ANY FOOTBALL ON?

Putting aside any of the problematical political reservations of Qatar 2022 being the host nation for the latest world cup tournament, far more important to me personally is that this will be the first world cup in my lifetime when I haven't had my dad alongside me to watch the games with.

And the great irony of it all is that most of the time when we did have a game on in the background, we'd spend most of our time doing anything other than watch the actual thing. Instead we'd more likely engage in philosophical dialectic, read books, argue about some contentious article we'd found in a newspaper/magazine or fall asleep only to be rudely awoken by the sound of a goal finally being scored, and then wait impatiently, bleary eyed for the replay to show us precisely what we'd just missed.

'Zen and the art of not fully watching a football match' is a title I might reserve for a future essay, but it definitely applied to our consistently contrarian display of engagement/non-engagement with the sport. The quality of a match could often be determined by how long it took for my dad to wander from the couch to his nearby "Brambly Hedge" inspired book shelf and pull out some sublime book on architecture, design or buddhism and re-focus his attention on that instead.

"Are you not watching this?" I'd challenge him, as if to test his commitment to endure the game for its entire duration so as to ascertain my own.

"Of course," he'd say with head buried firmly in a book on sea front ranches in California.

The amount of sublime goals we missed by being generally bored and distracted by the overall field of play was probably quite high. Nevertheless, it was never really about the game per se. It was about ritual. The ritual of spending time together and using the general 90 minute framework as the sporting equivalent of a "Gone Fishing" sign or turning off the phone. A football match somehow provides a temporary exemption from reality for a short time and while it lasts, a multitudinal set of agendas can be simultaneously appreciated which is why it was always about more than just the football for us.

At any one time, we might have a Tony Bennett album playing in the background whilst listening to an esoteric podcast and having the football game on mute all the while drawing up plans in notebooks and sketchpads for future creative projects. Who said men can't multi-task?

However, if a game exceeded our expectations, we also knew when to put aside our cultural and philosohical distractions to focus 1oo% on the game at hand. There's a vibrational frequency to a great game of football that is hard to replicate from match to match. It comes along rarely to be honest, yet when it does it happily reminds us of why we even sat down to watch the sport in the first place.

Tomorrow I'll watch England vs Iran and find myself no doubt zoning out and looking for a book to dip into just like the old man did, until a genuine moment of controversy or inspiration on the field re-directs my focus. I have no doubt it'll be at that precise moment I'll look to see if Dad is paying attention.

Only he won't be there.