​On the Piss with the Morningwood Rovers, Edmonton’s Footy-mad English Ex-Pats

Edmonton's infamous 107 section. Photo via Tony Lewis.

When I walked into the downtown Edmonton bar, I noticed two things. The first was that it was louder than the bar should have been this early on a Sunday, and the second was the sheer density of British people that populated the place. They're sloshing their drinks and singing along en mass to britpop tunes. Someone at the end of the bar belted out "God Save The Queen" (not the Sex Pistols' tune, unfortunately) and everyone joined in.

We're all hammered. It's not yet noon. Such is the life of a Morningwood Rover on match day.

Founded by British expats Danny Greenwood and Antony Bent, the Morningwood Rovers are an Edmonton rec league football (soccer) team, and a FC Edmonton supporters organization. Primarily though, the Rovers serve as a homing beacon in Edmonton for expat football nuts to find each other. The Englishmen have been drinking here since the bar opened, some even before. Meanwhile, every week, religious folks driving to mass cruise past five or so Brits off in a corner of the platform outside the bars' entrance shielding the wind. The expats do this because Sunday is a holy day. Sunday is match day.

Greenwood and three of his recruits sit around a bar table at the Pint, their beer-soaked pseudo–British embassy, and drink. The ages around the table range by 20 years, but they all share one thing, a stereotypical British love for football. They're from all over the UK and they all support different clubs. "Back home we would've fucking hated each other," one of them told me. It's a table packed with subtly different accents, dry vulgar humour, and numerous pints— both empty and full.

"We're a bunch of loud English guys. When everyone is in a pub, everyone is singing, we're always singing football songs," said Greenwood. "We like to make sure that every time we're in a pub everyone fucking knows it."

The club has humble origins. Danny Greenwood and Antony Bent, two British ex-pats, founded it in 2010 as a simple excuse to go play in a Vegas football tournament. The team, full of large scary Brits, thought it would be funny if they wore baby pink uniforms and went with the most ridiculous name they could think of. That's how the Morningwood Rover FC came to be. Since that time, the team has morphed into something more.

"It's become a running joke with the teams and my friends in Edmonton that I stand at the Edmonton airport with two signs," Danny Greenwood told VICE. "Do you play football? Or do you fancy a pint?"

Born in Rochdale, a town in Lancashire, Greenwood moved to Edmonton for a girl he met on his first go-round in the city. Once in town, the relationship quickly fell apart, and Greenwood was essentially on his own in Edmonton. Greenwood debated returning home.

"I was miserable, I had no money, I had no furniture, I didn't know anybody. It was terrible, I hated it," he said. "Then I met another English guy and it went from there."

The man that Greenwood met was a fellow football fan named Antony Bent. He and Greenwood would go to pubs, slam pints, and talk footy. Suddenly, Edmonton wasn't so empty for Greenwood anymore. It's an experience he tries to share with fresh-to-Canada British expats.

"I just try to recruit people from a similar situation," he said. "Hey I know you came here because you got a real good job opportunity but you've left all your friends you've left all you're family. Why don't you come for a pint with us? We've all been in the same boat."

The team soon got the reputation as Edmonton's British team, which bolstered the number of players. The Rovers' "live football," and if they aren't playing it they're watching it either at a pub or live and in person. The organization has rallied around FC Edmonton, or the Eddie's as they are affectionately called, and Greenwood has organized matchday buses to bring the hooligans from the Pint to Clark stadium. The team has partnered with the the FC Edmonton Support Group to fill up 107—the infamously loud section in the home stadium.

"There is no fucking sitting in 107" my friends and I were cautioned upon getting to our seats, and it was for good reason. While the rest of the stands were dotted with seated fans, everyone in 107 was on their feet—they stood and started in with chants almost immediately upon arrival. "Colin Miller's fearless army" and "You're so shit it's unbelievable" were the first of many chants to be yelled that day. A lad a few rows below us started to play his bagpipes.

The intensity of fans at Oilers' games pales in comparison to that of the Morningwood Rovers, even when the match had only started. But section 107 is a whole other world to the rest of the people in the stands. The vulgarity and intensity are a completely foreign thing. We were only a small section in a small stadium located across from a liquor store and a gravel pit in Edmonton, but for the next 90 minutes, it was Old Trafford. These 80 or so fans were going to make section 107 a little slice of home for themselves, and this feeling even spilled over onto the pitch.

"You can tell when they're there. It reminds me a little bit, when I hear them on the field, of playing back at home," said ex-Manchester United player Ritchie Jones, now a midfielder for FC Edmonton. "It's a hostile atmosphere, they really get behind the boys and they are a bit abusive [towards] the other teams as well.

A few seats next to me at Clark Stadium, Greenwood jumped up and down in unison with the rest of 107. His face taut as he chanted, "These are my Eddies, my only Eddies, they make me happy when skies are grey." It was fitting. The day was a cold one and with the wind, the temperature couldn't have been much over zero. It didn't bother the Rovers, though: the men stayed warm by slugging down cheap beer and hurling insults.

"Nice try ya' fucking cunt!"

It was wonderful.

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