I wondered if we would ever do this again. Sachin, Carlo, Kier and I watching a Manchester United game in my living room. The dog barking randomly, knocking things over with its tail. Pizza on its way. Not unexpectedly, Wolves have equalised in the 93rd minute. Before my injury, we gathered like this every week. I’m in a wheelchair now, my sons on the sofa beside me, their feet on the coffee table, and we’re threatening never to watch this crappy team again, which has become part of the ritual.
When I was a kid in the Sixties, it was more or less impossible to watch football unless you went to the ground. There was barely any football on television. We could watch the World Cup, the Cup Final and other glamour games, but it was impossible to follow your team’s progress week by week, like we do now. Recently, looking through my diary of that time, I notice that among the five or six books a week that I read, many were autobiographies or biographies of sport stars, mainly footballers and cricketers.
At home, we received The Daily Express and The Guardian every day, and on Sunday The Observer, and my grandfather’s favourite, The News of the World. I was a big fan of sports writing and would enjoy reading accounts of football matches. My father had been a sports journalist, and my uncle, Omar Kureishi, was a famous cricket commentator in Pakistan, who had been, briefly, manager of the Pakistan cricket team, making Imran Khan captain.
My maternal grandfather, Edward Buss, who ran a second-hand antique and junk shop on Chatterton Road, Bromley, had several televisions piled up on top of one another. Only one of them at a time seemed to work, and since he had obtained it from a fish and chip shop, when it warmed up, it gave off an awful smell of rancid oil. The picture was black and white and fuzzy, and to get it going would require considerable manipulation of the aerial and several bangs on the television’s side. Although we could vaguely make out the shape of the game, you couldn’t really see the ball or the footballer’s faces.
I left home in the mid-Seventies to attend university in London. I lost interest in sport for years, and became attracted by theatre, European cinema and psychoanalysis. Everything changed in 1991 when Sky began broadcasting live matches. At the time, I was living on Comeragh Road, Barons Court, and there was a pub at the end of the street, which is still there, called The Curtains Up, where I began to watch football. There was another pub close by on the North End Road, The Nashville, a rock venue — now the Three Kings — which also began to show soccer.
In 1992, the French footballer Eric Cantona left Leeds United and was transferred to Manchester United for a fee of one million pounds. I can remember reading somewhere that Cantona had been in Lacanian analysis, which he claimed had been essential to him. He compared it to “having an oil change”. I was already mesmerised by this astonishing man, who would take an easel and canvas out onto the pitch after training and paint the view, comparing football to a dance. This new knowledge accelerated my interest in him. After all, how many footballers have had psychoanalysis?
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