Archive for the ‘American Football’ Category

Sigma FC v St. Catharines Roma Wolves, Sunday 21st June 2026, 4pm

July 16, 2026

Travel days can sometimes be a bit of a nuisance, particularly if your flight home departs late evening. Paul and I checked out of our Toronto apartment with around ten hours to go before we had to be at the airport but fortunately Niagara Falls wasn’t too far away and so we went to have a look at that.

I’d been before, back in 1988. On that occasion I’d approached Niagara from the American side and then crossed the bridge into Canada. My then wife and I had taken a ride on one of those Maid of the Mist boats that sail close enough to the falls for you to be drenched with the spray. It was all a lot dryer this time as Paul and I got no closer than the path that runs alongside the road, well above the falls. It was still a spectacular sight.

The best part of the travel day though was that on the drive back to the airport we got to take in another football game at the Tim Horton Field in Hamilton. This game was a fixture in the Ontario Premier League, which sounds quite grand. but it is the third-tier of Canadian football and the players are semi-professional.

Hamilton is only around an hour from Toronto and is probably a commuter town, but it all seemed quiet and run down. We called into a bar for wings and ribs and whilst everyone was friendly enough, it had the air of a town with not much going on.

The game was free to get into and only one of the stands was open. The stadium holds twenty-two thousand and whilst it might be full when hosting the Hamilton Wild Cats in their Canadian Football fixtures, there were only around a hundred people watching Sigma take on St Catherines Roma Wolves in the more traditional version of the game.

I often think that local clubs at the lower levels miss a trick by not scheduling friendlies in cities where World Cup games are taking place. With so many fans in town, you’d likely get four-figure crowds watching Sunday League level fixtures. This game took a bit of getting to from Toronto, but I noticed another thirty-eight groundhoppers, mostly German, had clocked in to the futbology app.

It was a hard watch at times as the pitch was primarily marked for Canadian football which is a variant on American football. I had no idea of the existence of the Canadian rules. The main differences between the two codes is that in Canada there is an extra player on each side, but only three ‘downs’ instead of four in the US. The markings and the uprights caused some confusion to me when watching, but the players seemed to cope with it ok.

The standard was poor, but I think it was early season and the sides were still trying to gel. Sigma took the points with a single first half goal and we headed back to the airport having had the bonus of a travel day game and a second Canadian stadium tick.

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LSU Tigers v Army, Saturday 21st October 2023, 6pm

January 12, 2024

After the Mississippi stay, Jen and I moved on to Denham Springs in Louisiana for the dog-sitting. Even though Halloween was quite a way off, the neighbourhood was full of decorations. There was a residents competition to see who could put the most effort in and if you didn’t have a couple of twenty-feet high inflatables in your front yard then you didn’t really stand a chance.

It’s also a big football area, or specifically an LSU town. Everywhere you go people are sporting the colours. Player images adorn the drive-throughs and on game days the supermarkets are stripped of beer and snacks for house parties.

Whilst I’m all in favour of beer and snacks I like to watch my sport live and so Jen and I went along to Tiger Stadium for the fixture with the Army. Not the whole army, but presumably their version of Sandhurst.

It was a right arse-on getting parked but eventually we were directed to some free parking in a field that was only twenty minutes or so from the venue. We passed by some serious tailgating that involved gazebos and big tellies. Some of those people won’t even have bothered going inside, preferring instead to enjoy the atmosphere in the vicinity.

We did a lap of the stadium and had a gawp at Mike the Tiger. A real tiger in an enclosure that Jen assured me was much larger than the small pen that one of the earlier Mikes lived in when she was an LSU student.

Once inside we were able to take elevators to our forty-dollar seats way up high and in time for a helicopter drop of parachutists as pre-match entertainment. There was a band too, on a much bigger scale that the one at the soccer game, with perhaps a hundred or so members marching up and down.

I got myself a crawfish pie from one of the concession stands on the basis that I’m unlikely to get the option of buying one at a game anywhere else. I don’t see them catching on.

As a contest it was far too one-sided with LSU racking up the points at will. They were so dominant that they hooked their star quarterback at half-time denying him the opportunity to set whatever records he fancied. In the end, it finished up 62-0, which is a score that you wouldn’t expect to see anywhere other than at the cricket. Nevertheless, it was a decent evening out.

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