This article supplements information found in Americans Abroad: Eddie Lewis on page 12 of the Nov. 27, 2000 issue of Soccer America Magazine. Eddie Lewis played four years of MLS ball for San Jose before a lucrative deal lured him to the English League last February. The former UCLA standoutÆs second season finds him fighting for playing time but relishing life in EnglandÆs capital. BY WILL KUHNS STADIUM. Craven Cottage, Fulham’s stadium, is one of the oldest in England and holds about 22,000 fans. Plans are in progress to build a new stadium. “It’s a small, sort of cozy stadium,” Lewis said. “To be totally honest, it’s an older stadium, especially for a club with, at least now, as much money as we have. I enjoy all the stadiums, but ours is sort of special just because it’s so intimate. [The fans] are right on top of you. … most of the stadiums we play in are even nicer than ours — the pitches are so nice, the fans are always loud, singing back and forth. I think if I had to say one thing, that when it’s all said and done, that what I’ll miss the most about Europe, it’s the atmosphere at games.” The most recent renovation of Craven Cottage was nearly 20 years ago, so some of the facilities are a bit Spartan. “The locker rooms are kind of small, the showers are kind of old, there are no big treatment rooms or anything. In some of the stadiums we play in, there are huge Jacuzzis for after the game, massage tables, the whole nine. I just think with our stadium, the space is too limited for that. But they’re claiming that the one they’re building is going to be the most state-of-the-art in the world. [Owner Mohamed] Al Fayed doesn’t like to do anything without a lot of hype, so I’m sure it will be nice. It’s supposed to seat 28,000 with the ability to add a second level all the way around.” FANS. “When I got here I thought ‘these are the most incredible fans in the world — this is unbelievable.’ But the more I’ve learned, Fulham fans are actually a little more subdued than some others and London fans, in general, get the reputation as a sort of L.A. crowd where there are other interests. ôThey’re there, but they’re just not as diehard as say, some of the teams up North. The more North you go, with big clubs like Newcastle, Liverpool and Everton, it’s just absolute live or die. Even in the First Division, as you go North, the fans are just nutty. Our fans are still very good, but it gets much nuttier. ôDepending on how the game goes, sometimes teams have to stay in their locker rooms an extra 20 minutes because they have to clear people out — everybody gets so upset.” Lewis was concerned about how Fulham fans would receive him as an American, but those fears never materialized. “They were very warm. As I got there last year, I was playing right away and they were very supportive. They were always interested to know how I was enjoying England, how I was dealing with the rain and the weather and all that. … They have a song they sing depending on who’s doing well at the moment, and they’d sing that for me every now and then, but they haven’t made up any new ones just for me or anything. ôThat’s sort of what some the players on our team say is wrong about our fans. If you go up North, everybody has their own song and they are clever songs. ôTeams are going up and down [between First Divison and Premier] so often that pretty much everybody in England is tied to a team, either if you’re from that area or you grew up supporting a team. It never really changes, regardless of how that team is doing or which division it’s in. There are old fans that have been around all of their lives. “At the moment, it’s very fashionable to be a Fulham fan, just because we’re doing so well.” TEAMMATES. Before this season, French coach Jean Tigana took over and since, five French coaches have been added. Lewis says the team’s attitude has changed significantly since last year. ôBefore it was a very, very English team and it seemed like a few of the English guys kind of ran the team and did what they wanted. This year, they’ve been much, much quieter. It’s been a very disciplined team. Guys are much more on their behavior. Guys are not taking days off from practice just because they don’t feel great. It sort of seemed like that was the case toward the end of last year.” “If things weren’t going so well, it might be a completely different situation, but for the most part it’s a very good group of guys. They’re all players with pretty good reputations. Most all of them have played in the Premier League at some point, but have come down to Fulham because it’s a club that can pay their wages and help get them back up. The only players here are Premier players on Premier wages. They feel like this is a club that has not only ambitions of moving up, but of being a top club and there’s no reason not to be a part of it.” JEAN TIGANA. “He’s really quiet. He has an assistant, Christian Damiano, who runs all the training sessions and is sort of the tactician behind everything. He coached in the French federation for 12 years, he was an assistant during the World Cup and he’s unbelievable. To be fair, none of the French coaches talk a lot, but they’ve spent a lot of time learning English and they do make an effort.” Ushering in the new guard was, predictably, not the smoothest transition, but reeling off 11 consecutive wins certainly helped. “Before the season started, it was very negative. All the English guys were saying, ‘French guy — he’s not going to understand the English player or the English First Division — there’s no way he’ll last even a year.’ But all of a sudden, when a team starts winning, nobody complains about anything. It’s ‘Oh, he’s a genius and his training sessions are great.’ It’s always that way. As long as teams are winning, everything the coach is doing is masterful.” “They are very hard-working folks, very set in their ways,” says Lewis, adding that they are tactically more aware than coaches he had in the United States. “They’re very insistent on where players should be on the field and when they get there. … They’re very picky about it. It almost seems like it’s never quite good enough. They assume that you’ve already learned everything else and the more detailed you can break it down, the better you’ll be. ôThe other thing is that they’re very unsatisfied with [players] having just one or two traits. It seems in my case, at least, that they thought I was a very good crosser of the ball, but in modern football — and they always defend themselves not as French coaches but as coaches of the modern game — there’s no such thing as wide players anymore. ôA player’s got to be able to get wide and get crosses, but he’s also got to be able to pull inside and playmake for the forwards. As well as defend a lot and score a handful of goals. I don’t think that pressure is really [in the United States]. I seemed to be content just crossing a lot of balls, coming inside every once and a while, but it’s clearly not enough here. They just think that’s too one-dimensional and to be fair, I agree with them, really.” LANGUAGE. Playing in England would seem to make language a non-issue for Lewis, but he says some of the thicker accents within England were quite difficult to comprehend at first. Now, he says, he can not only understand everyone, but identify where people are from by their dialect. Lewis has not picked up any accent of his own, but he does find himself using British terminology. A language barrier did arise, however, when Tigana took over. “When [the coaches] first got there, they could barely say hello. But they’ve had some pretty intense tutorials and have actually come a long way in a short period of time. We can now have a conversation with them. Sometimes it takes a little effort, but they can usually get what you’re trying to say. ôOne of the players, John Collins, is a Scottish guy, but he played under Tigana at Monaco for three years, and I think that was one of the reasons, originally, for bringing him in — to sort of help smooth over that transition.” FIRST DIVISION. Fulham was relegated from the Premier League in 1968 and is now looking to get back up for the first time since. The improvements began when Al Fayed took over in 1996. ôAs soon as Al Fayed took over, it was like night and day. They basically just snatched up any player who was unhappy in his situation. We’re far and away, on paper, better than anybody in the league and that’s showing. A lot of teams just can’t compete.” “It’s always the joke on Fulham that they’re in the First Division but they have a higher salary cap than some Premier teams. … In general, you don’t get as many big foreigners, though. Most of the English players you can sort of interchange, except for the big, big players. Most of the players if you pulled them up or down wouldn’t make too big an impact. ôBut because of the foreign influence in the Premier League, you get technically a better game and as a result, the First Division is a little faster, a little more direct. The teams that do well don’t play so direct. One of the reasons we have so much success is that we keep the ball while other teams just knock it long and run hard. After chasing the ball for 70 minutes, they just run out of gas. Then every game, for the last 20 minutes, we start just killing teams.” TACKLING. Lewis said the tackling in the First Division is some of the worst he’s ever seen. “They slide at everything. So many times, two guys slide into each other. There’s already been a few broken legs, but I don’t see how there haven’t been more. I started a little slowly in that area, and once or twice the fans got on me for it. Now I end up just [slide tackling] at full speed without even thinking about it. “England is now complaining that the referees are too involved and they’re taking away the rugged part of the game, but it’s still pretty violent. There are a lot of cut heads, stitches — fortunately I haven’t been a victim yet. I think if you take a little bit of the technical play away [from the Premier League] and add some grit, you get the First Division.” MEDIA. “One thing that’s actually kind of nice about the First Division is that it still gets a lot of coverage, just because it’s England and they love the sensationalism of all of it, but it’s not nearly as out of hand as it is in the Premier League. That is really out of hand. It really can be overkill at times. ôThere are certain players who just cannot do anything without it being printed. Just ridiculous stuff. I actually enjoy reading it. The tabloids are so big over here and they just constantly are making up stories, creating controversies, trying to get the coaches fired or players moved when the teams aren’t doing well. For us, it’s pretty mellow, though. There’s a report on every game, but not so much of that other nonsense.” SCHEDULE. Fulham trains every day that it does not have a game, almost without fail. “It’s one of the things the guys were upset about when Tigana first took over,” Lewis says. “There are so many games, that there’s almost never a full week between games. Even the day after a game, we’ll be in for a run. Days before games, it’ll be really light.” The games are anything but fixtures. League games are usually on Saturday, but sometimes on Tuesday or Friday. Cup games are generally on Wednesday. “It’s pretty crazy,” Lewis says. “A lot of games are across international fixture dates and so they get postponed and we’ve had four of those that they’re just throwing in at random times.” WEATHER. “If everyone’s training in shorts and long-sleeved shirts, you can probably expect to see me in the full warm-up suit,” Lewis says. “The California kid doesn’t always feel quite as warm.” DRIVING. “I’ve definitely almost died three or four times because I looked the wrong way. As much as you know you’re supposed to look one way, sometimes your subconscious takes over — you’ve been looking the other way your entire life. It’s definitely been a challenge.” LONDON. Living in London is “one of the best things about playing in England,” says Lewis. “It is just a massive city. It reminds me a lot of New York. Where I live is in the Southwest quarter … right between Chelsea, Knights Bridge, Kensington — really the Beverly Hills of London. ôThere are tons of nice restaurants, although my wife and I actually cook quite a bit. The theater here is great, the shopping is incredible. If you don’t have something to do one evening, you can just pop into central London in five or six minutes and window shop, catch a late dinner. It’s much easier than in almost any other city in Europe. Every other town I’ve been to in England, except Manchester, seems to have a very small downtown or High Street, but London is just endless.” Although the subway system or “the tube” is very convenient for Lewis, it has had its problems recently. Lewis was once stuck in an underground train for about 90 minutes, during which time one passenger’s claustrophobia got out of control. “He was completely panicking — screaming, banging on the windows and I was thinking, ‘This is it. This guy is going to pull out a gun and mow us all down.’ Finally somebody just grabbed him and told him to relax. He actually ended up apologizing to the entire car.” Another drawback is the threat of terrorism from the I.R.A., which recently bombed a bridge over the Thames River right near Lewis’ home. “They basically just did it to cause havoc, since a lot of people use that bridge,” Lewis said. “But I thought to myself, ‘Where am I that people are still bombing bridges?’ I can’t believe how big a problem Ireland still has. A lot of their efforts are centered in London because that’s where they’ll get the most attention.” Lewis said he hasn’t come close to seeing everything there is to see in London. Most of the popular tourist spots he avoids until someone comes to visit from out of town. “I’ve never even really been to the north or east parts of the city, but I’ve heard good things about both,” Lewis says. “I’ve barely tackled Chelsea. The city is so alive, always buzzing. A lot of guys live 20 to 30 minutes South, closer to training, but as long as I’m here, I’ll live in the city.” (Will Kuhns is an associate editor of Soccer America.)