How I Became the Gunners? - Part 1.

after being so frustrated by yesterday's performance....


How I Became the Gunners? - Part 1.


I am the Gunners. I am proud to admit that I am supporting one of the most successful football clubs on earth, playing the most beautiful football in the entire world. And that is Arsenal Football Club (Arsenal). Gunners is the name everybody call us. I have been supporting this club (with such an awful lot of loyalty) for about 3 years and being an Arsenal fans has been a huge part of my life. It really is. Every weekend I sit in front of the computer, watch them playing football so beautifully with a live commentary which is provided from the official homepage of Arsenal. I like to submit what I think of ‘our’ game and how should ‘we’ improve etc during the match by emailing ‘our’ commentator in minute-by-minute. I really like the feeling that I am one of those who support the best football team around the world. There is a sense in many occasions that WE share something. From UK to US, from Africa to America, from Islington, where the club has its home ground, to a small town in Ivory Coast, there are millions of people whom I share something with. And I am one of them. It is just like I have got millions of friend and I really love that feeling.

At this point one might argue that given the fact that Arsenal is take their home in a small town in north London, then how did I become such an insane supporter of that club? How do I identify myself as Gunners? And also there are thousands of football team in the world, even in Korea there are several football team including Daejeon Citizen FC which has its home ground in my hometown. But I know almost nothing about Daejeon Citizen FC. So why is that? How it works? Obviously the way I became supporter of Arsenal is not a miracle. There is every reason to look at how it works, I mean, how I became supporter of Arsenal, not Daejeon Citizen or any other club else. Now you may get a little bit of clue from the remaining part of this short-essay.

In the summer of 2007, I landed at the Heathrow Airport, in London, with all the excitement and great deal of expectation ahead of me. I was going to stay in London for a year with a great ambition of beating English. At that time I was just normal football fan. There were general interests in English football and European football in Korea, mostly affected by the fact that Ji-Sung Park, one of the heroes of Korea national team in the World Cup 2002, joined Manchester United (Man Utd.) which is one of the most famous football clubs in the world, and was playing very nicely. With a kind of feeling that ‘our’ player shows his ambition and ability to play in that high-level football team and league, every journals in Korea started to bring extravagant amount of report and news from England to Korea, insisting that ‘we’ can now be proud of that. He got a huge amount of support from Korean people, and soon became the hero for almost every football fans in Korea. Man Utd. is regarded just as the another national team in most of reports, Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager of Man Utd., became more famous than anybody else in the football world. From that context, I was aware of sort of nationalism so I really did not like that general mood. But at least, I have to say that from that moment, my interest in European football has been broadened. Although I was supporting none of those teams, I enjoyed some fantastic football in general. Things had to be different however, when I started to find my feet in entirely different life in London. First of all I just wanted to be a Londoner, not a visitor. I was trying to go deeply into their life to look at how they live, how they think, what they like, and even what they eat. I thought that is the best way to spend my time in London. What I wanted to learn is much more than English which makes sense a lot to me. Spending such a huge amount of money then you get clumsy British-accented English, knowing almost nothing about their culture? I was not convinced with that at all. And that kind of thought led me to become highly madly addicted football fans in the end.


====================================

* Part Two will be followed in the very near future.

** Come On Arsenal!
"We've got to stick together."
Rightly so.

*** Ji Sung Park killed us once again.
Ooops... we've already got enough killers against us.
Too many, actually.

**** Was Denilson just jogging yesterday, anyway?