Welcome to the Portland Timbers Offside blog

By: Bob Kellett | March 10th, 2008

Hello. Welcome. I think we’ve met before. My name is Bob Kellett and I will be your cruise director on the journey that future historians will call the 2008 Portland Timbers season. For those of you who are new around these parts and those of you who suffer from short term memory loss, my grammatically questionable words have polluted the interwebs before. I spent a large part of my life in 2006 manning the ship that is World Cup Blog, writing about the sex habits of the participating teams and having erudite discussions about how clean a player Zinedine Zidane was on National Public Radio (oh to go through seventh grade with a name like Tom Fudge!).

World Cup Blog didn’t suck so the guys at BootsnAll let me fire up The Offside where I continued to write about the sex habits of players. In November 2007 I decided to step down from my job as the site overseer. A lot of people couldn’t understand why I would walk away from getting paid to blog about soccer and I had a hard time explaining it, but in the end it has worked out peachy for this site and for me. I have a new gig (if you donate money you will be rewarded in the afterlife), I’m marrying a wonderful woman in May, and I hardly ever spend any time looking through YouTube for bloopers and odd soccer games.

Which brings us to where we are today. While I enjoy my current blog-free life and I am enjoying the heck out of watching The Offside continue to grow and get better, I do miss punching out poorly constructed musings. I also still have a passion for soccer and specifically for the Portland Timbers, my hometown club. While I was getting paid to do my thing for The Offside I tried my hardest to be neutral about the various teams and the various players. I never wanted my writing to be construed as homerism (or homo eroticism for that matter). This wasn’t always easy since I am human and I like some teams better than others. Still, I think I toed the line pretty well, especially since I rarely wrote about the team I care for the most in this world, the Portland Timbers.

Now that the shackles are free and the paychecks are being signed by someone else, I feel like it is time for me to write a blog about my beloved Timbers. This is something I did before and I enjoyed it immensely. With your comments, thoughts, suggestions and contributions, I think we can also enjoy the heck out of the 2008 season in this little old corner of cyberspace.

Here’s what you can expect from this blog:

1. Somewhat biased and opinionated reporting – I am first and foremost a Timbers fan so while I have the ability to look at things objectively, I also bleed green and white and gold.

2. References to Chugger Adair – If you don’t know who he is, you will in due time.

3. References to my wedding – It is kind of a big deal for me so it will probably leak into my posts from time to time. I might also write about my newly acquired chickens and I might also post the license plate numbers of people who almost hit my bike on the way to work.

4. A post a day – At least during the weekdays. The weekends might be less active. I also imagine I won’t be doing much posting in late May when I am getting hitched nor will I be doing much in late July when I celebrate getting hitched by going to Malaysia.

5. Untimely posts – In my previous life, I would rush home after a game and write a match report. In my current life, I prefer rushing home and cuddling on the couch (I also like long walks on the beach, gentle rainstorms and Lilith Fair music). I will do my best to post things quickly, but I make no promises. There’s also a better than decent chance I won’t be able to watch every game. Go ahead, sue me.

Here’s what you should not expect from this blog:

1. Tales from the Shed – Sorry, but the days of me drinking 12 beers and standing with a couple dozen crazies, dancing on the dugout and then writing about it afterward are long gone. Six beers followed by a three-day hangover in which I can’t even turn on a computer is more my current pace.

2. Sex tapes – Even if Scot Thompson enjoys a threesome at midfield during a game I will not write about. However, if any member of the Seattle Sounders does anything lewd or objectionable it will be covered in great detail.

3. All Army, all the time – The Timbers Army has played a big role in my life and I still have many friends who stand in the North End, but this blog will be primarily about the action on the field and not the action in the stands.

4. Brian Winters – This is the last reference I will ever make to him. I promise.

5. Bring MLS to Portland propaganda – I think Portland would be a great MLS city and if the day ever comes that a game show host like Chuck Woolery or Wink Martindale pays for the Timbers to join MLS I will dutifully cover it, but this blog is about the club’s efforts in the USL First Division. In a perverse way, I actually enjoy supporting a club in a league that is obscure to most folks.

Sit back, buckle your seat belts, and feel free to get in touch with me – timbers [at] theoffside [dot] com with your tips, suggestions and musings. It feels good to be back. Now on with the season…