Originally from Coleraine, Roger Woodend now lives in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n
His journey is perhaps shorter than some others, but still involves travelling to a different country – in this instance, Canada – to catch a game. <\/p>\n
It has become something of a tradition for him and his friend Alex Logan, who is from Ballymoney, but lives in Scotland. <\/p>\n
Both previously visited Brazil for the 2014 World Cup, a tournament that also didn’t feature Northern Ireland, but nevertheless the country has still been represented thanks to the pair’s matching green and white jerseys.<\/p>\n
“It is amazing. It’s fantastic. It’s great to see people from all over the world here supporting their team. It’s great to see the Americans embracing it,” Woodend said.<\/p>\n
“It’s a really good atmosphere, there’s a real massive energy around the whole place.”<\/p>\n
Logan agreed that, while football – or soccer to people in the US – may not be the biggest sport in America, “people are getting into it”.<\/p>\n
“It just feels like a proper World Cup atmosphere. I know there’s been a lot of concerns about all sorts of different things, but to me, it’s just a real normal World Cup.”<\/p>\n
The first match they went to was Canada v Bosnia-Herzegovina at Toronto Stadium, which would have been one of Northern Ireland’s games.<\/p>\n
Woodend said they even bumped into a group of fans who had travelled from Bangor, County Down.<\/p>\n
“It’s a shame we didn’t make it. I’m hoping that we’ll make it to the next one.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Originally from Coleraine, Roger Woodend now lives in Philadelphia. His journey is perhaps shorter than some others, but…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648582,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[218,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-648581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-football","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648581\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648582"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}