Senior Writer

LONDON Paul Hirons began it by fighting sleep and air waves to hear Phil Samp and Dave Lapham on Armed Forces Radio. He has crowned it by improbably orchestrating the internet to do good and form one of the great pockets of Bengaldom in the United Kingdom. He surveys the scene of Friday night’s like a kid, well, let Hirons tell you.

“The night before Christmas,” says Hirons, after watching Ken Anderson replace him in the guest chair on the Bengals Pep Rally radio show above a milling, boisterous crowd of fans of Who Dey are.

We are squeezed into The Admiralty, a pub straight out of central London just down the street from Buckingham Palace in the run-up to Sunday’s game (1 p.m.-Cincinnati’s Local 12) at Wembley Stadium. But he believes it has nothing on his adopted hometown, where he has been known to wander OTR in pursuit of punk rock and anything guitar while randomly ducking off the street to introduce himself to shop owners and restaurateurs.

“The word Cincinnati as well,” says Hirons of one of the reasons the Bengals snared his heart so long ago. “If you put together a load of letters into a bag and shook them up and threw them out however many times out, you wouldn’t get the word ‘Cincinnati.'”

If Hirons sounds like he has a bit of the poet in him it’s because he does. He’s a free-lance journalist who grew up in Leamington Spa about six miles from William Shakespeare’s birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon in the heart of England. He lives in north London now and right now he’s living the dream because he’s thinking about the Bengals fans on their way from Glasgow, Sheffield and Manchester arriving on the public mega buses after working Friday.

“Usually we’re watching so many Bengals games by ourselves, when we have a meet-up it’s like,’ Wow, we’re together watching the Bengals.'”

Right now they’re watching and calling and cheering Anderson’s still golden right arm throwing Bengals’ paraphernalia into the crowd from a balcony with help from Lapham and Dan Hoard, the air to Samp, in between ” Hall of Fame, Hall of Fame.”

Canton Anderson’s career was spent behind the iron curtain that existed before cable, e-mail, cyberspace and podcasts. Hirons fell in love the year Anderson retired in 1986, and he was 13, just falling in with a new set of friends when he went to high school. That was the year after the London tabloids made William “Refrigerator,” Perry, a cult figure as the NFL began to make inroads into underground British culture, pushed by Terrestrial Television beaming over weekly highlights from the age of Marino and Montana and Montana and The Hirons’ new chums were in the Dolphins, Niners, Raiders.

“They were a bit clean cut for me. I wanted a team, ” Hirons says. “There was this blond left-handed quarterback throwing the ball all over the place. I didn’t know what play-action was at that stage and he did this play-action game and it was the most beautiful thing. In fact, it even confused the cameras.

“The tiger stripes. The helmet. The uniforms. The word Cincinnati as well, ” Hirons says. “I said, ‘This team could be for me. They look exciting to watch. Really fun to watch. I was proven entirely correct when they went to the Super Bowl three years later.”

He wasn’t the only one. Boomer Esiason’s own golden arm, head coach Sam Wyche’s innovations and Ickey Woods’ touchdown dance helped the Bengals become a United Kingdom favorite. When Chad Johnson came along and began celebrating touchdown catches from Carson Palmer, 15-year-old Nathaniel Palmer was hooked.

“It was Carson Palmer’s (no relation) rookie year. (Jon) Kitna was the quarterback. I had never seen American football before. They were playing Baltimore. I said ‘What’s this?'”Palmer says. “Chad and Carson were fantastic as a duo. And T. J. Houshmandzadeh as well. The uniforms, the helmet, the tiger stripes. Who doesn’t like tigers? They were exciting and a pretty good team.”

Pretty soon, Palmer, a Londoner from Essex, had a video of Johnson’s celebrations and sent them to his friends. ‘Watch this guy. Look how much fun.”Two years later at midnight when he watched Palmer tear his ACL on the second snap of the 2005 Wild Card Game as Big Ben neared midnight, he went to bed in tears and had to wipe them away as he went to school.

“Oh my God,” Palmer says. “A school night.”

Hirons and Palmer combine generations with the Bengals UK podcast and are finding out a third generation born of A. J. Green and Andy Dalton is living and dying in stripes now, too. The podcast is probably the most visible product of the Bengals UK fan group Hirons helped mid-wife about five years ago to unite the Who Dey flag flying from Edinburgh to Essex. It coincided, more or less, with that 12-4 run in 2015.

That was about the time of the game in Baltimore, and Hirons was drawn to how visibly hard head coach zac Taylor took the loss in his post-game presser. It left an impression on Hirons. He couldn’t believe when Taylor accepted his invite to do a podcast before the season and was rooting hard for the gracious young coach.

“Man, great interview. They got me fired up,” Taylor said. “You can just tell the passion that they had. They just recently sent me an e-mail. I like talking anytime to anyone who is passionate about the Bengals. They’re knowledgeable about what they’re talking about. They work hard. They bring attention to us over here and recruit new fans. I enjoyed the podcast. I’d love to do it again in the offseason. I think it’s good to connect with fans across the world.”

“I’m one of these guys you get an emotional connection with a city. What you want to know more is the people of Cincinnati itself,” Hirons says. “Those ties got deeper and deeper. Any sports fan will tell you sports is cyclical, right? You have your good days and bad days. I just carry on. Patience. And I felt like I was vindicated a little bit the past decade when Marvin (Lewis) had a great run in the city.”

Friday night the orange and black swirled underneath him and the old roommates, Lap and Kenny, were on the air, and some of the coaches were stopping by and mingling and you could tell by the gleam in his eye he was having another moment with his team.

“You develop ties and they stick with you,” is how the British ambassador to The Court of St. Who Dey put it.