What a Week

Last week was a pretty awesome week. It started off with waking up Monday and finding out that bin Laden was killed in a 40 minute raid in Pakistan. I have been doing my best reading up on everything and keeping up with all the news. I was super proud to be an American that day and had a good feeling. It was neat seeing it on CNN here and just hearing everything. I guess the view here is not quite as wild as it was back home, but it's still a good thing to have a huge terrorist leader killed. I think what is on a lot of people's minds is that terrorism won't just end with this, and we can't get comfortable. As an American, it's just a great feeling to know we got the guy who was responsible for the most violent attack on American soil ever. I am interested in the articles coming out now stating how Pakistan had to have been aiding him in some way since the house was extremely visible although private and that was their way of life. It will be an interesting time when more news keeps coming out.

Football-wise, it was a regular week for me, with U19 practice before mine on Tuesday and Thursday. We put in some good work and were ready for this game. The Jets were pretty unknown to us, and we didn't know what to expect. The biggest controversy I guess, was whether their former NFL and CFL QB would be back with the team. He "unexpectedly missed" there first game and we didn't know what to expect. Some investigating found out that he signed with an indoor team, so he would probably not be there against us.


Saturday morning rolled around, and the crazy trip to Coventry began. Before I get into too much of anything, I wanted to throw out there that we had a couple people with a TV station following the team on the trip up to England, mainly focusing on our QB. It was neat to get interviewed on the plane, and see the guys talking to them. The biggest thing that can come out of this is publicity and hopefully some sponsors. It's great for our team to get ourselves out there! Back to the trip, our flight out of Copenhagen was at 10:30 am and we arrived in London around 11:15 London time, which is an hour behind Copenhagen. I had to go through the non-EU passport way and had to fill out some paperwork and explain while I was here. It asked for occupation and address of where I was staying. I threw in coach for occupation to sound cool, but had to explain what was going on and why I had no idea where I was staying. I was very clear it was American Football, to which he asked if I played professionally in the States. I really could have messed with a customs agent, but just said nope, and went on my way. We waited for a while and boarded the bus for the 2ish hour ride to our hotel in Coventry. It was pretty tight on the bus as no one could really fit in seats, but we all made it work, and most people just slept. I was in the middle, but I don't think there was anything really great to see. We were just driving on the wrong side of the road, so it was weird boarding the bus on the wrong side.

When we arrived at the hotel we had our pregame meal ready, which was 3 types of pasta, which I devoured since I was pretty hungry. We then had about 45 minutes before we had to be ready to leave for the game. We took a bunch of cabs for the 5 minute ride to the stadium. I was one of the first few there and walked around. It is a rugby field, so it is a big space, with seating for about 4000 I believe. The field itself was hard as a rock though.

As game time approached, I was out early with some guys while specialist were warming up, and one of their coaches just came and talked to us, and he started talking about how good and fast the Cougars d-line was, which is true, they looked great against the Jets. I went back and watched our game, and it was all the same dudes and they didn't look as impressive. But I just nodded along and was like yep they looked great, but in my mind thinking, just wait until kickoff and then let us hear about speed.

The weather was pretty nice at kickoff- it drizzled a bit and looked like it would rain, but it never did. We won the toss and chose to receive. They boomed it deep, and we started the game with a return TD, 7-0 right off the bat. A series of events happened and we never really looked back, being up 30-0 at the end of what felt like the longest quarter of football ever, and up 66-0 at half. Long story short, the game ended 90-0 and we felt great. Some highlights of the game were two punt returns for TDs with some slick moves from out returner, as well as a couple bad snaps that led to safeties. My confusing play of the game came when I blocked a punt and the ball was bouncing quickly through the endzone as I pursued. I was thinking I could either let it go out for another safety, try to be cool and scoop and toe tap, or dive and swat it hoping one of our guys falls on it for a TD. I did just that and batted it backwards keeping it in bounds. Sure enough, Showtime ends up on the ball with the biggest grin on his face. Unfortunately, we all learned it is illegal to bat the ball in the endzone. I'm pretty sure its legal everywhere else on the field as it is done on punts to keep it out of the endzone, and I know you can't like swat it forward, but I never knew that you couldn't do that in the endzone. Kim told me later that the call was correct, and I am such a dirty player for breaking the rules. Unfortunately, I over thought and then felt stupid. If only I was dumb, lazy, and slow, the ball would have rolled out and we would have had 2 more points. Oh well, now we know that rule if we are ever in a close game!

The game ended and we enjoyed ourselves a bit, but quickly left the field to get back to the hotel. I showered
quickly and got ready to get some food and drinks. I was following around my roommate for the night and fellow DT, Rorbol as he helped me get some pizza from Dominos and got the first drink for the evening. I'm pretty sure Dominos was not happy with the large amount of food we kept ordering, but oh well. It was great food at the end of a game that happened. We all just stayed at the hotel bar and drank for the evening.  There was a wedding reception going on that I believe a few people crashed and it sounded alright. The time waster of the night came while playing one of those touch screen trivia games. I'm pretty sure among the 4 of us that gathered around there, we easily spent 15 Pounds on the game. It cost 50 pence to play and you could win up to like 20 Pounds maybe, but we never made it to the money rounds. It would ask a question with like 8 correct answers and give you 12 choices. Some of them were very British questions so we would be stumped. We came up with the genius idea that if we didn't know what one of the possible answers was, it was probably right. I went to sleep around 1:45 and slept for about an hour before we had to get up for breakfast at 3am before boarding the bus at 3:30 to head to London for our flight. We all shoved ourselves back on the bus and I would be surprised if there was a person that didn't sleep. I slept for pretty much the whole ride.

We got to the airport around 5:45 and our flight was leaving at 7:15. I went through security and forgot to put my contact solution in my clear bag, so they had to search all my stuff. The guy was a weird combo of angry/ nice. He started off by saying "So you have some liquid in here eh" to which I just responded I guess so what is it? And he came back with something making me feel like an idiot for forgetting I had liquid, but was then really nice talking while searching my bag It was weird, but it was 6:30, so I didn't really know what was going on. After all that, I had about 10 minutes to get to my flight before the gate closed, but I really had to use the bathroom. I knew there were people behind me, so I found the gate and luckily there was a bathroom right there, so I dipped in and did my business. As I was washing my hands, I heard people running outside, so I hurried out to see our coaches running by, so I joined in. it was a 10 second jog there, but apparently they ran from security for a solid 2 minutes and shoved their way into one of the trams to our gate as the doors were closing. We all made it and had safe travels and arrived in Copenhagen around 9:30. I got home around 10:15 and went to sleep around 11 for a couple of hours, but I didn't want to sleep so much that I couldn't at night.

All in all it was a great experience. Our next EFAF game is against another British team, the two time reigning champ London Blitz. It will be the weekend of May 28, but the location has not been decided yet. It would be huge for us to win that game. The Blitz are a fantastic team, and we are looking forward to the challenge, but first we have two league games against the Amager Demons, who we beat 58-0 in our first Danish game, followed by the Kronborg Knights, who have a new American coach implementing his system, and they are currently 0-2 in league play. I have 3 U19 games, including one the 28th, before the matchup, and i am really excited about there as we are really untested. It will be fun to get into the meat of the schedule and get these games going!