Green Smoke

By Alasdair Mackay

Last season we had 53 Jets fans in attendance for the home Patriots game. I can remember when it was just Manny and I, getting asked not to sit on the back of the sofas to get a better view of another energy sapping loss.

Back then (I am guessing around 10 years ago) the weekly games would be shown upstairs, with three small VIP rooms showing a game each and more games screened in the bar area that overlooks the main casino floor. Then there was the theatre room which showed the Sky game on an enormous screen, along with two other games on smaller screens set to one side. The Jets were almost always in one of the side rooms, in fact it seemed to be the furthest little room from the bar area more often than not.

That was where Week 1 of the 2015 Jets season was going to be shown. The opponent was the Cleveland Browns and we had a new coach in Todd Bowles, “the best player in the draft” in Leonard Williams, Darrelle Revis had returned from his Superbowl sabbatical, we had traded for Brandon Marshall and Ryan Fitzpatrick and our other draftees included a promising young Ohio state receiver and a 4^th round QB we had traded up to go and get – there was a feeling that the playoff drought was ending this year. So when I walked in to a sea of Browns fans occupying our little space I was shocked. Was I to be the lone Jet this time? That was when a head popped up from the very back of the room and called out “Jets fan!” Jon Love beckoned me over.

Jon is from Wolverhampton but had just moved back to London from New York. He had given up a Metlife season ticket for a spot behind 30 barking weirdos in a small room off an upstairs bar in London’s Leicester Square. Before long we were joined by Nigel, Manny, Kam and a few others and, by the time the Jets took over the game in the 3^rd quarter, we were happily “J-E-T-S-ing” our way to a 31-10 victory behind a largely silent group of Brownies.

That season was special – even though we didn’t make the playoffs. By the time of our overtime victory “at” the Giants in early December we had 10-12 Jets fans attending regularly. Many of them are expats that have since returned to New York, but there was a solid group of Brits, too. Dave Balcombe and I observed a drunk Jon almost getting into a fight with a female Giants fan and then charming the bar manager (who was wearing a Pats t-shirt of all things) into not kicking him out for the privilege.

The following week that same bar manager was sporting a Revis jersey and popping his head in to check on the Jets score every 5 minutes or so – I don’t know what Jon told him, but it worked and then some.

A couple of seasons after that the male strippers moved in; and the NFL community was ejected into a hastily set-up basement bar area. That was a year when we floated between a bar near Victoria station, the Canadian bar near Covent Garden and a couple of other spaces, but none could match “the Hippo”, even with it’s reduced service.

In the dark days of Adam Gase the numbers dwindled. We were back in the Hippodrome basement, where Mike (the Revis jersey-wearing manager) looked after us and always put the Jets game on a screen closest to his spot near the door. By the end of the 2 win 2020 season, though, it was just Jon, Nigel and myself drowning our collective sorrows and discussing the draft almost exclusively. 

Year one of the Salah era brought with it a Jets trip to London for the Falcons game and another chance to build our community. Like so many of us, we descended on the Barrowboy and Banker on London Bridge before the game, while the day after the game Jon and I took time off work to chase the Jets banners, that had adorned the walls of the pub, around London. We eventually found them about to thrown in the trash behind a pub in Trafalgar Square, they are in Jon’s garden shed now.

This season we have grown significantly again (something about winning football games brings fans out). We have chat group of 60+ Jets fans and our London community includes Jeremy (a sadly deluded Liverpool fan) and Paul (a much more enlightened Everton fan) as well as Mike (Millwall), Gavin (Preston) and Alex (Hibernian and the presumptive QB1 for the London Blitz B-team, by the way). These are the regulars along with Jon, Nigel and myself; but we get to see Manny, Nic and Dave Balcombe a few times a season, when their schedules allow, and we still have Mike taking care of us from his spot near the door. An even bigger group got together for the Bengals game and the aforementioned Pats game (both of which we lost) and we even have a few New Yorkers who found each other at the Hippo in London and who now meet up stateside to watch the game – an ex-pat-ex-pat Hippo Jets community.

Next season we will have as good a chance of a deep play-off run as we have in a long time, so I expect our community to keep growing. We are easy to find – just follow the “J-E-T-S” sound coming from the basement. Hopefully we will see you there at some point in 2023 and beyond.