reminiscing old loves...

oooookay. i know that a football blog is definitely not something you would expect from me. well... i am not sure this is a football blog, but it definitely bears resemblance to one :) actually... it is a blog about heroes... one fallen, one standing.

now, i can't say i'm a football fan... don't think that term ever applied to me. still, when i was in highschool, in the 10th to the 12th grade, i was an avid watcher of the champions league. and i love(d) english teams. my love was especially steered towards chelsea fc and manchester united, but i supported any other english team in the competition, unless they played against these. oh my, actually, i think i still have my sticker albums from that time... if i haven't thrown them away the last time i did a thorough cleaning of my room. i'd have to check.

anyways, in those days, when champions league season was near, you might have had a chance to spot me with the names of chelsea and manU, written on my forearms with waterproof markers. red for the devils, blue for chelsea of course :D. thank god my mum forbade tattoos, otherwise... heaven knows, i might sport those names on my skin even now :)

so, what happened? not much, actually. it's just that... i'm a usually calm person... whenever i can. now, as any footie watcher out there might know, you just can't stay indifferent when your favourite team is out on the field. honestly, the tension was just too much for me. i started watching less and less and was content with just checking the results. eventually, i gave up on that too. however, in conversations about football, i'd always maintain that those are the teams i support.

so, tonight is match night, knockout rounds. for rookies out there, that means there are sixteen teams left in the competition, they play two by two now in two legs, winner goes on. eight teams qualify, eight teams leave the competition. tonight, chelsea and liverpool moved on past porto and barcelona respecively. tomorrow night, i hope arsenal and manU do the same against lille and psv. which would then mean there will be four english teams in the last eight standing.

now, considering all this, i was reminded by highschool celeb crushes in the footie world. every team just had to have a player i favoured. well, for chelsea at that time it was the norwegian tore andre flo (when the presentor spoke his name, i always understood torean de flo, lol). easy to spot on the field, too, the guy. he was like... the lampard of his time :) i've just checked wikipedia to see what has happened to him in the meantime... apparently, after a return to norway he came back to the british isles and as of january this year, is playing for leeds united. woo-hoo.

as for manchester... do you venture a guess? who? david beckham you say? when he wasn't yet spaced out.... hm... well, guess again :D nope, actually, it was australian-born goalkeeper marc bosnich. he later played for chelsea too. now, on looking him up in wiki, i wasn't that delighted anymore :( bad seasons, relegation to second, then third choice keeper for his teams, relationship break-ups and a dangerous bitter-sweet topping of ice-cream and cocaine, leading to his sacking from chelsea and a nine-month ban from playing. the guy has basically fallen from football hero to a mess.

i am pretty sure "regular" people take falls like these once in a while. but their stories don't make the media and they don't leave the same trail of broken hearts and disappointed faces behind them. and maybe it is not fair, but i think their personal tragedies are greater than others'. i am darn sure you don't get on top without loads of work, not in this field and what can be worse than your un-doing by your own hands? he claims he started doing drugs to help out his then girlfried with the problem. for every line she did, he did one too. i doubt that helped much, since they broke up later, due to his becoming violent. apparently he still does it and while not happy about it, says he's still convinced he started it out for the right reasons. talk about good intentions poorly handled gone bad...

anyways... this whole manU-chelsea-flo-bosnich thing has such an aura of nostalgia about it. it's some remain from a time when the world was still in order. and it is something that should've remain untainted. yet... ah, well. heroes fall. still... yeah, i know this is the anthem of liverpool, but...

Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart
And you'll never walk alone,
You'll never, ever walk alone.