The Wembley Joke

Well... it was an experiment.

I couldnt watch it because the Bengals were hosting the Steelers... I had a backlog of chores to do so I didnt watch much of it. After it was 14-3 Steelers, and the Bengals elected to go for a FG on 4th and 1 on the 2 yard line*, I figured.. why submit to this agony!

I remind myself this is the Bengals that got me interested in the Crew... now, read my previous sig again.
Fire Jim Tressel! For setting unreal expectations for fans of other sports in Ohio.

* Anyone note where I said not to worry about Lawrie until he started making bizarre decisions? That's a good example of a coach who has lost it.

 

81,000+ is a very well attended joke.

 

It seemed like it went off well for the NFL.

As far as an EPL game over here. Wouldn't an equivilant of Giants v Dolphins would be like Bolton v Villa? I think you'd have to have one of the big four for it to be sucessful. Even with that I wouldn't be very optimistic. The insular sports media would kill it, the mainstream news media wouldn't bother covering it. Regular TV rights aside I doubt if a mainstream channel like ESPN would have much interest in showing it.

Would go much better in Toronto or Vancouver.

 

A few thoughts, since I came on here yesterday to see if anyone was discussing the game but nobody was...

(For the purposes of this post, when I say "football" I mean American football, not Association football.)

A) A Super Bowl in London would never happen. (Aside from anything else, because when he was interviewed during the game, Goodell pointed out that while there has been INTEREST from cities, that doesn't mean that they're actually CONSIDERING doing so.) The NFL will only put a Super Bowl in a cold weather city if the stadium has a roof, and there's noplace suitable in London. (I personally think this is a stupid rule, because...)

B) Football was meant to be played in shitty weather. Some of the classic games in the NFL's history have been played in mud and snow and ice and rain. So while it didn't make for a pretty game with lots of big yardage totals and pretty plays, that was FOOTBALL (said in the John Madden voice) on display.

C) You could tell that the Wembley pitch is maintained with soccer and not football in mind, because players (and even officials) were slipping all over the place, and it got really torn up by the end of the game. As I said, I think mud is part of football, but it still needs to be more resilient turf than that.

D) Don is right that it sucks for Dolphins season ticket holders to be deprived of a home game. (Though, I suppose, one could argue that nobody really wants to watch the 2007 Dolphins anyway.) If the NFL is seriously considering having more regular season games abroad, they need to come up with a good way to resolve this, both for making the fans happy and for competitive balance.

E) The attendance clearly indicated that there was interest in at least this one NFL game; whether there'd be the same level of interest in the future is yet to be seen. I don't think you can dispute that the fans who attended were loud and enthusiastic.

 

I thought it was pretty amazing to watch and listen to the crowd. A very surreal experience, seeing a guy wearing a 49ers jersey while singing "God Save the Queen."

The game itself was awful. The Giants laid a tremendous egg and I don't know why we couldn't send a better team than the Dolphins.

Re: the Dolphins losing a home game, this is also something that didn't make sense to me. The Jets and Giants played each other this year and it was called a Giants home game. Why didn't the NFL scheduling people just make that a Jets home game and then have this game be a Giants home game? That way the Giants would have basically broken even by playing a "home game" at a neutral site and an "away game" at home; meanwhile the Dolphins wouldn't have lost a home game. Or does this make too much sense for the NFL?

 

Yeah and at $150 a ticket who's the joke on?

 

I'm pretty sure the Jets-Giants game WAS a Jets home game.

If people thought the ticket prices were unfair, nobody forced them to pay it.

 

Roughly 6,075,000 British Sterling Pounds. Or Diomansy Kamara.

 

Nah, it wasn't. I'm a Jets fan and I felt good about them only having to play 7 away games this year. That turned out well...


See week 5 http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/teams/schedule?team=nyj&year=2007

 

Huh. My bad.

 

I think it should have counted as an away game for both of them. They both could have still had 8 home games, 7 away games in the US, and count this as the 8th away game for both of them.

 

quote]If people thought the ticket prices were unfair, nobody forced them to pay it.[/quote]

I'm not saying anyone was forced I was just stating a FACT

 

I don't think that would work. There's something about it that doesn't sound logical.

True enough, it's a significant amount of money. Though not, I don't imagine, a whole pile more than people pay for any other Giants game.

Edit: Right. Because if you were to call the London game an away game for both teams, and move one of Miami's other road games to Miami, then some OTHER team has nine road games. There's no way to properly balance the schedule if that were the case.

I guess if you really wanted to, you could call it a neutral site game, but even then you'd have to set it up so that teams (I guess it wouldn't have to be all, it could just be, say, four of them) each played 7 home games, 7 road games, and 2 neutral site games. That would even out competitive balance, but you'd still have season ticket holders unhappy.

 

Actually THAT doesnt sound logical. I'm too lazy to work out the 'distribution' but while it would affect which teams were scheduled to play the two, I dont see how it cant be done.

And by the way.. if Wembley held 500,000 it would still have been sold out.

Also who SAYS the Super Bowl couldnt be held there? It's not as if it would be an 'Ice Bowl'. Is the weather in London not unlike the weather in Atlanta in February?

 

I'm willing to entertain the possibility that I might be wrong, but would you care to elaborate on how it could be done?

 

http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/b ... rom=search

Average temp in Febuary in London is 44 degrees

http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/b ... rom=search

Average Febuary temp in Atlanta is 57


So it could get a little nippy but hey its not Minnesota!

My parents always tell the story of the 91 Grey Cup(thats CFL) in Winnipeg that they attended. The game was held in November and the temp according to wiki was -17 celcius (or 1 degree Fahrenheit). Which really isn't exceptionally cold in Winnipeg terms but uncomfortable conditions to sit outside and watch a football game non the less.

 

I shoulda looked it up... but the REAL point is the 'likely' temperature in London making it reasonable. Variations less than Atlanta, I'd think.

Don, I aint being obstinate just for fun.. I just discount the point of it being a 'joke'

 

Atlanta isn't a relevant point of comparison, though, because the Georgia Dome is (as you might imagine) a dome. The last time the NFL played a Super Bowl as far north as the San Francisco area (where the average February high is 59) was 1985. Since then the Super Bowl has been hosted in/is scheduled to be hosted in:

New Orleans (dome, 1986, 1990, 1997, 2002)
Los Angeles (average Feb. high 70 degrees, 1987, 1993)
San Diego (average Feb. high 66 degrees, 1988, 1998, 2003)
Miami (average Feb. high 73 degrees, 1985, 1989, 1995, 1999, 2007, 2010)
Tampa (average Feb. high 72, 1991, 2001, 2009)
Minneapolis (dome, 1992)
Atlanta (dome, 1994, 2000)
Phoenix/Tempe/Glendale (average Feb. high 72, 1996, 2008)
Houston (retractable roof and average Feb. high 67, 2004)
Jacksonville (average Feb. high 67, 2005)
Detroit (dome, 2006)
Dallas (retractable roof and average Feb. high 61, 2011)

The NFL has overwhelmingly shown, over the past 25 years, that if you want to host a Super Bowl, and you're in a city that's cold in February, you'd better have a domed stadium. (More cynically, they've shown that providing a comfortable environment for their corporate bigwigs to watch the game is more important than providing some semblance of what wintertime football is like in the cities where half of the league's franchises are located.) If they're not going to make an exception for John Mara or Chainsaw Dan Snyder, they're certainly not going to make an exception for Ken Livingstone.