Oh To Be In England...

...now that football season's here.

Yes, it's been a seemingly interminable - what, almost three months? - wait since the curtain came down on the last Premiership season, and here we go again: just when I was beginning to get used to having my Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays free, the marathon begins again. And now that I'm watching my matches on television rather than in person, there's actually a lot more of them. Especially since I'm considering getting Setanta in addition to the Fox Soccer Channel: it could mean that I'm barely able to leave the house until the FA Cup comes around again next May.

Not that I've been completely starved of football these past few months; there's always something, if not on FSC, then on one of the Mexican channels. Which reminds me of something that came as a revelation to me the other night while I was watching some lower division clash from the ass end of Southern Mexico: every time there was a lull in the action, a band would strike up a few bars of the Mexican Hat Dance.

What's remarkable about that? Well, I guess I'd just assumed that the Mexican Hat Dance, like California burritos, was essentially a gringo takeoff on Mexican culture, and that real Mexicans would never dream of having anything to do with it. Guess I was wrong; either that, or some American TV producer had got in on the act and convinced someone to play the MHD as a way of adding an air of verisimilitude for the Norteamericano audience.

Anyway, this morning I watched Man City systematically take West Ham apart, and while in an ideal world I would have liked to have seen both teams loses, West Ham for their dodgy dealings in the transfer market last year and Man City because they're now coached by Sven Boring Eriksson, the inflicter of untold misery on English football fans and ruination of two World Cups and a European championship.

Unfortunately, Sven's team done good today, and thoroughly deserved their win. Liverpool, who squeaked past the perennially tedious Aston Villa thanks to an own goal, not so much. In fact today's second match was totally forgettable affair, but that was all right, as the plumbers were busily making a racket in my apartment trying to fix the pumps so there won't be any more floods.

But tomorrow - in a mere 6 1/2 hours, actually - I've got to be up for the real start of the 2007-08 season, as my beloved Fulham go charging (or more likely skulking) into the macerating maw of Arsenal's Emirates Stadium. Fulham have never won at Arsenal, never once in their entire history, and I'm not counting on much different a result this morning. In fact, there's every likelihood that this could be a bleak and truly dismal affair, and that crawling out of bed to watch it will be the equivalent of witnessing a 90-minute train wreck that I just can't turn my eyes away from.

Ah well, hope springs eternal in the youthful heart, they say. Or was that the foolish heart? At my age, it's definitely got to be the latter, but hey, at least until 2 pm UK time, we won't have dropped a single point and have every bit as much a chance of winning the championship as anyone else. Yeah, right, but what I guess it comes down to is that opening day is like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny for grownups. Until they've actually delivered that lump of coal, the world is full of infinite possibilities.

Relegation Blues

I could barely bring myself to watch today's match between Arsenal and Fulham, not only because Fulham had scant chance of winning, but also because so much was riding on it. For Fulham, anyway; Arsenal is going nowhere this season and have settled into what for them is mediocrity, a fourth place position from which they have no hope of rising any higher.

But for poor little Fulham, now fourth from bottom and sinking fast, defeat meant another step toward disaster. For Americans and other non-followers of football, allow me to explain the principle of relegation: each season the bottom teams in each division are demoted to the next lower league (and conversely, the top three promoted to the next higher). Imagine, for example, if the New York Yankees had a bad year and finished in the cellar. The following season they would have to play in the minor leagues, and would stay there until they won their way back up into the majors.

For an English football team, relegation is disastrous. Just for starters, it will cost the owners in the neighborhood of £30 million ($60 million) in lost revenues from TV and merchandising. They'll also lose most of their best players, who will have to be sold on to other clubs who can afford to pay their wages. That in turn causes many fans to stop coming to matches, and ticket prices have to be reduced to counteract that trend, leading to even more of a decline in revenues. Many teams relegated from the Premiership never make it back, and gradually sink to yet lower divisions.

So that's the position Fulham finds itself in. If they don't win at least one of their remaining two games (or possibly draw both of them), they're almost certain to lose their Premiership status. From my purely personal standpoint, the biggest loss would be that their games would no longer be telecast in America. I was a season ticket holder when Fulham were a Second and First Division team, and since I just plain love football, I'd be happy to watch them even if they were only playing Swindon Town or Wycombe Wanderers. Unfortunately, the only reliable way to watch lower division English football is in person, and since I'm no longer in England, I'd be out of luck.

All that's meant to give you some insight into how I felt this afternoon as I watched, like a horrible car crash unfolding in slow motion, Fulham's 3-1 loss to Arsenal. It was made even worse by Fulham, after trailing most of the match, pulling back a goal to make it 1-1 with only 10 minutes left. If they'd been able to maintain that score, they would have gained a precious point and moved a bit up from rather than down toward the relegation zone. But it was not to be.

In the dismal aftermath, I found myself wondering why it upset me so much. I mean, unlike the club's owner, Mohammed al-Fayed, I don't stand to lose millions of dollars. My own season ticket expired last year, so I don't have any investment in the club apart from emotional, and if I were that desperate to see them play on a regular basis, I suppose I could have stayed in London.

And yet, I wandered about all afternoon in a grim stupor, almost as though someone close to me had died. Then a strange thought struck me: in a sense, I had gone through personal relegation of a sort. 10 years ago, you could say I was playing in a higher league, at least when it came to my particular line of work at the time, the music business. I had over a dozen employees, was responsible for multi-million dollar budgets, and had the privilege (and occasional pain) of dealing with some of the best bands in America (even if you never heard of some of them, trust me, they were). And now? Let's just say my life is lived on a considerably lower profile.

True, I still get the occasional author, journalist or filmmaker coming around to solicit my views on 80s and 90s punk rock and the DIY explosion, but for all intents and purposes, I'm history, which of course is why they're interested in me. Yet - and here's the kicker - while I do sometimes miss the frantic and frenetic days of being a scenemaker and music magnate, it occasions far less grief in me than the prospect of Fulham Football Club, of whom I was only ever a passive spectator, going down.

I asked someone why he thought this might be, and he replied, "Oh, that's simple. You don't have any control over what happens to Fulham, and that's why it drives you crazy. Whereas with Lookout Records and your music career, you made your own choice, or at least convinced yourself that's what you were doing. Accepting what we can't control is always the hardest part. It strikes right at the heart of our ego."

I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense. Maybe quite a bit of sense. But now that I've learned that invaluable lesson, could Fulham just maybe defeat the odds, win their last two games, and stay up in the Premiership for another season? Pretty please?