More of an introduction, or, what have I gotten myself into?

By: Jim | May 22nd, 2007

You know, starting out blogging about the Crew in the wake of one of their worst defeats ever may not have been the most emotionally healthy decision I’ve ever made in my life, but I trust I will not regret it. For one thing, the whole point of blogging is to bitch about some horrible injustice or another, and how much could I bitch had Columbus been on the winning side of that 4-0 score line? Not much, I imagine. So, in a sense, this couldn’t be a better time for me to have started this endeavor, since things can only get better from here. Right?

I’ve decided that I’ll continue to introduce myself gradually over the next couple of weeks, rather than bore everyone with my biography as a Crew supporter all at once. One thing I’ll mention now is that, while I’ll probably use ‘Columbus’ and ‘Crew’ interchangeably to refer to the topic of this blog, in general I abhor the American practice of giving their sports teams official nicknames. Therefore, in my mind, we aren’t playing the Fire on June 3rd, we’re playing Chicago.

Also, I use the terms ‘soccer’ and ‘football’ pretty much interchangeably as well. This isn’t pretension; I learned about the sport by conversing with, and listening to, Europeans, mainly Englishmen. In addition, I read British sports publications regularly, including, yes, World Soccer. How’s that for irony?

In the future you’ll learn all about my not-so-secret desire to see the Crew remade into the image of the 1994-95 Ajax side that won the European championship (maybe the de Boers would come out of retirement and play for us? Hmm…), or how a fixation with the European Premier League is poisoning the American soccer culture. But for the immediate future I’ll be concentrating on exactly what’s wrong with Columbus right now, and I imagine I’ll be explaining in great detail how Sigi Schmidt is a fool who doesn’t know one end of a football from the other.

The daily link section:

(N.B.: When I took this assignment I was wholly unfamiliar with the various MLS and Crew blogs out there. I am quickly educating myself and plan to link to relevant postings from around the blogosphere daily, should there be sufficient material to which I can link. Maybe this will be a couple of times a week thing instead. Like I said yesterday, I’m still getting my feet wet with all this.)

I’m quickly discovering that everyone and his brother has a MLS ‘power rankings’ algorithm. Today we look at two. Soccer by Ives places Columbus 12th out of 13 in his weekly MLS soccer rankings., and Mike H’s prosaically titled ‘My Soccer Blog’ places the Crew at, you guessed it, 12 out of 13.. Maybe they’re the same person?