SOCCER DILETTANTE, NO. 1: CLEARLY AFRAID OF A COMMITMENT

Hell is a blank page. Discuss.

Upon reflection, and procrastination, it's become clear as mud.

The way that ESPN.com's Bill Simmons picked his English Premiership team to cheer for during the '06-07 season because he's Bill Simmons and the rest of us are not.

With few notable exceptions, no one among us bloggers has the platform ESPN can provide, where Simmons' solicited help from readers in picking his English football club (he ultimately picked Tottenham Hotspur, a happy medium between popular and obscure). The Sports Guy received something like 4,000 e-mails, many running 1,000 to 1,500 words in length.

More power to him. However, choosing a favourite club based on input from fans and criterium such as "celebrity fans" and the appeal of club's home city as a vacation spot (which were some of Simmons' categories) seems like the most contrived thing this side of My Fair Brady.

There has to be a better way. I don't know what it is, but I know that I don't know. Yours truly made a similar, Simmons-esque decision the day after the World Cup that's it time to pick a Premiership club and really follow the rest of the world's football. Watching the big tournaments for one month every second year, catching the odd Saturday morning match and being hooked on reruns of the sleazy-yet-strangely-compelling Brit soap Footballer$ Wives is not enough.

Such dilettante behaviour is to be avoided. Not to get all High Fidelity, but being a true professional appreciator requires signing up for the long haul.

To sum up, 21⁄2 weeks later, yours truly is no closer to picking a team to support and has realized Simmons' method is no way to choose in affairs of the heart. It works if you want to be one of those people who come out of the woodwork when there's a big tournament or a major derby. It's just not real.

My friend Neil Acharya cut to the quick when he suggested that instead of choosing now, follow the upcoming EPL season and go from there. It means a commitment, namely having to get out of bed on Saturday morning to watch games from overseas. The plan is for all of this to be chronicled in a regular feature called Soccer Dilettante.

By next spring, yours truly will hopefully have a football team to call his own, and it may not necessarily be an EPL side. (Neil has suggested Celtic in the Scottish Premiership, or maybe even scouting out the northern Europe leagues, in a nod to my Scandinavian heritage.)

Rest assured, this will all happen organically. It damn well better.

Related: To The Next Step (July 10)
Confessions of a Failed Soccer Hater: How Bill Hicks Made Me A Soccer Fan (June 8)

OTHER BUSINESS

• Today's Toronto Star has an article about former pro hockey player Mark Moore and his "new" book Saving The Game. The quotation marks are necessary since yours truly mentioned that same book more than a month ago -- and that was at least a month and a half after I actually finished reading it.

• Why is your cable and Internet bill so high? My friend Greg Hughes explains.
• What must it be like to be a Tampa Bay Devil Rays fan? The D-Rays, who are playing a day game today, scored four runs in their first at-bat -- then promptly yielded a 10-run innings to the L.A. Angels.
• The Toronto Sun's Bill Lankhof has a pretty funny line about the Toronto Argonauts' injury woes: "Super Dave never found this many ways to hurt himself."
  
  That said, it's a bit much to say of the B.C. Lions, the Argos' next opponent, "Not sure how often their medical staff has been called out, but I think (quarterback) Dave Dickenson needed an emergency manicure once." Dickenson has a wonky shoulder and the Lions regularly take him out of the game for short-yardage plays when they might run a quarterback sneak; when B.C. beat the Argos last month, he was removed in the third quarter but had to come back in when the Argos made the game close.
  
• CIS football kicks off five weeks from tomorrow. You will be subjected to occasional missives about the Queen's Golden Gaels. Don't say you weren't warned.
• Shameless plug time: yours truly's page at ArmchairGM, and a reminder to check out the the upcoming issue of Quill & Quire, where I have an article published. It should be on newstands by the second or third week of August.