The World Cup fever has found its new victim – our columnist Suresh Menon. The man speaks of his interlude with the sport.

Suresh Menon is a writer based in India. In his youth he set out to change the world but later decided to leave it as it is

In a few weeks from now, World Cup soccer will be upon us and experts who last played the game just before someone ran off with the ball to invent rugby, will be telling us all about it. These experts are not necessarily in the television studios; some are pundits because they once walked past a Sunday afternoon game in somebody’s backyard. You can usually identify them by their manner of starting sentences with “In my time”.

That phrase, I hear, has been banned from all sports commentary, now the preserve of former players and stars who thought on their feet and now do so in more traditional ways.

Frankly, no one wants to know how it was in your time: not your listeners, not the casual fan, certainly not your children.

“In my time” seems to bestow special privileges. It suggests a time of greater moral superiority, higher technical standards and superior toilet facilities. Everything, apparently, was better in the past, and if you went back long enough, the best player was the one who first kicked a stone in anger outside his cave dwelling. The best commentator was the one who saw that and said, “Wow!”

Soccer may not always be a better game this year than it was last year – if that were the case, a two-year-old speaking for the first time could legitimately say “In my time” – but there is something about a World Cup that captures the imagination in ways other events don’t.

Certainly the annual lemon-and-spoon race at the local community hall doesn’t, nor does the three-legged race, once such a favourite in schools that had limited playing space.

The difference between the game you played at school and the one professionals get paid an arm and a leg for (sometimes literally) is not one of degree but of kind.

I once happened to be hanging around near a goalpost in primary school, trying to unwrap a toffee when a ball kicked from somewhere north by north east deflected off my knee and went into the goal. There were so many teams playing each other on a small field that it was impossible to discern where the forwards of one team ended and the defenders of another began. I was wildly congratulated for being in the right place at the right time, and walked on air believing I was a reincarnation of a still-alive Pele. I even tried to speak with a Brazilian accent for a while, assuming in my innocence that people from Brazil spoke a language called Brazilian.

And that is how I earned the right to say, “In my time”. No one can take that away from me now.