyussports.libsyn.com.  Cheers.

The Barrister here.  My boy Phil, a dear friend of the Deeg, and I talk Liverpool. You may remember Liverpool from such films as "Smoking Everton Off The Pitch" and "Ruining Arsenal's Universe."

A fun one. Music by way of Two Door Cinema Club, The Chemical Brothers and Black Tide. Breathe it all in.

Red or Dead.

Stream below. Download here or here. RSS feed here. iTunes button below. OPTIONS

The Barrister


What the fuck ever, it's been a while, but it's the off-season for the only Buffalo sport to hold any interest this year, the Sabres are a tire fire for whom only merit my mention with remarks such as "Oh God thanks to Jesus they're terrible please draft well and fuck off until then," and I've been reluctant to talk about soccer since it is a bore for the #BillsMafia readers who have inexplicably wandered here in search of Buffalove or some such vague feeling of positivity. Not today. Buffalo is rad as hell, but the only local sport of current interest to an expat living in the Garden State is probably Syracuse Men's Basketball but, seriously fuck that and Go Duke. /ducks

Soccer it is, I suppose. 

August to May is the time for English soccer, an unappreciated gem in the US, giving Americans sports at dawn to enjoy over coffee and pancakes and whiskey. The sport that gives you a reason to jump start the weekend with consciousness and, if you invest yourself enough in it, an excuse to avoid the inevitable list of chores your sports-agnostic spouse has prepared while somehow simultaneously feeding your baby, calling a plumber, redecorating your living room with inspiration from a few hundred photos she saw on Pinterest before the baby even woke up, and making a second list of all the ways you've failed and continue to fail her, not the least of which is oversharing relatively intimate domestic details on the internet.

Like I always say, soccer is fun!.

So if you haven't, to reiterate the urging of many posts you might see before the start of each EPL season: try it out, find a side that makes watching the sport fun, and make sure it's not Manchester fucking United. 

It was a fun weekend (for some) of EPL action this past weekend, and since the Bills are in the hunt for draft position despite their stupid ability to win down in the Panhandle, and since the Sabres are just terribly, terribly shitty and should all die in a fire, I'll be shifting gears to soccer, my love of the EPL and, in particular, the Liverpool Football Club. If you don't like soccer, I get it, but this season is bonkers so it's a good time to try to jump in.

Consistent with my tunnel vision for foot, I digitally gathered together some producers of hot fire takes to talk about the EPL. Since we all ramble, and since there was a lot to get through, it's a two part episode this week. This all was an enormous amount of fun. I did barely any editing, so apologies in advance for rambling, WNY/Roch-style pregnant pauses, random static, and foul language.*

As with all of our podcasts, you can subscribe via iTunes (handy button below), or via the RSS link here. 

In Part 1, my good buddy Phil and I talk almost exclusively Liverpool. We're both Reds supporters and after Sunday's 5-0 win at White Hart Lane, there was a lot to enjoy.  Part 1 includes music from Chiddy Bang, Queens of the Stone Age, and Calvin Harris. Yes, that Calvin Harris, lay off. You can download here or here, or stream below. 

In Part 2, Phil is back again and we're joined by The Outlander, the Deeg's resident Citizen, and Peter Berkes, who supports Tottenham and couldn't bring himself to watch the entire game on Sunday.  We talk more generally about the EPL, listen to Peter as he bemoans his squad and Outlander as he predicts an away victory for Manchester City, and Phil and I continue to dry hump LFC.  Part 2 includes music by A Tribe Called Quest, Pusha T, and Frightened Rabbit.  You can download here or here, or stream below.

*Apology revoked for foul language

Barrister running solo this week but gets a special guest for the second segment mostly because he hates the sound of his own voice.

Liverpool's win over Manchester United is the topic of the day. A boy named Phil gets Barrister all excited, as if he needed any motivation.

Music from The Beastie Boys, Daft Punk and Kanye. 

Download here or here. Stream below or subscribe via iTunes below or the handy dandy RSS feed here.

Be honest, none of you expected us to actually have a second episode of this now incredibly-famous-in-a-very-infintesimally-small-niche-market podcast ever, much less the very next week. If only to prove you wrong, or to allow Barrister one small moment of joy before moving to the suburbs, here is Episode 2. We are, from time to time, and at some times more than others, going to have a party. There will be cake.

This week was Liverpool winning 1-0 away at Villa Park. It was good fun. We drank. We revelled. We opined orally.

Download here or here, stream below, subscribe via our RSS feed here, or through iTunes below and/or at the top right of our site. Options, motherfuckers. We bring you options.

YNWA. JFT96.

Cheers.