High Wycombe railway station, 3pm on a sun-lit Sunday afternoon in late-October. It can only mean one thing - your blogger and his father are on their way to London for the annual National Football League game at Wembley Stadium.
He flies over from his home in Spain, we meet up at Warrillow Towers, drive down to High Wycombe (he drives and his driving still terrifies me; he used to be a sales rep/manager/director for several steel stockholding companies in the Black Country in his working days and probably travelled more miles along the country’s motorways at 85mph than I will do in a lifetime), then park the car and take the train down to the new Wembley Stadium station.
We’ve been doing this since 1986 when American Football, the USA’s favourite sport, first came to the UK. Then, it was the Chicago Bears and the Dallas Cowboys in a pre-season game. Now, the Bears are back to meet the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a proper game that actually counts in the regular-season schedule.
We never get tired of this. As I’ve explained here before, my love of American Football comes from the finest schoolteacher I ever had, Dr Ken Thomas of King Charles I Grammar School in Kidderminster. When I was there in the late-1970s, ‘Doc Thomas’ used to liven up dull chemistry lessons with tapes of football games he’d garnered from his time in the States studying for his doctorate.
My dad quickly picked up on my interest and is now just as keen an NFL-watcher as his son, except that he has the advantage of owning a Sky subscription.....
The NFL has been holding one regular-season game in London for the past five years, although this one nearly didn’t happen. A dispute between players and team owners during the summer (millionaires vs billionaires, as the American press billed it) had the entire season in doubt at one stage and the argument was only resolved late in July, at the 59th minute of the 23rd hour in terms of time left to arrange the London game.
Nonetheless, 76,981 fans turned out and, as always, it was an amazing spectacle. Fans of all ages dressed in the shirts of the vast majority of the NFL’s 32 teams and there was an atmosphere that the FA would kill for at any of the pointless friendlies it has to stage in order to pay for a stadium with less than a tenth of the atmosphere of the venue they bulldozed to create this place.
The game lived up to the atmosphere, which hasn’t always been the case. The Bears ran out into an early lead against a young Bucs roster that still seems to be finding its feet. But the team from the Windy City, who didn’t fly in to London until Thursday having played on the previous Sunday night back home, seemed to lose their energy in the fourth quarter.
Two touchdowns engineered by Buccaneers quarterback Josh Freeman brought the Floridians back into it and gave an excited crowd a finish to remember, with the game not resolved until Freeman threw an interception with 18 seconds left, giving the Bears a 24-18 victory.
It was then that we saw one of the very few benefits that the new Wembley has over its predecessor. Less than 20 minutes after leaving our seats and calling in at the gentlemens’ facilities which are no longer a serious health hazard, we were on a train from Wembley Stadium station and on our way back to High Wycombe. We were back home in Tamworth, thanks in no small part to Himself’s astonishing driving, in time to watch the game highlights on the BBC.
I’m already looking forward to the 2012 game and hoping that we don’t have to wait until August for confirmation that the game will take place. In a couple of years’ time, I’ll have one of those round-numbered birthdays and my dream is to take in an NFL game in the States. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if I could take my dad with me?
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