It’s a regular occurrence to see English Football Teams on TVs across the United States at the moment. The Premier League is arguably the most popular league in the world and many of the most beloved English teams are on display regularly for the American audience. However my team is not! For close to twenty years, I’ve been supporting Peterborough United Football Club. The club is known by the nickname “The POSH”. They do not play in the Premier League. Nor do they play (at the moment) in the Championship. The POSH are a League 1 team which means that they are in the third tier of English Football. Since they are not on the television often, I follow my favorite team weekly through the internet by watching highlights and interviews on Youtube etc. This week I’ll be making my second trip to watch a match at their home, The ABAX Stadium (formerly London Road) and I can’t wait!
My interest in the POSH was completely unexpected. My girlfriend (now wife) bought me the first XBox and the FIFA video game to go along with it. At first I used Liverpool as my team because as a young player I had watched soccer videos with Kevin Keegan. Eventually I got bored with how easy it was to win the league. So I decided to choose a lower league team and get them promoted to the Premier League. As I was searching through the lower league teams, I found Peterborough. Since my name is Pete, it seemed like a fine choice. My POSH teams on the XBox were usually a combination of quality POSH players and a few of my favorite American or English players. Brian McBride and Scot Thompson were regulars in the digital version of the blue and white.
After playing the game with the POSH for a while, I decided to look into how the team was in real life. It was very casual at first but the season they got into a relegation battle really drew me in. After that I followed the team regularly online by reading the match reports and checking Skysports.com. The POSH forum at LondonRoad.net was another way that I got information relevant to the club. The slow burn of my love for POSH got a large log thrown upon it in September of 2006 when Darragh MacAnthony became chairman of the club. He stated that his ambition was to do exactly what I had done in the video game world. If I wasn’t hooked before, I was all in at that point. My newborn son had a full kit and I wore POSH blue (or bright yellow) regularly. In addition to game days, I wore the POSH colors whenever I ran long distance races.
In 2007 I decided that it was time to visit London Road to attend a match. It was possibly the most frugally planned trip that I could arrange. I was in England for three nights including one in a basement room of a one star hotel in London. It was an amazing trip! The main reasons that the trip was amazing were all POSH related. The team beat MK Dons 4-0 despite Shane Blackett getting sent off in the second half. After the match, I waited around for autographs from the players and coaches. Shwan Jalal and Craig Mackail-Smith were particularly nice to me. Unfortunately I did not get to meet the new manager, Darren Ferguson. At that moment, I mainly knew him as Sir Alex’s son. Eventually he would become one of the best POSH managers by putting Darragh’s plan for promotion into effect. By signing ambitious young players and putting them into a system that created boatloads of goals, he has become my favorite manager.
So after a twelve year absence, I finally get to return to Peterborough. Many things have changed but many have not. Darren Ferguson is the manager but he is on his third spell with the club. The club is still ambitious but pragmatic in its approach. On the outside looking in on playoff spots, there is a slim possibility that they’ll make the cutoff. Regardless I am still hopeful that I’ll get the chance to see one of the games culminating in a playoff promotion success. I know that it will be a great atmosphere having watched “Sunderland ’til I die!” recently, it’s obvious they have passionate fans. Regardless, I can’t wait to be there! It may require thousands of miles of travel and over ten years of waiting but I’m proud to be a POSH fan! Supporting Man United would just be too easy!
Pete
There are plenty of nicknames for the police. The most common comes from the city of Chicago where the badges were made out of copper. So eventually the name “copper” became associated with the job. That of course got shortened to the word “Cop”. Whether it is the fuzz, popo, Five – O or any other version, the code is usually developed by someone who is doing something wrong and trying to hide the discussion of the over-watching force. So with all of that code in mind, it is probably time to Five – O – U.
My first car was a 1977 Chevy Nova! I inherited it from my great aunt and it was the perfect first car. It had holes in the floor boards where you could actually see the road below you. It had an 8 Track tape player in it that never really worked. It was pale blue and covered with rust spots, as you can tell from the description, I loved it! There were plenty of reasons to love it that had nothing to do with how looked or how it ran. And now looking back on it, I understand even better that it was the perfect first car exactly because it was a piece of junk. At no point did I ever have to worry about messing it up. I learned how to change the oil, replace the bulbs and change tires on that car. At no point did I think, “If I mess this up, I’m screwed!”
Marvel and DC have been churning out movies for years now. For many reasons, the Marvel Universe is leading the charge in this genre. One of the main reasons is that they don’t just have the heroes face the obvious Super Villains. They also continually show their heroes struggle with the more difficult Super Villains that are hiding within themselves. Whether it is Tony Stark battling his own ego, need for control and alcoholism* or Captain America’s conflicting values of friendship with right and wrong; these are all battles that we as mere mortals can relate to. So what do you do when the enemy that you must face resides within you? Identify your foe. This is usually the most difficult step.
In 1998 my best friend and I traveled to Europe for the World Cup which was held in France. Despite our main goal being to watch soccer games, we also made side trips to other cities inside and outside of France. One of our stops was the Spanish city of Barcelona. It’s a beautiful city on the coast with the architecture of Gaudi, the shopping of Las Ramblas and hosted the Olympics only a few years prior. Despite all of those magnificent characteristics, whenever I talk about that trip, I usually talk about the Police Department. Let me explain!
At certain point in history, in particular parts of the world, the wealthiest people such as kings lived in castles. I’m sure many people have fantasized about living in a castle. The fantasy probably does not mirror the reality of what it was like hundreds of years ago. By comparison, the comforts of most of our modern day houses outshines castle living. Castles were made of cold stone without heat or air conditioning. Although they served as protection from the elements in some ways, there was no escaping the fact that survival was the order of the day and not comfort.
It’s odd the way that we think of things. Often an effective story is a much better tool for creating change than the actual 100% truth. I’ve run up the “Rocky Steps” in Philadelphia well over a dozen times. Each time I felt a sense of accomplishment and kinship with Rocky. The truth is of course that Rocky Balboa never truly existed and in that moment I’m play acting much like Stallone was in the 1970’s. Regardless of those facts, the story gets me to where I need to go more effectively. So my explanation below is not the 100% gospel truth but it is rather an effective way to exercise change.
Geometry was probably one of the easiest classes for me in high school. Despite its relative ease, I had trouble staying engaged with it. I found it tedious to give all of the reasons why something was true. It was usually pretty obvious whether a problem was going to withstand the scrutiny of the different theorems that we were learning at the time. So it seemed like a relative waste to my teenage self to write out all of the steps in proving or disproving a problem. Especially when the answers (to the odd problems usually) were in the back of the book.
In this episode, Peter Loge and I have a wide-ranging conversation on soccer’s many uses as a metaphor. Peter is the author of “Soccer Thinking for Management Success.” Throughout the book, he discusses several different ways that soccer overlaps with management concepts. Check out his work at 
Huryk Unlimited 