William Shakespeare once wrote that “the miserable have no other medicine but only hope.” Three years ago, Darren Foster struggled to find any.
It was the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic and the rare genetic syndrome that Foster’s teenage daughter, Bethany, suffers from made her potentially susceptible to the worst case scenario of the virus. In 2020, there were more than 238,000 deaths from coronavirus in the United Kingdom and Ireland alone, and the stout former rugby player, father of two and dispensing optician from Warrington, England — halfway between Manchester and Liverpool — was often consumed by fear and loneliness. Then he found hope in an unusual place: the U.K. Ravens.
Baltimore and London are separated by more 3,600 miles and an ocean, but the longtime fan group provided the solace and joy that Foster, a 40-year-old built like a fire hydrant and with a beard as thick as his northern English accent, desperately needed amid strict isolation rules.
“I’ve got a vulnerable daughter, so [the pandemic] was terrifying for us,” he told The Baltimore Sun. “Every day you’d turn on the TV and this person’s dying and that person’s dying.
“The Ravens put on a lot of Q&As [on the internet] with players, but it also let us meet other U.K. fans as well as fans abroad. They’d do the Q&A and you could sit and chat and then they’d shut it off, but we’d all just stay on. We would talk for two hours afterward. It was the only chance at that time that I had any sort of community because I wasn’t breaking any [pandemic] rules. It was amazing from the mental health side of it.”
That Foster was a Ravens fan to begin with is something of providence.
The NFL held its first regular-season international game Oct. 28, 2007, with the New York Giants playing the Miami Dolphins at Wembley Stadium. Not long after, Foster was introduced to the game by his father-in-law, an avid planespotter who’d made several trips to the United States and become an Atlanta Falcons fan. Soon, watching whatever games were on TV in England that Sunday evening turned into a family ritual.
“With the rugby league background, there’s lots of big hits in that as well,” Foster said. “I was quite enjoying watching people smack each other all over the pitch.”
That included the Ravens, who had a torrid stretch from 2008 to 2012, reaching the AFC Championship three times and capturing their second Super Bowl in that span. Though Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis was the leader of those teams and what Foster said would be a natural attraction, it was Torrey Smith who caught his eye because of the swagger and style the receiver played with, including the dreadlocks flowing out from under his helmet. He was also moved, he said, by Smith’s 127 yards and two touchdowns on six catches against the New England Patriots just hours after Smith’s younger brother, Tevin Jones, was killed in an early morning motorcycle accident in northeastern Virginia in 2012.
One of his earliest memories of the Ravens was also the “Mile High Miracle,” Baltimore’s improbable 38-35 double overtime upset of the Peyton Manning-led Denver Broncos during the 2012 playoffs in which Joe Flacco connected with Jacoby Jones on a 70-yard, game-tying touchdown with under a minute left in regulation.
Foster was hooked.
It turned out he also wasn’t alone. As the NFL continued to play more games overseas, the fan base for all its teams continued to grow and groups began to proliferate. The U.K. Ravens group, which was started in 2017 and is helmed by Brits Shane Richmond and Ian Demain, has seen its membership grow significantly.
The same year the group started was also the first time the Ravens played in London, where they were blown out by the Jacksonville Jaguars, 44-7. The running joke among the group is that the game never took place in their eyes. That year, Richmond and Demain said, there were about 150 fans who showed up for a party at the team’s unofficial pub, The Admiralty in Trafalgar Square, the night before the game. For this week’s game against the Tennessee Titans at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, they sold over 1,000 tickets, which covers the cost of food and drinks, and had to turn people away.
“It’s grown massively over the last six or seven years,” Richmond told the team’s “The Lounge” podcast, adding that Lamar Jackson’s stardom has been one of the biggest reasons. “It’s been really interesting to see these people come along. Some join because of Lamar, some of them it’s the first team that they watched, some of them they have some sort of connection to Baltimore. Some people just like purple uniforms.”
Even Jackson, who is playing in London for the first time, has been surprised by the reaction he has gotten.
“For me to have fans in London, I never dreamed about that, so that’s amazing to me,” he said. “I didn’t know [how popular the NFL is here] until people recognized me. I was like, ‘That’s crazy. I’m known in London.’
The U.K. Ravens are becoming known, too. For the first time, they have had meetups around the country every week this season. They have a podcast. There are multiple WhatsApp groups. The group’s X (formerly Twitter) account has more than 5,000 followers and their Facebook group more than 1,000 followers.
The team has noticed as well. On Friday, general manager Eric DeCosta greeted fans at the group’s event at the Counting House pub. So did Lewis.
“Here, if you’re a fan of the Ravens, you almost certainly won’t know a fan of the Ravens who lives near you and you probably won’t know anyone else who’s into American football,” Richmond said. “So being able to connect these people through social media, the WhatsApp groups and meetups is a really big thing.”
The group also recently launched an Instagram page, which Foster is in charge of.
“Post Covid, I felt like I owed something back a little bit,” he said. “So I started up the Instagram and it’s snowballed from there. At any point, you should be able to go to a meet somewhere in the country. Now there’s hundreds of people going to these meets all over the country and it’s built this community.”
And it’s that community that takes Foster back to 2020 when he and a lot of others were struggling with the pandemic.
“It’s really good seeing all these people meeting; we were strangers when we spoke on the internet and now everyone’s friends and I’m getting pictures sent to me all the time,” he said as he began to choke up. “I’ve got to be honest, sometimes I think I’m really proud. It’s just an amazing thing.”
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