Matchday 9: Stockholm Saturday!

Whatup crazy kids!  I had quite a day yesterday in Stockholm.  We had a match, watched the Euro Championship matches then had a night (and day) on the town.

The reason I was in Stockholm for the third time in a week was that we were playing against Vasalunds.  This marked the fifth time in nine games that we were playing the team currently in first place in the league.  In fact the only team we’ve played that wasn’t in the top 5 was our only win against Akropolis.  Anyway, we got killed 5-1.  I was available on the bench, but wasn’t used.  The game was awful and we were on the back foot the entire time.  Vasalunds scored in the 4^th minute then continued to pressure the rest of the half, though they didn’t create many more great chances.  In the 22^nd minute, we scored completely against the run of play.  We cleared a ball to our attacking midfielder Ernesto, who played a really great through pass to Erik who scored a great goal with his left foot.  That was a great moment for us, but our happiness only lasted until halftime, because the second half started with them scoring again.  From that point, it was only a matter of how many they would score and by the 70^th minute it was 5-1.  Vasalunds continued to press, but our guys showed some good pride and prevented the scoreline from getting even worse.  We even had a goal wrongfully (in my opinion) disallowed for offsides.  Long story short, it was a forgettable game.  The fact that I didn’t play just made things all that much more disappointing for me.

After the terrible match, we were in need of a fun night.  So Daniel, Robert, Joel and I took the subway from the stadium to Gamla Stan (Old Town) to watch the European Championship matches.  After being initially turned away from O’Leary’s, the same chain of Boston-themed restaurants you may remember me going on about while I was in Jakobstad, Finland, we looked for another place to eat and watch the games.  However during our search, we ran into Kevin and his pops who incidentally owned the O’Leary’s we were turned away from.  After a quick phone call, we were in a booth at O’Leary’s with no wait.  VIP service!

Most of you will be unfamiliar with the various areas of Stockholm.  For you, I will explain a bit about Gamla Stan.  This area is a small island that makes up the very center of Stockholm.  I have done no research to support this next claim, nor do I intend to, but I think Gamla Stan used to be the entirety of Stockholm.  That may or may not be true, but considering that the only thing connecting current day Gamla Stan to the rest of the city are bridges, then there must have been some time when the island was the whole city.  Well, Gamla Stan is tourist central in Stockholm.  It is the location of the Royal Palace as well as the Nobel Museum and many other historic sites.  Amazingly though, among all that history and tourist attractions are hundreds of apartments that people still live in.  This leads me to the next part of my story where we visited Tom’s house to watch the 2^nd game of the night after we left O’Leary’s.  Tom lives in Gamla Stan and was gracious enough to host us for the match.  We had fun watching the game and drinking a little bit, then we went out to a club.  We snapped this picture in the subway station on our way.

L-R: Philip, Daniel, Tom, Me, Joel, Robert, Heradi

There’s not much to say about the club.  It was really more of a lounge feel but with much louder music.  One thing I absolutely do not like about Sweden and Europe in general is that most clubs only play house music or some sort of house/dance music hybrid.  I haven’t been going to clubs for too many years, but I’ve been to enough to know that I prefer rap/hip hop clubs to house music.  It’s just my preference in music.  I find it easier to dance and enjoy myself when my favorite kind of music is playing.  For that reason, I spent the majority of the evening hanging out with the guys in one of those huge curvy sofas that clubs have watching drunk Swedes dance and being peer pressured into taking just one more drink, one more shot, etc.  I’m not saying I didn’t have fun because I did, it just isn’t my ideal nightclub.  I don’t know if my ideal nightclub even exists in Stockholm.

We left the club at around 2:30am and were faced with a dilemma: no public transportation to Enkoping was leaving until 4:49am.  That meant we had two hours to kill in 50 degree weather and with nowhere to stay and nothing to do.  So, like the majority of Stockholm it seemed, we went to McDonald’s.  That only took up so much time so we just kind of walked around aimlessly.  Finally, we stopped at some steps and decided to just hang there until the train station opened.  For the story I’m going to tell you, you need to know that at 3:30am in Stockholm in the summer it is as sunny as the middle of the day.  That’s not an exaggeration: sunrise is around that time in the summer.  Anyway, we’re standing at the top of these steps when a really drunk (or on drugs) guy starts walking up.  There were about 40 steps total, and maybe ten steps from us the guy stops and decides he’s going to pee.  It’s the middle of the night, so this kind of thing isn’t the most unusual thing in the world.  However, it was sunny outside!  There was no cover of darkness that would usually protect someone doing something so stupid.  When this guy started peeing, we all kind of looked at each other (Me, Daniel, Joel and Robert) like, “Is this guy serious?”  He must have noticed, because he turned around and started aiming his pee at us!  We ran away to wait for the train a bit further down the street, but not before the guy walked up to us and uttered some nonsense along with a buddy of his who rambled on about leaving 60,000SEK somewhere and having it stolen.  I could tell by his eyes that the second guy was on drugs.

3:50am in Stockholm.  About to get peed at.

About five minutes into our waiting for the train station to open, a guy came up to us and offered us a ride.  When he heard that we needed to go 60km to Enkoping, he was shocked.  Once he came to grips with that, he made his offer: 300SEK per person to take us.  It would only cost half that to take public transportation so we denied.  However, after a bit of haggling with him and another guy we agreed to pay 200SEK per person.  That led to us getting a ride to Enkoping in a 2001 Audi A4 with some guy who was clearly not a taxi driver at 4am.  I fell asleep and when I woke up we were going 100mph on the highway.  I felt like I was going to die in an awful car crash.  Fearing for your life: the fitting end to yet another terrible matchday.

The season has been awful so far, but now we go into a stretch of matches against teams that aren’t in the top five of the league.  If we’re going to survive in this league, then we have to get results against the teams in the bottom half of the table.  We’ll train for a week then go for some points!

Matchday 7 and the motherf'ing Eurovision Song Contest

Hi friends!  There’s much to talk about, so let’s just get to it.  But first I have to say thanks to everyone who reads this blog.  I know my life isn’t terribly interesting, but many of you have continued to come back and read.  I just passed the 1000 pageview mark!  That may not sound like a lot, but since I haven’t advertised my blog in any way I’m proud of that.  Maybe I’ll start to advertise it a bit, but I don’t know.  I kind of like knowing that only people who actually care are coming to my blog.  I’ll try to keep doing things to make this blog interesting.  Just so you know, every time someone visits my blog, my niece Amani smiles!  Moving on…

"Read my uncle's blog!  I love him and want only for him to have success and occasionally change my diaper!"

We lost yesterday to Vasteras SK, 2-1.  I came off the bench for the second consecutive game in the 66^th minute.  I felt much better physically than I did in my last sub appearance and I had many positives in the moments that I had the ball.  Hopefully I can play from the start in our next match.

The game itself was actually pretty good.  We played one of our best games of the season, even though we were missing Kerim Mrabti, who had started every game so far.  That allowed Ernesto Ferreira to step in, and he did a very good job.  It’s been clear to anyone paying attention that Siggi has been itching to put Ernesto into the starting lineup, and now I see why.  Ernesto is our oldest player by far, but he is also probably our smartest.  His introduction brought with it a calming effect on the team.  For the first time since preseason, we were moving the ball from left to right and penetrating the other team’s defense.  Ernesto was instrumental in pulling the strings in the #10 spot.  He was clearly our man of the match and I hope he can continue to be so influential for us.  With Kerim missing due to injury and the fact that our captain Tom Noden had to pull out of the warm-up due to a migraine and didn’t play, we now have only one player who’s started every game: Robert Kjellman.  That’s a pretty extraordinary turnover considering we only have a 22 man squad, and from that three players haven’t played at all.  Anyway, the game was very even with a lot of possession from both sides, but no real attacking threat either way.  There was the odd chance, but the first half was played almost exclusively in the middle third.  Vasteras scored the only goal of that half on a questionable penalty.  They got the ball wide and the winger put in a cross that hit Philip Zamayeri on the arm.  There was no question that it hit his arm, the question was in whether such an infraction warranted a penalty kick.  His arm was tucked in on his body and there was no way he could have avoided the contact.  I don’t like the “ball to hand” rule in soccer, but it exists and this was a textbook example of ball to hand.  In my opinion it should have been a no call.

The second half was a bit different in that we had to chase the game.  By the time I came on in the middle of the second half, we were essentially playing 4-2-4, with both wingers and Ernesto pushed up alongside Erik Andersson.  I came on as a left winger, which was kind of new since I haven’t played there since preseason.  I’ve been used this season exclusively as an option to run behind the defense and put in crosses.  By playing on the left though, I was given more freedom to come inside and play almost as like a 2^nd #10.  For the tactical soccer nuts out there (I’m in that category.  I love analyzing various tactics) I was playing a role similar to the 2 in a 4-3-2-1.  That’s not the formation we were playing, but that’s what I was doing.  I like the role because it combines the two positions I’m best at: winger and withdrawn/2nd striker.  I felt instantly more comfortable than I ever feel as an out-and-out winger.  I was also able to be more dynamic and unpredictable which made me far more difficult to defend.

In other news, I have been getting more boring by the day.  If my life was a tv show it would get canceled at this point.  I hang out with the same people in the same places almost every single day.  And I have no real desire to go out and meet new people in Enkoping.  It’s not a knock on the town, but I’ve already got a handful of really good friends here now and I feel no need to make new ones.  In short, I’m boring, which is why I’m shocked at myself for bringing up the idea to go to Stockholm a few days ago.  Just spontaneously at lunch with Daniel, Linus, Joel and Fabian (look them up on my Meet ESK link.  Fabian’s not on there just yet) I blurt out, “I wanna do something.  I kind of feel like going to Stockholm.”  Daniel, a native of Stockholm, immediately jumped on the idea and was ready to go.  I on the other hand, had already soured on the idea once I considered the time and money involved in a half day trip to and from Stockholm.  I want to visit Stockholm, but not on a tight schedule.  Long story short, I was convinced to compromise on a trip to a “fotball golf” course in Stragnas.  I’ve butchered the spelling of the town since I don’t know how to put the dots over the a’s.  Well, once we got to Stragnas we saw this:

And this:

This fotball golf course was more like an abandoned amusement park.  We played the course anyway and I finished 2^nd.  Daniel won and he was all to happy to let everybody know about it.  I’m glad I went out with the guys.  Sitting at the Poorhouse (my apartment, keep up) wouldn’t have done me any good.

The last thing I’ll talk about before I go is the ridiculousness that is the Eurovision Song Contest.  Now if you’ve never heard of this, then congratulations, your life is better than anyone in Europe.  But also sorry, because now you’re going to hear about it from me.  The Eurovision Song Contest, which I insist must be pronounced “the motherf’ing European Song Contest” in the same way as the Catalina Wine Mixer from the movie “Stepbrothers”, is something that I don’t understand at all but I will try to explain it.  Essentially it is American Idol, just that the people performing create their own songs.  People watch the performances then vote for their favorites.  There are no live judges from what I can tell.  I’m pretty sure that the artists have to be amateurs and cannot have the backing of a music label, at least when they begin the competition.  Each European country has their own competition and declares a champion, then that champion competes at the international level to see which country will have the winner.  Sweden’s representative was Loreen with her song, “Euphoria”.  I really like the song and apparently so does the rest of Europe because she was voted champion!  This was a big source of pride for Swedes, with probably half of all Swedish people I’ve spoken to in the last month have mentioned that Loreen was a favorite to win the Eurovision Song Contest Grand Final, a competition of the top 20 countries.  Now I’ve never been a big American Idol fan or any of the similar shows, but at least I understand them.  It’s cool to see someone go from unknown to star in front of your eyes and partially with your help.  This contest though doesn’t seem to have that quality.  I’ve been hearing “Euphoria” on the radio since I got to Sweden.  I am 99.9% sure that Loreen has a recording deal with a music label and that her song is on an album.  That makes this seem more like a vote to see which country has the artist with the #1 song in Europe at the moment.  I don’t see how that could possibly be popular but what do I know.  Maybe only Sweden was interested because they knew they’d win!  Anyway, I can’t talk so much about a song and then not post it, so here you have it: Loreen performing “Euphoria” at the Eurovision Song Contest Finals.  See you guys.