On Fatherhood & Football
They don't warn you, of course. From the very moment that a wave of "I think I'm late" washes over your significant other for the first time to the point at which you're looking at a grainy black and white image of something that looks like a human being while a feeling of "somehow or other, I helped to make that" washes over you, the very prospect of being a father is almost completely overwhelming. There are a lot of people offering advice on the internet that ranges from the invaluable to the ethically questionable and the more than useless. There are a lot of horror stories out there and there is a lot of overwhelming, all-consuming love to be read about. But there's no definitive manual.
Even the question of whether my first born child will actually have any interest whatsoever in association football or not hangs in the air like Denis Law. If he or she has much psychological genetic code from their mother, the answer will most likely be a resounding "No." This, after all, is a woman to whom I had to explain how the World Cup works as if to an alien (and doing this is something that I'd heartily recommend to anybody who should, for any reason, feel the need to remind themselves of the ultimate futility of professional sport) and who inhabits a universe that has never been blemished by the existence of Ken Bates. But if my genetic code has anything to do with my child, at some point it's likely that questions of where daddy goes every Saturday lunchtime that requires him to wear a bar scarf and which sees him return home four hours later, smelling of rum and more often than not cat-kickingly furious will start to be asked.
Of course, one of the questions that probably invokes the most head scratching from new fathers is that of how to engineer your offspring to support the right team. It seems most likely that the best policy to stick to in this respect is to strike early, while the child's brain is still malleable. A few heroic tales from the past dressed up as if they're fairy tales should do the trick, but, to cover myself on this front, it's probably going to be necessary to demonise others, too. It shouldn't be too difficult to write Arsene Wenger into Little Red Riding Hood, for example ("and then the wolf, who was wearing a ridiculous puffa jacket, said in possibly racist French accent…"), whilst casting Jose Mourinho as The Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang doesn't feel like it will be too much of an stretch either.
The danger with all of this
