Arsenal Women in DC: Tour Diary Day 1

I can’t sleep on planes. A mixture of permanently damaged hips making sleeping in seated positions difficult and the fact that I have had other profound issues around sleep anyway make it impossible. But it can be useful sometimes. I landed in DC at around 9pm local time on Monday evening or 2am London time.

With no plane sleep behind me, I wearily made my way through customs and clambered into a taxi to my hotel, arriving at around 11pm local. Great. Sleep 11.30pm till 6am and I am straight into DC time. Which is especially helpful because today, Tuesday, it was straight into action.

Arsenal held an open training session at George Mason University campus, around a 30 minute drive out of DC. The drive from my hotel to the university is my first taste of US suburbia, the kind of which I have seen on screen so many times. Large converted houses with mailboxes at the end of the drive, Stars and Stripes everywhere, house numbers that seem to go up to 18,753…

George Mason is a really nice facility, a really nice, relaxed place for an open training session with its US style bleachers stand, running track and lack of any really imposing barriers between fans and players. Then you remember that this is a university campus and you are even more impressed. Thankfully the oppressive DC heat backs off a little and gives way to some cooling clouds as the players take to the field.

It’s a Tuesday morning in the suburbs and there are a few hundred fans here, which, very recently would have represented a good crowd for a game at Meadow Park. Lots of people say hi and that they love Arseblog which feels reassuring because later on, yours truly is part of a panel discussion to talk women’s football content and the growth of women’s football. I talked to a lot of really nice people today. The camera guy for Washington Spirit is a big Arsenal fan and we talk for ages about the men’s and women’s teams.

Stina Blackstenius trains alone as she continues to recover from a hip problem, Daphne van Domselaar is not with the group as she also recovers from a hip issue and Lina Hurtig is also not yet training with the group after a long spell on the sidelines. Lotte Wubben-Moy sports a Batman style mask after taking a painful bang on the nose in Sunday’s win over Washington Spirit.

15 minutes is put aside for players to sign autographs and take selfies with fans and supporters slowly creep to the front as time on the training session ticks down. The Meadow Park culture alive and well in the Virginia suburbs! I get a chance to have a word with Jonas Eidevall and he enthuses about the opportunity, not just for fans to connect with the players, but for the players to properly understand the depth of feeling for them in the US.

Last summer, I went to LA for the men’s pre-season tour and was just blown away by the experience of talking to so many fans stateside. I put it to Jonas that it’s one thing to know you have fans somewhere and another to see and feel that interest for yourself. (I wrote a piece on the LA tour last year and I gave it the headline ‘connection’).

I ask him whether Rosa Kafaji gave us a good insight into why Arsenal bought her during her cameo against Washington Spirit. ‘She is very brave in the way she plays but she is so good technically that she can be brave.’ This follows a training session on the pitch that Arsenal have arranged with local kids as part of the DC Scores programme.

Then I am up for a panel discussion with Tony Francavila from DC Scores, a local community project for kids in DC that combines soccer (I have to use that word while I am here) and Sarah Bergman from Togethxr, a brand that lists long time USWNT attacker Alex Morgan among its founders. Sarah and I are asked about women’s football content and its evolution and I am minded of that quote from Kierkegaard, that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.

Because we plan or strategise very little of what we do with the AWFC content on Arseblog, we just keep doing it and sometimes I think about the ‘journey’ afterwards. But we are asked for our reflections on Arsenal Women being able to take part in a tour like this one and there being a commercial basis for it now. In my answer / ramble, I talk about how the US is the most fertile ground for women’s soccer in the world and has been for a long time.

On the men’s side, the US is clearly a market that Arsenal are courting more aggressively. On the women’s side the dynamic is similar but different, harnessing the name of Arsenal FC in the US is an important part of this, but women’s soccer was enormous Stateside well before England got its act together. This is not a place / audience / market that needs any convincing about women’s soccer. Two weeks ago this country won a fifth Olympic Gold in the sport (it’s only been an Olympic sport since 1996).

Arsenal boast one of those gold medalists in their current squad and at this very open training session. Emily Fox was born in Ashburn, Virginia around a 30 minute drive from this campus and she is greeted like a returning hero. Alessia Russo and Lotte Wubben-Moy went to college in North Carolina. Heather O’Reilly and Tobin Heath have worn the red and white. And you can play friendlies against American teams that are on your level. The cables are there, they just need to be connected.

Later on, the players with the closest US connections, Fox, Russo and Wubben-Moy, join in with a DC Scores poetry session with some local kids, culminating in a touching scene with Wubben-Moy which we will recount on Friday, when Arsenal will be publishing a lot more content around this community hook-up.

I come back to my hotel and sit by the pool to write some things up, check in at home (I sent my daughter a video of Gunnersaurus dancing and she asks why I am not dancing with him. I don’t have a good answer to this question) before taking a walk up towards the Monument and the White House. I am saving the full tourist experience for tomorrow, when there are no club or media activities, for now, I am good with a beer and a burger in the area and typing this back at my hotel, my eyelids are getting heavy.

We will have a vlog from the open training session out in the morning UK time.