Am I missing out on the World Cup?

England are to face Argentina tonight in the semi-finals of the World Cup. But I won’t be looking in.

I’ve always liked to join in with big significant communal events, even if only at a televisual distance. They count for much more nowadays, when collective experiences – even virtual ones – are so much scarcer. We are rarely all on the same page in the 2020s; film, television and pop music have splintered into thousands of jagged shards.

What else is left but sport? Only really the big news stories, and those are hardly ever good news. We could perhaps revel in the excitement of Andy Burnham’s accession – but that is something only starry-eyed Labour MPs, and absolutely nobody else in the country, think is going to be anything but a disaster. Big sporting occasions are all that really remain of the positive uniting events that used to be ten a penny.

But sport in general, and football in particular, has always been a mystery to me. Sport is obviously a valuable diversion. It seems such an important part of being a human, and I sometimes feel I must really be missing out. Yes, it’s a case of different strokes for different folks, but it would be nice to share in the fun.

However, my spatial awareness is so poor that I can’t comfortably follow the ball in most games, even as a spectator. I catch occasional sight of it, but anticipating its direction, or what or who is heading towards or away from it, is quite outside my capabilities. As an unwilling participant at school, this led to many moments of richly comic catastrophe. On the rare occasions the ball came into my possession, the question of what to do with it was, in today’s vernacular, far out of my skill set. My mind kept wandering – however hard I tried I’d find myself contemplating Kate Bush B-sides or something.

Also, I find it hard to assign a favourite player or side, or to back a team on something that seems so arbitrary as nationality. I don’t look down on sport – but I just don’t feel it.

I will happily ignore other things that I’ve no compelling interest in. But, perhaps because it’s such a huge part of the discourse, I often wonder if I’m missing out on the pleasure of sport.

This has held true over my life, with one exceptional event – the 1990 World Cup in Italy. A strange combination of circumstances – I didn’t fully understand at the time, and certainly don’t now – aligned, and I ‘got’ it. I think perhaps it was the camaraderie of sharing a student house with lads who were very much immersed in it. I was infected by their enthusiasm and the thing ‘clicked’. But when the normal football season began a little later, I tuned in, only to find I was back at square one.

What I most remember now was the emotional agony of it, the incredible levels of suspense, the overwhelming physical sensations. It is an obvious thing we overlook that sport is a proxy for war, and World Cups are a safe, ‘pretend’ version of human conflict. Humans enjoy wars, or we wouldn’t keep having them, and this is the civilised way of satisfying that impulse.

Every time a World Cup rolls around, I find myself – at some later stage in the proceedings – trying to join in and give the thing another go. The first factor that defeats me is the TV commentary. This is such a strange custom, which I can understand being useful in the days of radio, but which seems pointless and actively irritating today. After all, the actual spectators in the stadium have a worse view than us at home, and they can follow it perfectly happily. So why do we need this mindless chatter? The football pundits are always insufferable (and of course now they also have correct progressive opinions). I tuned in briefly for the Norway game to hear them chatting about the Norwegians looking ‘leggy’. This is a term I know only as something the Sunday People might’ve said about Rula Lenska in 1976.

Television’s half-time discussion and full-time dissection both baffle me. What can there be to say? ‘The losing team should have scored more goals’ seems about the size of it. As with so many pastimes, the hobby itself is fine, but the hobbyists discussing the hobby are intolerable. (Something we also see in those witless after-show spin-offs like Strictly: It Takes Two or The Apprentice – You’re Fired.)

The Norway game was my traditional attempt to get into the World Cup, but this was doomed when a speck of weed pollen shot straight up my hooter, dooming me to an hour of roof-rattling sneezes, which scattered all my mustered concentration.

But still. I really like the thought of other people having fun. The sound of a crowd enjoying themselves in a (usually) peaceful activity is very soothing, I find. From the pub near my house, there is always such a joyous eruption of sound whenever an England goal is scored. It lifts the heart – the safe venting of big emotions. I hope to hear lots of those tonight, but that’s all the pleasure I’ll be taking.