Everything I know about football

The reason it matters to people is because it’s a place to go through the journey of life and death, defeat and triumph, love and loss, but with a reassuring structure all around it. It’s a place to work through life’s journey in miniature, to experience all those inexplicables in an explicable framework. Seasons. Relegations. Rules. A half-time whistle to regulate your nervous system. A referee you love to loathe, a necessary evil.

It gives its fans the highest highs, the lowest lows, and all the waiting and loyalty and uncertainty in-between, but done in stadiums that feel vast, where the size of the crowd dwarfs any feeling that you might just be alone. You move as a tribe. You’re with your other wolves and you cry and you cheer as a pack.

And that pack is as big as your whole country sometimes. Those strangers you might hate when they’re squashed in beside you on the bus and the train or the supermarket - suddenly you’re all cheering for the same thing and it feels so nice to be united for once. It’s alright to join in.

And language, that dominates so much of our 21st century lives, is only the icing on the cake in football - yes it’s there in the chants, the shouts, the jeers, the post-match analysis and the interview where Harry Kane lost his voice because he was singing Wonderwall too loudly. But the cake itself, the beautiful game, is wordless. Perhaps that’s where people - men - put all the vastnesses they can’t explain. A safe place, even when it hurts.

(Perhaps I see women living at the coalface of uncertainty, far closer to the business of life and death, every day. Perhaps language is a closer friend to us. Perhaps?)

And even when it’s unfair, when you hate the other side, hate the referee, carry a burning feeling of being robbed - well it’s a place to work through that too. How exciting to have such turbulence.

This is in the ideal version of course.

There’s the other version where people go home from watching the football, boozed and gakked out of their minds, and kick the shit out of their wives.

The red card that was issued to an American player and then magically withdrawn after Trump intervened brought something more than the whiff of fascism into a global tournament.

Many people, not only supporters of the USA team, thought Folarin Balogun might not have deserved the red card in the first place. But what was more concerning to the footballing community was that it was then overturned by political intervention. Not just because this meant FIFA were bootlicking Trump but also because - without rules - what do we have here?

Without consequences, without walls around us, without the maths of the system, without the details of the framework, what you’re suggesting is that those teams will go out there and still do all of that life and death stuff, all of that rebirth and love and loss, but without any guarantee that it will at least make sense at the end? That it will be fair, even when it hurts? Well then you’re leaving us with injustices far too similar to actual life. The vastness without the frame around it? That’s not how sport works.

A red card must remain a red card. Every player needs the thing they fear to remain as mighty and fearful as it has ever been. Without that punishment they can’t hold themself back from falling.

The joy of having just turned fifty is that I stayed up all night to watch England play Mexico in the Azteca stadium, and found I could vividly remember the last time we played a World Cup match there as well. In 1986, when Maradona did the hand ball and got away with it. It was a week before my tenth birthday, and I watched that game with my parents and big brother on the telly, in the house near York where my parents still live.

In the same corner of the living room where my mum watches all her beloved Leeds matches, and where she would have watched the Mexico match this time , except it was the madrugada, so she lay in bed listening to it on Radio 5 Live, but then it got so exciting that she eventually retrieved her laptop and had that in bed with her too at 3am.

My dad, in the other room, wouldn’t have been so bothered about the football. Gender rules don’t apply to much in my family. The stereo equipment in the living room was always my mum’s - my dad could just about work the kitchen radio. The faster car was always my mum’s. He only wanted to buy second hand Alfa Romeos, in the days when car paint from hot countries wasn’t waterproof, and so they would rust on our Yorkshire driveway.

But my earliest memory of football is that Argentina match in 1986, with its world famous Hand of God incidence of cheating. Couldn’t believe my eyes. No one at school spoke of anything else for days. I couldn’t get back into football for a decade.

Do we think we are inside the footballer’s body while we are watching him, I wonder? These athletes who have devoted their bodies to the pursuit of excellence, who’ve taken all the hard yards that we didn’t take. Is our voyeurism also a kind of transference? As we sit on our arses with a can of lager?

We project ourselves into their body of excellence and then they go forth and break their ankles for our sakes. Like Jesus, who sinned for us and was sacrificed for us. They go forth like mortal sacrifices; superhuman exemplars of an athleticism rarely found, and yet upon which every single person in the stadium has an opinion. As if we could do it too. As if Tiggers could also climb trees, but we just don’t want to.

When I go to see Beyonce sing I don’t think it’s me up there on stage, but when we watch football it’s as if our bodies are in their bodies, their pain is our pain and their success ours to be shared. We talk about our national teams in the first person plural - we beat Mexico, we’re in the quarter finals, we’re up against the Norwegian Viking on Saturday.

Being a goalkeeper must be worse than joining a nudist beach on live TV. The most naked man in the country. Where can he hide?

(Camus said that being a goalkeeper had taught him everything he knew about morality.)

(Pasolini said football was a language, the passing of the ball a syntax. He said most football was prose but the greatest footballers became poets.)

(James Baldwin wrote a character in Another Country who said, referring to American football, "This isn't a country at all, it's a collection of football players and Eagle Scouts. Cowards. We think we're happy. We're not. We're doomed.)

Football asks who you are under pressure.

Sometimes the answer is grace.

In 2014 my sister-in-law wrote an article for the Guardian about how she got into football as the mother of an eight-year-old boy.

I’ve just read it again - it’s absolutely brilliant!

By the time you read this I should be on a Four Seasons yacht somewhere along the coast of Croatia and Montenegro. Not a sentence I can say I’ve ever typed before or ever will again. It’s a work trip, the suite is worth $50,000 per week, no I’m not paying for it, and all shall be revealed in due course. I’m going to watch England vs Norway on the big screen on the boat, or should I say England vs Haaland, oh dear Lord please save us all.

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