Come all ye faithful. Come to San Francisco. Come to San Francisco to watch the Community Shield and, in my case, come on the last day of a family holiday to California, at the start of which I vowed to my wife this would be a football-free trip for us and our daughter. Turns out I lied.
In my defence, I had done a pretty good job of keeping football out of our lives while on this side of the Atlantic. We arrived on the previous Sunday and, since then, there had been little checking of pre-season scores or obsessing over transfer news. But the Community Shield, well that was different. Not an important game but definitely a more important game than the other not important games, and particularly so if your team are playing in it for the first time in 13 years. That’s right, Liverpool were back at Wembley to compete for English football’s curtain-raising silver octagon and even from 5,000 miles away, I simply had to watch it.
What that entailed was something I hadn’t previously experienced in more than three decades of being a Liverpool fan: waking up in darkness, jumping into a taxi and rushing over to a bar in order to make a 7am kick-off. But that’s what I found myself doing on the Sunday just gone. Out of our hotel near Union Square and towards the Kezar Pub in Cole Valley. Hippy and hipster country and the place Jimi Hendrix once called home.
It was hard to get a sense of that as my ride pulled up outside the Kezar. San Francisco is known for its fog and this was proving to be a particularly foggy morning. Thick mist hung over Stanyan Street, covering most of the surroundings but thankfully not the place I was meant to be.
I found out about the Kezar on the Twitter page of San Francisco’s official Liverpool supporters club and was told, via a direct message from the club secretary Aman Parikh, that I was more than welcome to join members at what is their regular hangout for Sunday’s game. Parikh wouldn’t be there himself but, he assured me, other friendly faces would be.
So that was the plan, and it allowed me to not only watch Liverpool versus Manchester City at Wembley but also explore something that had fascinated me for some time – the experience of being a Red on foreign shores. The distance, the time difference, the general sense of isolation; was it really worth the hassle and commitment?
Overseas supporters certainly come across as a unique bunch. One only has to observe the levels they go to in order to stay in touch with their respective teams for proof of that, as well as the subsequent ways that affects how they react to results. It can be extreme – wins are seen as the start of something big while defeats are very much the end of the world. Not always but definitely in some cases, and discussing this with a friend back in England some years ago he espoused an interesting theory as to why this might be. “The thing is,” he said, “most overseas fans watch football on their own – on their laptop or whatever – so for them it’s a very personal experience. As such, they take results personally.”
It’s a train of thought that perhaps explains why so many overseas supporters club have sprung up. There are almost 60 officially affiliated to Liverpool in North America alone, with branches in New York, Washington and Madison, the later created by Bryn Griffiths, the Woking-born son of Liverpudlians who also organised Chicago’s official branch while living there.
“We’ve grown steadily and have hundreds of members who fill our bar – the Nomad World Pub Madison,” Griffiths says, and it’s obvious that for members of overseas supporters clubs, in the US and elsewhere, the importance of them is not only in their establishment of a place to watch games but also in the collective sense of identity that they foster.
That is certainly something Philip Knowles has got out of being a member of San Francisco’s official Liverpool supporters club. Born in Liverpool, he moved to southern California at the age of six and then to “San Fran” for college. He’s been in the city ever since and, for the past 12 years, a Kezar regular.
“One of my earliest memories of watching Liverpool at the Kezar was the 2007 Champions League semi-final against Chelsea – the atmosphere was wild,” Knowles says. “Being part of the supporters club and coming to this bar is central to my experience of following Liverpool in San Francisco. I’ve made friends here and being with them makes the whole experience of being an overseas fan much more fun.”
The clock strikes 7am and it’s time for kick-off, at which point the unique nature of this experience well and truly hits me. It’s early morning, I’m barely awake and stood in a bar watching Liverpool play a game that is starting at 3pm back home. I know 3pm kick-offs back home and this is not how they are supposed to go.
“An eight-hour time difference is crazy, especially for the games that kick-off at noon in the UK – that means a 4am start for us on the west coast,” says Knowles. “But I look forward to it – waking up on the couch, having a coffee and heading straight here. It’s definitely an experience.”
Certainly those packed into the Kezar are in good spirits as play gets under way in north-west London. The Bobby Firmino song breaks out and enthusiasm levels remain high all the way until Raheem Sterling gives City the lead on 12 minutes. And then there is almost total silence, a real sense of deflation, and perhaps something in the theory that overseas fans react to events – setbacks especially – in particularly extreme fashion.
Liverpool’s disjointed first-half display is certainly not helping matters and amid the muttering there is tangible concern that City could run riot. Thank God, then, for the occasional and wonderfully American outbursts that break the silence, with a personal favourite being “Nice sidenet!” as one of City’s attackers fails to hit the target.
Liverpool are much better after the interval, which leads to an increase in the volume. The whole thing goes up to 11 after Joel Matip equalises and pretty much stays that way as those in red crank up the pressure. They can’t find a winner, though, so the game goes to penalties. Cue a rendition of the Allez, Allez, Allez song followed by a sudden thud in the Kezar’s collective enthusiasm levels as City clinch victory.
But there is no angst. Instead backs are patted, hands are shook and everyone slowly but surely heads for the exits with a full Sunday ahead of them. Until next time and all that.