Pardon me for stealing ESReality’s famous tag line but for this article it seemed appropriate. Tonight my football team play against the side top of the league in a battle that will decide whether last week’s 4-0 win was a mere fluke or whether we’ve got what it takes to challenge the big boys. image: 1Hackney_Marshes_Football_01As a goalkeeper facing a team that has scored 26 goals in 6 games I’m somewhat apprehensive about the affair, a feeling I haven’t felt since my last competitive game of ET. What I want to explore in this column is the vast similarity that team gaming and team sports have because for me, my experiences in both are somewhat similar.

Way back when, when I was playing RTCW there was a long period where winning was everything (not that it happened as often as I would have liked!), the ClanBase UK Ladder was a hive of activity and the UK scene was so hostile to one another it wasn’t difficult to find a rivalry and a team that we really wanted to beat. Motivation was sky high and we’d be getting practices left right and center all in preparation for the next official match. We had our routine, never have the official before 9pm so that we had ample time to get a game in beforehand, and personally I had the routine down so that I always had a fresh diet coke in time for the game. I’m not ashamed to admit that if it was a big match, it’d be on my mind all day at school even the odd text message would be darted around between us ‘ready for the big game?’. So now its 8 AM on a Tuesday 5 years later and I’m asking myself the same question, ready for the big game? Only this time, there’s not a panzer or a medic in sight.

Accordingly to Wikipedia - on an average Sunday morning over 100 eleven a-side matches are played on Hackney marshes in East London. The site is infamous for its 88 football pitches and having played there on a Sunday morning in the pouring rain I can tell you the experience is quite surreal. A thousand people spread out over these pitches and all you can see to the right and left is football, you might try to focus on one match from where you’re standing but your eyes will also lose focus as another ball comes flying across your sight. This single purpose mass enchantment can only really be found in one other pastime, which is of course the BYOC.

Come rain or shine right now thousands of gamers are headed for Jönköping, Sweden for Dreamhack Winter. Advertising as the worlds biggest gaming party it has housed up to 6000 gamers concurrently and the glow of the PC monitors is intoxicating. PC’s to the right of you, PC’s to the left and all in the same name, gaming. Unlike football perhaps, the tournaments aren’t everything for these events however what’s not tournament is all social and that is very much what Sunday league football is all about, win or lose a pint after the match and a bag of crisps.
Team sports like team gaming have maybe inherent similarities. If you win, you win together that’s what makes it fun, the reaction of your teammates and adulation that is associated with scoring the winning goal or hitting the winning headshot. Likewise tonight when I let in that goal that really I should have saved I’ll feel just as bad as I did when I missed that killer panzershot, because I would’ve let the team down and whether it’s the silence of ventrilo or cockney accented ‘F#!k’s Sake’ that I can hear from my left back, it echo’s just as loudly to remind me that I messed up.

So I ask you, is Clanbase or ESL where gaming meets reality? Or is it when you make your way to LAN to meet your friends and play together and share together what thousands of people do on in Sunday League football. Because having experienced it perhaps the wrong way around, gaming first and football second I couldn’t tell you what was more ‘normal’.