50 ways TO LEAVE YOUR LOVER

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

Afriend of mine has a son who had reached the age of four without showing much interest in football. My friend knew the time was coming when he might have to make a decision about whether or not to introduce the little guy to the game. But he was torn.

Torn because his own life had been filled with sport to such an extent, and by football in particular, he had almost no idea what existence might be like without that obsession consuming his days.

But he wondered if it might in fact be better — better without the constant low-lying worry that your team might be in decline. Better without that vague sense of discontent that is your constant companion when your team is eighth in the table. Better, for sure, without the horrible downers that you endure when you’re losing.

So much of the sporting life — the addiction to it, indeed — is not about being happy at all, it is about being deeply unhappy in the company of a lot of other people who are equally unhappy.

This was the great insight which Nick Hornby articulated in Fever Pitch, this discovery during his first trip to see Arsenal, that football was not a form of entertainment in any normal sense.

Rugby might come into that category, with its all-too-friendly rivalries, but the young Hornby saw that football mattered desperately to these unfortunate people who were doomed to spend the best days of their lives at it, or so it seemed.

Of course, Nick Hornby was not the first person to realise this, but he was certainly one of the first to express it with such clarity, how so many of these men hated, really hated being there — but were powerless to stop themselves coming back for more the following week, and the week after that, and so on until they died.

It was actually through therapy that he acquired that clarity, due to the fact that when he recounted the events of his week to his counsellor, it would tend to consist mostly of the ups and downs of his relationship with Arsenal football club

— and given that his entire emotional life seemed to be connected to the doings of that outfit, the counsellor suggested that he might take a look at that...

But it’s not all bad, by any means. If you were lucky to find yourself either by birth, or by some other good fortune, to be a supporter of Manchester United between the years of 1993 and 2013, you would have lived in a state of such perpetual happiness, your only problem was that you had almost no concept of unhappiness.

But eventually this is not about whether your experience is mostly good or mostly bad, it is about the sheer vastness of the experience, how it is beyond your comprehension that this phenomenon would ever be absent from your life — or how it must be for those who don’t have it in their lives.

Indeed, you can divide the world into two kinds of people, those who hear the sound of a sports commentary on a car radio and are transported back to the best days of their lives, and those for whom it was hell itself.

That is how deep it goes, and yet it is not just an addiction, it is something else, something even more fundamental to our way of being in the world.

People can just about imagine getting drink out of their lives, but as my old friend George Byrne used to say: “There are only two things you can never change, your mother and your football club.”

My relationship with my father was profoundly connected to our love of sport, the journeys we made together — it would be wrong to disparage that as an addiction, but right to take heed of Nick Hornby’s findings on the dark side. My friend never had to make that decision to introduce his son to football — the lad found it anyway, somehow.

“There are only two things you can never change, your mother and your football club”