Who should you support?

So many teams to choose from. Which one is right for you?

Supporting a team from afar  

I have been supporting teams far away from where I live all my life - as a life long Dundee United (football/soccer) supporter growing up in Cheshire in the UK, the distance was not insurmountable, but still meant that as a child i could not attend any live games. As I started following other sports I started to try and root for new teams, the only trouble was that I had no idea who to support or why.

My first experience in looking for a team to support came when I discovered baseball in 2002. Every week there was a late evening game from the US which was broadcast in the early hours of the morning here in the UK. This led to me experiencing various teams and players with commentary in English. After some deliberation I chose the St Louis Cardinals as my chosen team and have been a fond supporter for 18 years (I even had tickets to see them in London this year until it was cancelled due to the Coronavirus). As I started to become more aware of American Football and Ice Hockey, the St Louis Rams (as they were then) and the St Louis Blues were obvious choices. 

In the years since then I have added a whole host of other sports to my list, including Sumo, Australian Rules Football (AFL) and of course my biggest passion pesäpallo. But how did I come to support teams in those sports? Especially with a language barrier. This series of posts is designed to help the English speaking fan to choose a team to root for in Superpesis - of course you can still watch games as a neutral and enjoy them. Most of the games I review I am neutral on, although with pesäpallo I find it much easier to watch and be excited than in any other sport. Maybe it’s because the sport is amazing; maybe it’s because there are so many great teams and great players to admire.

How to choose a team

Choosing a team to support can be a very difficult thing to do and can make or break a person’s interest in a sport. If you have a team you can share joy with through the highs and lows of a season, it makes the whole thing far more personal and far more engaging. So what is the secret? To be honest, I could tell you it is one thing, but to someone else it may be something completely different; all I can say is what has drawn me to various teams in different sports and help raise the profile of the Superpesis teams so you can choose for yourself.

Let’s start at the beginning - my support for Dundee United football club stems from my Father (who is from Fife in Scotland) who is himself a lifelong fan. This choice was obvious for me, but growing up in the shadows of some of the biggest names in Football: Manchester United, Manchester City, Liverpool FC, Everton FC, it was common to see families split between the teams and each supported someone different.

With the St Louis Cardinals, I fell in love with their style of play under Tony Larussa and the amazing skills of Albert Pujols Jason Isringhausen and Chris Carpenter. I came to learn about the team more and I really loved how former Cardinals players were so supportive of the city and club that they often returned after they retired as players so they could work in the back room staff or open local businesses. I also loved the old stadium they played at and the general aesthetic of the club. 

In sumo my favourite wrestler (Rikishi) was Kaio. He is now retired but has opened his own stable of wrestlers. I became a Kaio fan because I liked his style of wrestling - he favoured his left hand and had far more throwing techniques to his win column than his contemporaries. Even the silly things like the colour miwashi (belt) that he wore really connected with me. 

With AFL, I chose the West Coast Eagles of Perth, Western Australia. Whilst I was familiar with some of their players and style of play, it was the city itself that led me to support them. I visited Perth in 2013 on a holiday to Australia (as well as Sydney and Melbourne) and it really felt like my kind of city. Despite being far too hot for me (even double digits Celsius is a bit much for me!), it was a city I could really see myself settling in to. 

That’s great but what about pesäpallo?

This one is a lot.e more tricky for me to answer. I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint people here and stay silent on which team i actually do support. I don’t want to state a team and be seen as partisan, when in fact I love the sport so much I could happy watch anyone! But what I will tell you is why I chose the team that I did and in the end, isn’t that really the point of this article?

I came to pesäpallo in about 2007 and immediately was so excited to start following a team. But the problem was, there was nothing in English for me to read about and I hadn’t learnt any Finnish at the time. I had to rely on terrible (and sometimes incomprehensible) translations of websites to figure out any information. In the end there were 3 key things that swayed it for me:

1. The way the team played and the personalities of players - a classic factor;
2. The availability of information on the internet (in any language) - otherwise how can you follow someone when you have no way to connect?
3. The aesthetic of the team, the town and the stadium - Finland is home to some of the most remarkable and unspoiled scenery in the world and some of it is just beyond the pesäpallo fields!

What’s my advice?

Like I said earlier, what works for me may not be the same for someone else, but I hope that this post will at least help people new to the game think about the teams in a different aspect and start thinking about what characteristics draw them to other teams in other sports - which team does Joensuun Maila remind you of? Or Sotkamon Jymy? Or Vimpelin Veto? Etc. 

In the end it is the team you can connect to that is the one you should support. Do you love plucky teams with great internet presence that is out in the country? try Pattijoen Urheilijat. Do you love the idea of watching people dive into a river to retrieve balls still in play? Maybe Vimpelin Veto is for you. Or do you just look good in purple and orange? Then maybe Sotkamon Jymy is your team! There are so much more to these teams and all the others in Superpesis - far too much for this post, which is why this is only the first in a series of posts that will be published in the coming weeks.

What’s next in the series?

In this series of posts I will look at each of the current Superpesis teams and discuss their history, their key players for 2020, the towns and cities they come from and any other traits that make them all worth while supporting.