Football, bloody hell.

Someone asked me recently what my life philosophy was. The temptation was to cite Dre: I’m simply representing all the gangsters across the World. Instead, after some thought, I said that I’d prefer to follow the advice Paul gave to Jude, “it’s a fool who plays it cool, by making his World a little colder”. I soon realised, however, that this is quite the opposite of how I live my life. Of course, my friends would interject, I have no problem not being cool, my penchant for 80s music and University Challenge putting paid to any hopes of have of being street. I do, however, have a tendency to be disaffected to the point of aloofness. It is a trend that has only increased with my latest life malaise, an existential crisis born from my newly single, newly graduated and newly impoverished status. My angst has only made me more hollow; my World is certainly a little colder. In light of this realisation I have mused long and hard on a way out of my downward spiral. A job has escaped my clutches, and I don’t fancy my chances of picking up a girlfriend in the apocalyptic nightclubs of Oxford. Instead, I have decided I must follow the words I stumbled across. I must not play it cool. I must come out and finally say what I have realised in my sleepless summer nights. I know what is missing from my life. Or rather, I know what my life is. It is a ball game, the most beautiful one of all.

To those of you who are not football fans, and I can’t imagine there are too many casual readers on this most niche and neglected of blogs, this probably comes across as quite sad. Football is, after all, just a game, an endless cycle of matches and scandal which, in reality, have very little consequence. Maybe so. But if life is supposed to be a great drama of peaks and troughs then it is football that gives me the most visceral of my emotions. As I discussed with a fellow trequartista not two days ago, I am never so happy as when my team score. I am never as heartbroken as when they fall, fail in the dying embers of a meaningless clash amidst the glamour of Stoke or Reading. It is when I feel most truly alive; conveying boundless value on the most apparently futile pursuits, allowing my mood and outlook to be dictated simply by how the 11 men I choose to follow perform once a week.

It will thus be a welcome relief when the Premier League returns this weekend. There is much about the game I hate. It is greedy beyond belief, performed by mercenaries in front of morons who oscillate between blind adoration and vile abuse from one second to the next. It is a sexist, homophobic and even, still, racist theatre; all that is good and bad about our society distilled into a boiling pot of madness and fury. Yet is a theatre that still captivates me, and my friends, from its first kick to its last. It is the last forum of tribalism in an increasingly bland and interconnected World, the final place where I can roar and cry and feel (almost) no pangs of self-consciousness. It is the only place I feel comfortable not playing it cool, and so why should I play it cool about admitting this?

It shouldn’t really be a surprise that I feel this way about the game. Almost all fans do. Their ego, home life and pride are intertwined with their team; it is an escape from the drudgery of daily life and a rare chance to be bonded by one common cause. I am, first and foremost, a football fan. It defines me and literally shapes the way I live my life, patiently waiting for a weekly kick off and then days of discussion, remorse or joy that will inevitably follow. When the trequartistas and I get together it dominates our discussions, in between the occasional game of Articulate. I would love, of course, to find such pleasure and pain in other areas of my life, and maybe when the mists of my summer angst lift I will. Until then, however, I am left with football. To paraphrase Trainspotting’s Renton, Choose your future. Choose life . . . But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got football? Quite.