Vanessa Calls Me on the Phone, Reminding Me I'm Not Alone

I wrote last week about Rangers and Stars owner Tom Hicks partnering with Montreal Canadiens owner, George Gillett, Jr. to possibly purchase Liverpool FC. Since the announcement , I spent a post-Finals weekend of relaxation watching innumerable YouTube montages documenting "The Reds" and their captain, Steven Gerrard.

I'm pretty sure that with my penchant for becoming a little bit too attached to organizations that I belong to (GSP) or teams that I follow (The Rangers), I was meant to be a soccer fan in some respect. It just seems like it's encoded on my DNA or something like that. I should mention that I only played one season of soccer. It was during the Fall of 1994 that I played for the Tyler Ajax. I'm not sure if we understood that we were named after the Homeric hero of The Iliad instead of the cleaning supply, but we played hard nonetheless.

Despite my lack of soccer-playing experience, I've always been drawn to the fervor of the game, the sheer joy that accompanies the scoring of goals, and the pageantry in the stands. Because of the preceding points, I'm here to declare that I'm going to start following Liverpool FC. Ever since I started reading about the club in The Sports Guy article on selecting a English Premier League team to follow, I thought that they would be the best to follow and the fact that Hicks is planning to purchase the club makes my fandom somewhat symmetrical. Think about it this way, at least I can blame one person for all of my fan angst in the future besides Jerry Jones.

Admittedly, I'm coming into this whole process a little late in the game. In the previously mentioned column on selecting an EPL team to follow, Simmons had this to say about Liverpool:

"Too much history, too personal, too easy, too obvious. Someone from America can't casually become a Liverpool fan, just like someone from England couldn't have casually become a Red Sox fan before 2004. I just wouldn't have felt right about it."

As much as appreciate the opinions of the Sports Guy, I'm going to go against him on this one. I'm going to start following "The Reds". If you were wondering why I think soccer is such a great spectacle, just watch the following clip of Liverpool fans singing "You'll Never Walk Alone" before a Champions League match against Juventus. These kinds of things just don't happen at Rangers games.