NED BOULTING

THE FOOTBALL WORLD CUP SEES NED RETURN TO HIS FIRST SPORTING LOVE

Many of you will neither know nor care that I started my professional life as a football reporter. It was a deeply held passion for the rituals and comedies, the occasional wonder and despair of football that drove me towards a Saturday job at Sky Sports, which paid me the princely sum of £50 per week.

So began a journey through the ranks, until a couple of years later I pitched up at ITV, a fully fledged ‘touchline reporter’; one of TV’s punch bags in suits who dole out the team news, get their heads torn off by megalomaniac managers, and lambasted by fans for being a stupid bloke in a suit. I spent 15 years stalking the players’ tunnels of Old Trafford, San Siro, Stamford Bridge and the Allianz Arena, dodging disaster and slowly falling out of love with the national game. At the same time I was falling in love with cycling.

What began in 2003 as a sideshow to keep me busy during the football off-season grew in intensity, until a couple of years ago I severed my ties completely with football, at least in a professional sense. Cycling has now colonised my calendar. I write books and stuff in the winter, devote the spring and summer to TV work, and in the autumn I tour my own one-man comedy/ cycling theatre show – it’s called Tour de Ned for 2018, since you ask.

But that’s not the whole story. I cannot just amputate the football side from my life and move on. It sat too deep, meant too much, so there’s a bit of me that still loves the game. Maybe because I don’t have a club to support, I find myself drawn to the national side of the country I live in – England.

Please bear in mind that I’m writing this long before we discover what inevitable ignominy awaits England at the hands of Andorra/Greenland/Lesotho... Or perhaps England has won the World Cup by the time you read this. Perhaps you’re reading in Wales or Scotland, so don’t particularly care about the team’s fortunes.

Back to the present day. I bought an England flag for my bike. I paid £2.99 for it on Oxford Street, only to find WHSmith selling two flags for 20p. I spent the first couple of weeks of the World Cup pootling around with the Cross of White Van Man, as it is derisively known by the metropolitan cycling elite, on my rear pannier rack. It felt good to reunite my Lycra yin with my studded yang.

Too often the rigours of 90 minutes of football are looked down upon by the cycling community, who seem to wish to annex for themselves the notions of suffering and bravery. While I wouldn’t want to diminish the sacrifices and incomprehensible toughness of road racers, in particular, I do wish that people who don’t play football understood how hard a game it is mentally, physically and tactically. And those who complain endlessly about players rolling around at the slightest provocation, share a great deal in common with those who claim that all cyclists shoot red lights. Both points of view wilfully ignore the silent majority.

Football is a bloated thing, awash with egos and swimming in unprecedented riches. The sport is doing its best to make us hate it, with its pomposity and its avaricious disappearance behind ever higher paywalls. And cycling, by and large, adheres to its fundamentally haphazard heart. It is an ungovernable pursuit, free at the point of use and lurching from wobble to tipping point and back again with all the stability of a Weeble.

But the two passions are not mutually exclusive. I know many ex players who have fallen deeply in love with cycling, from the great Geoff Thomas to Arsenal legend Lee Dixon. I once had a long conversation with Arsene Wenger about the Alberto Contador clenbuterol case. The England manager, Gareth Southgate, during a brief spell when he was working with me at ITV, was always fascinated by the Tour de France.

Just before the tournament started, I wrote to Southgate, telling him about the flag on my bike. He wrote an email back, all the way from Russia, which ended with him saying, “I hope we can allow you to fly your flag with pride.”

I write this column about three hours before England’s first game against Tunisia, and about two weeks before I head off to the Tour de France. I hope Gareth hasn’t been sacked by the time I return...

It felt good to reunite my Lycra yin with my studded yang