23 April 2025

Watching football is also watching everything else

From Kenny Dalglish’s hair to the evocative names of players, the game is a carnival of distraction.

When I look at football, I find my mind wandering all the time. Yet I always watch on my own – not with my son, in case he distracts me with irrelevant comments about other matters, other games, other times. I want to concentrate on this game, now, so if he insists on sitting with me, I tell him to belt up.

Yet my mind is a whirlwind, fantasies and thoughts and images sparked off by what I am watching on the pitch. When the Real Madrid manager Carlo Ancelotti retires he will clearly become a funeral director. I can just see him beside the cortège, walking closely and solemnly in his heavy black overcoat, black tie, white shirt and white hair. He has worn this same outfit for years, though his jowls are getting heavier. Being a manager is, in a way, a preparation for death, or at least grieving. Everyone, even Pep Guardiola and Arne Slot, has had periods of misery. In every match, there is a moment of total agony, lined on their faces for all to see.

Football does age them. Eddie Howe looked like a member of a boy band when he first emerged at Bournemouth. Today, despite great success at Newcastle, just look at those bags under his eyes – and now he is off poorly with pneumonia. Poor lad.

How do you spell that old Geordie chant? Is it “Howay the lads”, or “Away the lads”? You only tend to hear it, not see it written down.

Then I fantasise about their names. How I long for young Tyler Dibling, boy wonder at Southampton, to become a legend, a household name… and part of the football language. “Dibling” would refer to someone young and eager and ever so promising. Not to be confused with dribbling.

Footballers often have apt names. George Best was so neatly named. As was David Speedie at Chelsea. Though he was mainly speedy to anger. Frank Swift – you won’t remember him, you are too young – was a much-loved England goalie who died in the Munich air crash. I often thought he should have been a winger not a goalie.

I enjoyed Plymouth knocking Liverpool out of the FA Cup because I have always liked their shirts. They are the only team in the top four leagues who play in green. Is that right? Have I imagined that? While watching the game I have no time to look things up.

Oh my goodness, I have just seen Pat Jennings in the crowd. Still alive and with amazing hair, lucky beggar. As lush and thick a crop now as it was in the 1970s. Kenny Dalglish – he has a fine head of hair as well. He is a bit stooping today, but I only have eyes for his hair.

When Ollie Watkins first emerged at Villa I missheard his name and thought he was Dolly Watkins, which made me smile. I had a teacher called Dolly Watson at my secondary modern school in Carlisle in the 1950s. She was lovely. She would invite chosen boys back to her cottage for tea.

Then there were the players who sounded like girls when I first heard their name, such as Alisson at Liverpool. Or sounded like stately homes, like Dewsbury-Hall. John Stones: he must have gone through life with people assuming his name was Johnstone. New people always called me David Hunter when I was young.

Lewis Dunk must have gone through life being called drunk, or dunkin’, like a doughnut, har har… When you have an unusual name, people do make the same pathetic jokes you have heard a thousand times.

I suppose we have to praise Arsenal for getting to the Euro semis. I am now totting up in my head all the Arsenal fans in my street. To avoid them.

This week I discovered that Cole Palmer, who looks like almost every kid I was at my sec mod with, is of West Indian descent. His granddad came from Saint Kitts. I have been there – lovely little island. Might go again. How did I not know that? Too much time fantasising about football and not enough reading about it. I wonder if there is a book to be written called What I Think About When I Think About Football. Must ring my agent.