Balls. Balls and running.

I am not, it may surprise you to learn, a big sports man. I have had moments where it may have appeared otherwise but these have been a facade. If I’m being really honest, I just don’t get it.

Even if I have pretended otherwise on many occasions.

My Father was a rugby player as a young man. Rugby and no doubt the associated high-jinks of the club filled, as far as I can tell from the affection which he speaks of tearing along the flanks with mud spraying in his wake, a large part of his life for many years. I don’t actually remember him ever playing, but I suspect buggered knees at a relatively young age and increasing job demands as much as the stresses of raising my infuriating infant self ate into his time too much. Still, it was this rather than football or cricket or, I don’t know, water polo, which he attempted to share his enthusiasm.

I was, I say with regret if only because it probably would have bought him happiness, lamentably bad. In many ways it was one of the few sports where I stood a slim chance. Speed, competent hand-eye coordination and graceful agility are not prerequisites. Indeed, fat, stocky kids who can get in the way make ideal forward props provided they are also brave and prepared to throw their face in the way of someone else’s boot. I wasn’t brave. I was the exact opposite, being particularly cowardly about the prospect of physical harm and so coupled with my inability to run, pass, kick or catch I was doomed for a brief rugby career. Even so, I did spend a year or so lurking around the edges of the school team – who clearly must have been pretty dreadful if they were considering letting me take the field – before my eagerness to take part in anything that wasn’t sitting in my room reading comics subsided and I spent Tuesday and Thursday mornings sleeping in later and later rather than jogging, slowly, around a frozen grass pitch.

As I have grown up and become more physically able I enjoy being outside doing activities. I don’t mind kicking a ball aimlessly around, although I could think of better things to do. I quite like swimming in the sea, although have no real interest in doing laps of a pool. I love hiking, canoeing, climbing, cycling – well, okay, maybe not love, but I am starting to enjoy cycling. The point is that I’m not a fat slob who gets out of breath taking a shit. I’m moderately fit; I do sporty type things.

And yet, I have very little interest in sport itself. I can drive and like driving fast and along difficult country lanes, but I cannot watch formula one without wondering whether I’ve died and gone to hell. Doing is not the same as participating, but sport is primarily a spectator activity. Far more watch football than ever lay on a chilly Sunday morning, happily berating foreign players for weather gloves and snoods whilst refusing to leave their electric blanket fuelled dens themselves. It’s entertainment, I get that, even if I don’t particularly find it entertaining.

People looked at me like I was mad when I made zero effort to secure Olympics tickets. To be honest, if I was there I would no doubt get swept up in the moment, be taken over by a crowd’s hysteria of anticipation on the verge of being squashed and fear that every loud noise is the thermite being detonated. I may even enjoy myself, but equally it may make me want to tug my eyeballs out and eat them as watching the games in Beijing did. I didn’t want to watch the games, but they were shown in the pub I tended bar for during my Masters. The afternoon shifts were far from busy and the time difference meant it was likely to be men’s third round hurdle-javelin hybrid blaring at high volume. It was either watch or play on fruit machines. Or read the Daily Mail. Anything to avoid talking to the midday drunk with tattoos on his knuckles and scurvy scabs at the corner of his lips.

So, next summer: I’m not sure I really want to risk spending money on an event that will leave me initially frustrated at the inevitable claustrophobia of the queues in and then potentially suicidal at the dreariness of it all. I’ll be okay if I skip this one. But people can’t believe me. I’m missing out, they insist, on a once in a generation experience of terminal public transport collapse. What will I do whilst the games are on? What other thing is there possibly to do? Get on with my normal life and read less news, I guess.

A working knowledge of football is, however, a necessity for a man trying to negotiate with the rest of the world. There’s a default presumption that you will support a team. My choice, for having a false one is usually easier than explaining otherwise, of Birmingham City is mainly based on their lack of success meaning few people know anything about them either so I am less likely to be caught out in any error. But, after several years of pretence it started to become genuine, as though I was an undercover agent gone native, unable to remember what was a lie and what wasn’t. The deeper I went the greater the required knowledge to engage in the banter. I was reduced to actually reading the BBC Sport’s section on an almost daily basis to keep up with the statistics and gossip the clichéd twists and fucking turns that defined any season. And this is, I think, largely my problem with sport. It refuses to let you be passive; you have to give money and become emotionally involved.

To be honest there was a part of me that quite enjoyed the time in my life when evenings out were dedicated to watching football as part of a group. Not, I should clarify, the time during the 2006 world cup when I went to a pub in Islington with my colleagues and someone, not one of us, spent the match’s duration berating with ever more elaborately offensive language England. He was English, but clearly the players weren’t trying hard enough as they huffed and puffed their way to a not terribly convincing, but rarely in doubt victory. If it was he in Germany then the whole thing would be sewn up with a series of solo wonder goals, presumably. But, alas, he was a fat, balding, drunk, abusive moron who couldn’t even manage to sing the relatively easy tunes in anything other than a howl. Twat.

It was easy enough to enjoy the camaraderie of rooting for the same team. Male bonding takes place in few areas, but amongst the beer heavy adoration of a well-struck goal it is fully acceptable to hug a near stranger with tears of joy in his eyes and some sort of politically incorrect xenophobia on his lips. I think, however the need to be constantly aware of a player’s form, their number of assists, the clichés associated with their temperament, build, mercenary or sexual activities simply requires too much homework. I have enough obsessions to tend to without feeling socially obliged to know Peter ‘good touch for a big man clichéd lanky twonk’ Crouch* international scoring record against major or minor teams. Yet without this knowledge the whole dramatic tapestry makes no sense.

(* I had sports commentary clichés by the way for this to work... I feel mildly ashamed.)

Yes, I did just say the whole “dramatic tapestry” because the one thing I do appreciate, indeed am even jealous of, is sport’s artificially created drama. The result is always achingly tense because there’s your whole life as a fan hanging on it. The heroes and villains are perfectly formed and operate in a world of clear cut moments, of death defying, child sacrificing importance. Real ife is more subtle and complex and therefore full of apathy; rolling along is easier than struggling to understand.

Those moments of anguish are impossible to create in any other medium. That’s why novels about sport are almost always rubbish because they are too contrived, too scripted. Even good ones are really about something else. David Peace’s Damned United isn’t about football, it’s about the destroying obsession of ambition and shyness drowned out by overconfidence. Joseph O’Neil’s Netherland isn’t about cricket, it’s about loneliness and despair and last chances post 9/11. Don DeLillo’s EndZone isn’t about American football, it’s... Actually, it’s a clunky analogy of warfare being everywhere so let’s just ignore that one.

There’s no real competition. Sport allows the dullness, the sort of tedium novel readers would burn, of a nil-nil draw, or a long fought out five day test match broken every half hour by rain, or Steve Davis playing snooker game to help prepare for the thrillingly where literally anything could happen. You really can’t actually make it up. For example, I’m reliably told that when Birmingham City won their first trophy for forty-odd years back in the spring against far superior Arsenal side it took the Londoner’s goalkeeper and defender to stop playing and watch the ball bounce in the air between them and roll away as they then, passively let the Birmingham striker score. If you tried to write something like that random sequence of events no-one would believe your ham-fisted prose. And yet, because actual football has the twenty-two independent spoilt, overpaid characters roaming freely each with their own calculated agendas trying to fuck it up for everyone else, people believe in the impossible.

In fact they crave for it. No-one cares if Andy Murray wins a long sequence of Masters titles and advances on the world number one spot. No, they want a jaw stretching scream of triumph and then the broken, sobbing mess of man clutching the base-line two matches later as he fails to win Wimbledon. Sport really, implausibly, matters to people, far more people than ever give a toss about fiction. And it matters, ridiculously, because they love drama; they want to have the thrill of the briefest high and then crushing despair for the majority. It’s kind of like crack-cocaine.

Wish I could write like that.