‘Cheer for the Team Where You Are’

THE FXBG ADVANCE SUNDAY 7/19/26 MORNING READ

By Claire Marshall Watkins, ADVANCE CONTRIBUTOR

London at Night/Diego Torres/Pixabay

My dad is the guy who stops to chat with everyone in the supermarket. Mostly it’s with people he knows—which is still almost everyone in Fredericksburg—but even with people he doesn’t. They have the same brand of chips in their baskets? That’s a perfectly good reason to strike up a conversation for him.

At community events, I used to tug at his shirt sleeves as a tired kid. Was another conversation really necessary after the four he’d had since telling us kids we were going home? The answer was always yes. I used to resent it. I was either embarrassed or tired or just being a kid. But now I get it, and I miss it.

I moved back to Fredericksburg as an adult, at 21, then away again at 23. When I first left Fredericksburg at 18, I moved to Roanoke for university where I found myself in an even smaller community. My friends and I rarely left campus—it was pretty secluded from the rest of Roanoke—but when we did, the CVS attendants, the woman who ran the antique store, almost anyone, was ready to strike up a conversation.

But London, where I’ve lived now for the past year, isn’t at all like that. It’s considered weird to talk to strangers here, even just to compliment an outfit or smile, though it’s not like that everywhere in the country.

The English North, I’ve discovered, is to the United Kingdom what the American South is to the United States—both friendly and hospitable, and both also known for their unique accents.

This summer, the FIFA World Cup brought some of that Southern (or Northern) hospitality to London. For the first time since I moved, I’ve seen strangers talking to each other, even celebrating. Football is such a big deal here that many pubs across the country stayed open for the England v Mexico match, originally set for 1 a.m. BST, but delayed until 2 a.m. due to weather.

After downing Mexico, England went on to beat Norway in the quarter final. I was a wedding reception when the game started, and the happy couple got permission from the venue to project the game on a screen. A bunch of us stayed to watch, even through overtime which went well after midnight.

After the first extension, my partner and I left so we could try to get home at a semi-reasonable hour because we both had a long way to go. Trains had stopped running by then so we took a string of buses. Our last bus picked us up in Kingston in south-west London.

The streets were packed with fans draped in England flags, wearing England kits and red and white face paint. There were 5-year-olds and 55-year-olds singing “Hey, Jude” in celebration of English midfielder Jude Bellingham, who had scored our two goals. On one bit of pavement, a crowd of strangers jumped up and down around a speaker, shouting “It’s coming home!” A few meters down, a group of six young men ran into the road, sat down, and did the Norwegians’ Viking row but replaced “ro” with “Jude.” A car approached, but instead of the driver getting angry, they honked their horn in rhythm with the chant.

On that last bus, jam-packed full, people talked to each other. Towards the end of the route, bus still crowded, one man laughed and said to no-one in particular, “We can’t all live in [area]!” Everyone else laughed, too. None of us had ever seen this bus so full.

We were promised a Bank Holiday if England won the World Cup, but we unfortunately got knocked out in the semi-finals against Argentina. It was a sport in and of itself trying to find somewhere to watch that game. My friends and I put out feelers all over town before settling on a converted warehouse bar in Bermondsey in south London. It was an excruciatingly hot day—we’ve had heat wave after heat wave out here—so during hydration breaks and halftime, nearly everyone crammed into the garden out front.

At one point during the first half, the broadcast showed Louis Tomlinson, singer and former member of One Direction, and a man a few tables away from mine shouted out “I love that guy!” I shouted back, “Yes, exactly!” And I ask this genuinely: When and where else in London could I have had that interaction before?

This World Cup has brought people together across cultures, generations, belief systems, and nationalities. I will admit that I didn’t cheer for England until later in the competition. The U.S. got farther than I anticipated, and being far away has somehow made me appreciate it more. Canada got pretty far, too, and I cheered for them. But my mom shared something my grandpa always said that I couldn’t argue with: Cheer for the team where you are.

She said that when my Grandpa moved to Virginia years ago, he started cheering for the Nats and the Caps. He still loved the Blue Jays and the Maple Leafs, but he wasn’t in Canada anymore. Touché.

So, between the quarter-finals and semis, I bought an England shirt and wore it to watch the game.

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Claire Marshall Watkins is an alumna of the University of Mary Washington, currently pursuing her master’s in journalism at Goldsmiths, University of London. You can read more of her writing on her substack, Virginia Magnolia.