A Grand Old Team to See in Japan ー日本で見る、偉大なる古いチームー

Last week I took my son to see his first football match.  The team I support, from my hometown in Scotland, played two games in Japan.  We went to see Celtic play Yokohama F. Marinos at the Nissan Stadium in Yokohama. 

We chose the more enjoyable of the two games, even though Celtic lost.  The game we watched finished 6 – 4 to Yokohama.  Although Celtic won the next match 1 – 0 against Gamba Osaka, I am glad that we got to experience the excitement of 10 goals in a match. 

My son enjoyed the singing.  I taught him one of the songs the Celtic fans sing, and he had a chance to sing it out loud at the match several times. 

I enjoyed hearing the accents of quite a few Glaswegians who had come over to Japan to watch the match.  We even nearly got to see a fight between two fans just in front of us.  One extremely drunk fan, who had been singing and shouting the whole match, got very angry when Yokohama scored their sixth goal.  He then started shouting and swearing at his own team.  Another fan told him to calm down.  The drunk fan didn’t like this, and ran over to the other guy, pointing and shouting in his face.  Eventually, they separated without hitting each other.  The drunk guy said to the other fan, “You will die before me!”  I suppose the other fan must have been quite old. 

Then the old fan said loudly, “What a half-wit!” 

What wonderful nostalgia I felt.  Ah, this is Scottish football, I thought: the love for your team, the singing, the drunkenness, the hint of violence. 

I am just glad I could introduce my son to it all.  I wouldn’t want him to live his life without it. 

“…For that we only know,

That there’s going to be a show,

And that Glasgow Celtic will be there!”

 

Vocabulary:

“A grand old team” – The first lines of “The Celtic Song” are, “For it’s a grand old team to play for, For it’s a grand old team to see…”  Celtic are quite an old team now, having been founded in 1888 to raise money for charity to help poor Irish immigrants who moved to Glasgow in large numbers around that time, due to famine and poverty in Ireland

a half-wit – a slang term of insult, meaning a person with only half of a normal person’s mental capacity; an idiot