I'm delighted to be writing my first piece for NewcastleFansTV. A quick note about me, I've been a Newcastle fan for 25 years, born and raised in the Southwest of England before moving to America back in 2004 at the age of 18 to first playing football in University before settling down and starting my journey to the here and now.
For the last 16 years I've been a Newcastle fan in a far away land. It's not easy being a Newcastle fan even at the best of times, but I can assure you it's even worse being a Newcastle fan stuck thousands of miles away from our emotional home. My first live Newcastle game was actually back in 2011, a 3-1 win against Wolves which saw goals from Kevin Nolan, Shola Ameobi and club icon Jonas Gutierrez. I've been to SJP twice before, but not for a game.
Of course, like all exiled fans, I've watched the lads from afar on any available platform, not all strictly legal (dare I say!) over the years but we're actually very lucky here in America, every Premium League can be watched live for a very small annual fee on one of our largest broadcasting platforms, NBC. They paid a huge amount of money a while back to lock down Premier League broadcast rights - and although this is currently a sore topic for fans - the rights have been well looked after, and the product is excellent over here. I now watch all 38 PL games live from my couch usually at 9am (for traditional 3pm kick offs at home) and occasionally at lunch time (for the 5:30 KO), which is a very comfortable way to take a game in. The kids (6 & 2) throw on their home shirts and sit with me while their patience lasts. Dare I say, they've seen the best and worst of me during those times! The passion is raw, and it's there for my kids to see!
I've heard the comments before, you can't be a true Newcastle fan if you're not from the area, you can't feel the joy and anger the same way, you can't immerse yourself in the club without walking up the hill every week to the cathedral on top. Well, while I agree that the fandom is different, it's not fair to say it's not as true. In many ways it's actually harder. The passion and pain is the same, it's just what we do with it that might differ. I'm experiencing the same pain as you, the same anger & frustration - but I'm doing it alone.
Growing up in the South meant that most of my friends were Man Utd fans, some Arsenal and Liverpool and the occasionally the odd Chelsea or even Blackburn fan (we're talking early 90's Rovers!) - but almost no Newcastle fans. That wasn't unusually I suppose as it wasn't until the mid 90's, 1995 to be more accurate, that Newcastle United really hit the national scene. It was great to be a Newcastle fan then, and of course you'd see more and more Newcastle shirts in London and the surrounding towns, but still, nothing like the support of Man Utd or Arsenal. I still remember going into town to find the latest Newcastle home strip with my mum around my birthday and deciding which player to get on the back, I remember the dreaded wait while the shop put the numbers and letters on, it seemed like hours though I'm sure in reality it was only 45 minutes - 45 of the longest minutes to a young fan. I remember it all like it was yesterday. I sadly wonder if that still happens for 10 year olds across the country. I sincerely hope so.
It's that same passion and joy that binds my love for Newcastle United today. One of the hardest parts of being a Newcastle fan in America is that it's very hard to find a suitable outlet for our frustrations. We don't have a community of Newcastle fans around us, our mates aren't Newcastle fans, our families and co-workers. We don't have a suitable outlet or platform to vent out the pain and anguish of a loss, or a bad transfer window, or our hatred at the owner. We've no one to complain to - and that means usually bottling it all up (or releasing a mindless rant on Twitter, which we've all done!). In some ways, local fans are lucky to at least have likeminded fellow Geordie's to drown their sorrows with! Don't take that for granted.
Last September I took a 3 day trip to Newcastle to attend the Brighton game (yeah, that nightmare game!) and to spend some time in the city. Despite the misery of the 90 minutes, I loved my time in the city. I must have walked for 20 miles around the town center, down to the Tyne bridge, around Leazes Park and of course around St James' Park. I spent hours in the Back Page Shop and admired the locals at the Strawberry. What was my view of Newcastle? What a bloody fantastic city. The people are welcoming and gracious, and their passion for their football club still smolders strongly beneath the anger at Mike Ashley. I wasn't treated as an outsider, nor was I judged for my journey to where I was. My view as a Southerner turned Yank was that Newcastle is a city and a football club that the whole of England should be proud of.
Newcastle United have fans all over the world, across every continent and in every time zone. Being 6 hours behind England does create it's own challenges. Not only do games kick off at some what strange times, occasionally as early as 6:30am, but we're also getting our news in strange ways. We don't get 24 hour Sky Sports News, or the local news featuring the latest drama from NUFC, but we do of course rely on Twitter. I could write a whole book on how bad twitter is for us as humans, but I'll save that for another time. What Twitter takes away in creating & enabling social unrest, it does give us exiled Newcastle fans access to the most up to date information on our fallen club. We wake up to our lunchtime news - think about that! When my alarm goes off at 6am, you're likely heading out on your lunch break and when you're getting in our car to head home for the day, I'm making a sandwich.
So, we're limited in so many ways as fans over here (being anywhere that isn't Newcastle!), we're limited by not having Newcastle fans around us, we're limited by time zones and we're limited in the access to the same levels of information that local fans have.
What's the view from afar? Newcastle United is a once a great British football institute that has been torn down, worn town, and held down by a single man and his lack of vision, lack of integrity and lack of human sentiment. I don't need to tell any reader that, but maybe you didn't know just how we experience this club in America - isolated and alone.
Adam
@AdamBeckett09
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