Thread by @bidetofevil

Having a pint across the street from Vicarage Road, now is perhaps a good time to tweet-storm about how a kid born in Hong Kong and raised in Canada came to support #WatfordFC

So. Grade 10. A new kid started at my high school who just moved to Canada from England. From Hertfordshire, to be specific.

We shared similar interests. He got into my friend group. And I was just getting back into (association) football after not really having much access to it after the move to Canada.

In Hong Kong, my dad nominally supported Liverpool because it was the 80s. In the mid-90s, United was every where so I followed them. We had one match on TV all week: Soccer Saturday, 7AM PST. I only saw the big teams.

So this kid from England told me about his local team. Watford. The Hornets. But the logo is a moose? John Barnes. Graham Taylor. 1984 FA Cup. Luton. And so on.

It was all very confusing. But the name stuck with me. Watford.

Like many in the mid-90s, the computer game Championship Manager (2) hit me like a freight train (thanks @milesSI), and I spent hundreds of hours watching blinking text on screen as I guide my chosen football club to glory.

After winning everything with United, I figured I'd give a Division 1 team a go. Oh look, #WatfordFC. Sure, why not?

As I made a fictional Robert Page a world beater at Watford, the club in real-life was not doing so well. That was the relegation-to-Division-2 season.

The more I got into the game, the more I got into #WatfordFC. I started having access to the internet, so I read up about them online. I spent a lot of time on Blind, Desperate and Stupid on the school computer, back when I didn't have the internet at home.

Every Sunday, I would check the back of the newspaper to see how Watford did. That was literally the only way I could follow the club back the in the day.

It was weird, I'll admit, following a football club I could never see play. For years, I would follow the team and learn about the players online, and with every new version of Champion (then Football) Manager. For years, #WatfordFC existed for me only in my mind.

The first Watford match I saw in full could very well be the playoff finals in 2006 - that @D6MERIT header had me celebrating in my basement while watching online on Setanta Sports, a subscription I got for that month only just for that match.

After that, it became a lot easier. New technology allowed me to listen to the matches online, and Twitter allowed me to get into the fandom thousands of KMs away. I still couldn't watch many matches, though, but I had access to a lot more.

Then the Premier League happened, and I could pretty much watch every #WatfordFC league match. It was as if I died and went to @hornet_heaven!

And here I am, more than 23 years after I found out about a little club from Hertfordshire called #WatfordFC, at Vicarage Road, in my first trip to England, about to see them live for the first time. This is incredible. I'm buzzing. I can't describe how amazing this is for me.