Chelsea

The biggest news here over the weekend was Chelsea winning the Champions League over Bayern Munich.  I am sure it didn't even hit the radar of the news back in the states, but was about a 48 hour party going on just down the road.  We only live maybe a mile from Stamford Bridge, so we are definitely in Chelsea country.  It all started midday on Saturday.  I rode my bike around Fulham and by 3 the pubs were starting to spill out into the streets already.  There was a constant stream of blue shirts headed that direction between the stadium and our flat.  That was still about 3 hours before the game started, I can't imagine where everyone ended up actually watching the game.

Its probably a bit tough to put it in perspective to American's but let me give it a go.  The Champions League takes the best teams from throughout Europe and puts them into a huge tournament that has been going on since June.  There are play in games early on and then 32 teams square off for the actual League.  So it would be a bit like taking the best 4 teams from the NFL and (assuming all other countries had a similar football league) the best teams from the other countries and playing them against each other.  So once you get to the final you have all the normal fans, and then all of the fans that think their country is better than all the others.  It would be like a jacked up Super Bowl of soccer.  Ok, so moving on

You could pretty much tell what was going on in the game by listening to the screams up and down the street.  I didn't watch the game till later in the night, and pretty much knew what had happened for the first 90 minutes.  If you were a soccer fan the game was pretty much amazing.  Everyone was picking Bayern to win, and frankly had been picking Chelsea to lose for the last two months or so.  Some how some way they just kept winning.  I could see a movie getting made about the season.  Anything and everything was stacked against them all season, it was pretty amazing.  Long story short though, they finally won on the last penalty of the shoot-out, after 120 minutes of bunker defence.

Sunday at 4 there was supposed to be a victory parade in and around the Stadium and Fulham.  I went for a run, actually more of a breathing hard and shuffling my feet, at about 2 and headed that direction just to see what was going on.  They had already closed all the streets, and people were everywhere.  My guess is that a good 25% of them hadn't been home yet from the night before.  It was loud and rowdy then, must have been nuts once the parade actually got going.  They said that there were tens of thousands of people out for the Parade, but I think the # was WAY higher.  Imagine a couple of miles of streets just rammed with people.  Check out the pics................

This is the park where the parade stopped and the
team talked to fans.  Gotta be 50k people just here.