Don't Tell Me the Score

Don’t Tell Me the Score

I’m a moderate fan of some sports (football, cycling, tennis) and an occasional follower of others (international rugby and international cricket). In the case of rugby, I’m easily bored. I no longer understand the pernickety rules. Many games, for most of their duration, resemble the playground game of British Bulldog, without the latter’s fun (big men charging fruitlessly at a line of other big men). In the case of cricket, I like the radio commentary more than the game commented on.
Test Match Special evokes nostalgic memories of late driving in my younger days, listening to John Arlott & Co ball-by-balling tests in Australia. Although it  was for a cricket match – a test against all-white South Africa at Lord’s – that  I went for the first time to a hallowed sporting venue. It is scarcely credible now, but I was nine years old. I went with a friend of the same age on the train to Waterloo. We found our way to Lord’s and sat on the grass by the boundary ropes. Was there some adult supervision? Possibly at one end of the day or the other: I don’t remember (but then children take adult presences for granted).

As to football, I describe myself as someone who merely “follows” a team. I am not one of those fans that refer to his or her team as “we”, implying that he or she is a ghostly member of the squad. Especially (on the same theme) I am not (since the age of 8) one of those who on match days pull on a replica team shirt (perhaps size XXL) and are thereby transported from mundane reality, like a child in a superman costume.

But, nonetheless, I do get bound up in some games in some sports. Here’s the thing: nothing so ultimately unimportant makes me so unnecessarily anxious. I’m talking about live TV coverage or radio commentary. Attending an actual match is different. One gets absorbed in the atmosphere and loses the self-awareness necessary to this sort of anxiety. The shared emotions of the crowd take one over and carry one along.

The result of my anxiety is a lifelong inability stay watching or listening to a tense game. At a certain point I literally switch off and try to do something else. I might dip back in for a few seconds or, these days, check a smartphone. If, after all this sampling, there’s little doubt of an outcome and not much time left to play, I might resign myself to watching or listening the thing out, all tension safely drained. But, no, I’ve never watched through a Tim Henman tennis semi final, or an Andy Murray final. Did I watch the famous climax of the 2003 Rugby world Cup, when England won with the last kick? I did not; I was gone from the TV room many minutes before.

The best examples of my failure as an armchair sports fan are the famous England international football matches – the 1966 World Cup final, and the European Championship semi-final of 1996. Both matches were held at Wembley stadium, the National ground.

In 1966 I was 15. My family was then living in a small Hampshire town. We had a black and white TV (the mono-chromaticity goes without saying). My parents were not football fans; but that summer most people were caught up in the success of the England team and the succulent prospect of a final against West Germany (21 years after the end of WW2, the war of the parental generation).

We watched – Germany in white shirts, England in dark (in fact red). Full time came, with the score 2-2. Extra time followed. At which point, I was off.

The next half hour I spent on an aimless but frenzied bike ride round the empty streets. Most of the residential area of the Hampshire town was, in 1966, still laid out for retired and serving army officers and retired colonial administrators. It was mainly drives and rhododendrons that fronted the roads. Even if all the soldiers and colonialists were glued to their TVs and cheering or groaning, no sound got down the shaded drives.

When I judged extra time to be over, I returned, with no clue as to the result. I was back in time for the presentation of the trophy to England.

30 years later it was again England v Germany (now unified) at Wembley. Again, extra time. Again too much for me. This time there was no bike ride (not because I didn’t have one, but because, unlike in 1966, I had had a few nervous drinks). So I walked, around the summer streets of Muswell Hill. Here was a big problem for my anxiety-salving. Windows of the terraced housing stood open, and the noises coming out were only too explicit. As I stomped, it became obvious that the match was ending in a penalty shoot-out. Each house passed told me, inescapably, how fortunes were going. Roars and claps, at regular intervals, meant that England had scored. Then the roars and claps were replaced by a collective groan, and the roars and claps came no more. There was no need to hurry home.

I am already planning for this summer, should the need arise (another European Championship). I think big headphones and loud music should do the trick.

February 2016