A GAME OF TWO HALVES

It's wall-to-wall football at the moment: office sweepstakes, chat in the kitchen about where Wayne Rooney should play, how good the Germans are and whether the team from Nigeria actually bored themselves playing out a soulless nil-nil against Iran.

I watched that match. I'm by no means a fan; I've spent a long time in the first half of my life, figuring out whether I actually like this sport at all! However, I do quite enjoy the general excitement of a world cup and I stuck with it in the (ultimately forlorn) hope that someone might pass the ball better than I could.

You tend to meet two types of people around this time of the year. Broadly speaking, they are: people who love football, understand the nuances and tensions, the drama, the hope, despair and sheer atmosphere of it, and then people who don't. This second group of people grab their remote-controls and zap the TV over to soap operas, history documentaries, the shopping channel, anything except the flipping football.

My Mum's one of them. She's a zapper. Every time Gary Lineker's cheeky face appears grinning in front of a distant Sugarloaf Mountain, she groans and stretches for the TV guide. It's not Gary Lineker's fault - it's just the way it is. Hercule Poirot wins the ratings war.

"We've got a month of this," says my Dad, every time, as if to stir the waters.

Meanwhile, the first group of people, the real Publican Pundits are in their element. They speak the language of cliché, copied verbatim from their commentating heroes, who sit in brightly lit TV studios teaching them how to appear knowledgeable without actually saying anything.

"At the end of the day," says one, "There's no-one in the box. It's a great ball in, but there's nobody on the end of it."

What?

"He's really giving it 110%" says another, nodding seriously, "Clumsy, clumsy  challenge in the area; I've seen them given, Clive, I've seen them given."

And people say they can't understand the language of Shakespeare...

Anyway, I'm being a little facetious. As I say, I quite like the excitement of a good old game of footy and I do kind of know what those things mean. You'll hear clichéd phrases from the zappers too, by the way...

"It's just twenty two men kicking a bag of air round a field."

"Football's a game for gentlemen played by hooligans, whereas rugby..."

Yawn.

I tell you what though, I don't think anyone really thinks football is just 'outdoor-air-bag-ball'. I have a theory. I think football is a distraction to stop us bashing bells out of people from the next town, the next village or the next country. Rather than gathering together as fathers and sons for battle, jumping on our horses and loading up our cannons, we focus our tribalism onto this preposterous game, climb into cars and coaches and watch other people do our fighting for us. Heroes clash with villains in studded boots with a leather ball.

In short, the football field is the result of a steadily evolving battlefield, where obscenely paid young gladiators do battle on our behalf while we cheer them on from the colosseums we've erected for the purpose. It is a place where victory matters and defeat really hurts.

Listen to the jargon. There's talk of one team 'slaughtering' another, of the 'group of death' and 'marked men'. There are 'killer' passes and 'attacking threats', not to mention 'relegation dogfights', scrappy battles, crushing defeats and devestating blows. It's a very thinly veiled metaphor.

And I say, that's a great thing. Football's a marvellous invention, for that reason. Far better to focus aggression in this bombastic way (as ridiculous as it is) than actual warfare. OK, sometimes the aggression does bubble over into physical violence. Alright, occasionally, people do take it too far and that is inexcusable and preposterous.

However, in this second period of my life, on the whole (when I'm really beyond the point where being good at playing soccer actually matters) I think distracting ourselves from actual warfare by projecting ourselves onto a team of our local heroes is alright.

Maybe it really is a game of two halves.