Taking sport too seriously

There was a guy that used to write for The Independent called James Lawton. He was what gets called a doyen of sports writers. I would imagine him sitting down with a good claret and putting the world to rights with Michael Parkinson and Hugh McIlvanney. He wrote well - opinionated, fruity, forceful, dramatic. I'd often gravitate to his column. I'm not sure I once agreed with a single thing he said in around 10 years of buying and reading the Indy. It seemed like he wrote about Roy Keane every week. He fucking loved Roy Keane. Perhaps I should love Roy Keane. He grew up in the same area of Cork as my father, was a Celtic and Spurs fan as a kid, and of the two ex-Man Utd players I've regularly had people telling me I look like, he is meant clearly far less as a passive-aggressive insult than Wayne Rooney. I found myself in a minor (very minor) twitter spat about Keane recently and thought, since I've already dealt with Graham Gooch this month, I might as well hav...

I’m afraid I simply can’t resist adding to the literally hundreds of learned takes on ‘Three Lions’ this week. Nor have I been able to resist listening to it, saying it, or singing it a little. In May and June (i.e. before all this mania began) I participated in a group which sought to discover the greatest Number 1 single of all time – we were all invited to name our favourite for each year, and for some reason, to a certain degree of internal chagrin, I nominated Three Lions for 1996. Which makes a bit more sense to me now. Do I like it? Actually like it as a song? A bit, yeah … I certainly don’t hate it. But, obviously, there’s more to it than that. I do love football, and I did watch Fantasy Football League and the Mary Whitehouse Experience, and I do think shared experience is a powerful thing, and I am susceptible to nostalgia for the summers of the mid to late 90s, and I do care a lot and have read a lot and written a lot about “people’s songs”/“folk songs”. Th...

Three main questions occupied me in late pre-pubescence and early adolescence 1. why, with my tremendous banter, am I not extremely popular? 2. do I believe in god and if I do, what am I going to do about it? and 3. how can it be a just and sensible world when David Gower is not in the England cricket team and some people think that is a good thing? Gooch Vs Gower is the defining sporting issue of my youth. It's a classic "two types of people" sporting debate, truer, really, than Messi/Ronaldo, Woods/Mickelson, Federer/Nadal. It's an odd and dispiriting tale really, about a genuine falling out between friends, and about a bad time for English cricket, which set up an even more prolonged bad period. For me personally, it is a good example of when I have imposed a "logical" argument on top of what was originally an emotive one, though occasionally it can be the other way round. When I got into cricket, in 1984, Gower was a) called David b) left-han...