My dad was a man who hated sport. But I could never understand why. He was the greatest menswear salesman in the world, without a shadow of doubt. If a shirt or tie needed shifting, my late dad could sell it in his sleep. He had the most persuasive tongue in London and I’ll never forget his sterling contribution to the world of retail.

But there was a problem, you see. My dad hated sport and everything associated with it. The money, the sheer pointlessness of it, and those muddied oafs who kicked the living daylights out of a football.

My dad died two years ago. He was a gentle and dignified man who will always remain in my heart. But in his eyes there was a futility about the Beautiful Game which brought him out in a cold sweat. I could never understand why he didn’t like football.

'My dad hated sport and everything associated with it. The money, the sheer pointlessness of it, and those muddied oafs who kicked the living daylights out of a football'


In any mealtime discussion, I would bring up the subject of the FA Cup or an important League match. But any reference to football would be met with a stony silence from my dad. What on earth, he would cry, is the point of 22 grown men thrashing a cow’s bladder into a net?

Our parents should be the most decisive influences in our lives, role models to whom we look and revere. But my dad could never get his head around the so-called complexities of Association Football. I didn’t resent his  lack of interest in football, or any sport for that matter. If anything I respected and loved him for other reasons. But the fact remains that he never rushed over to the local park for a leisurely kick-about, nor would he would have dreamed of taking me to what was then a First Division match.

He used to work on a Saturday afternoon, a dedicated working class man who didn’t much care for the deeds of Liverpool, Manchester United or West Ham United. According to him, football was played by riff-raff and oiks with nothing better to do. They were neither silly nor misguided, simply young children who should have been revising for their O Levels and a proper career.

There were several times when I tried to convert my dad to football. His game, if he had any, was snooker. Now snooker was the game for gentleman. Snooker was a game of skill, intense concentration and rich excitement.

What was football all about? Why, my dad would say, did thousands of supporters queue up outside football grounds? Why did they stand on freezing cold terraces for hours on end? Surely their time would be more constructively spent at work or window shopping in Oxford Street?

But for all his vehement loathing of football, my dad was the loveliest and most compassionate man you could ever wish to meet. He was never the most athletic of people, and football was a game that required far too much sweat and physical exertion. In my dad’s world, Shoot football magazine was read by those daft country folk.

But looking through my dad’s old diaries, I made an amazing discovery. On Cup Final days he noted meticulously the names of goal-scorers and the teams involved. But his idea of a perfect Saturday afternoon was an old James Cagney film followed by a good old-fashioned Edward G. Robinson shoot-out. If anybody had mentioned Peter Osgood, Stan Bowles or George Best, the names would have lost everything in the translation.

Football, my dad insisted, went on for far too long. Why was it 90 minutes as opposed to 45 minutes? Why did I have to watch the endless highlights on a Sunday afternoon? Every single second, minute, month and week of the year was taken up with that wretched round-ball game. It was corrupting me and horribly repulsive. TV showed far too much football and my dad would rather sit in the garden.

Football, my dad felt, was a waste of time and, along with hunting, should be scrapped. He would often jokingly call himself a Fulham supporter, not that it had anything to do with a lifelong fondness for the Cottagers. Rather it had everything to do with his place of birth - Hammersmith.

Above all, football was that stupid spectacle that scruffy school kids played. It was that sport without any meaning or purpose. I think my dad missed the point, though. True, football was played by long-haired louts and he may have been right about the excessive hooliganism of the 1970s. It was a rough, tough and violent game - but it did have its good points.

In the opening years of the 21st century I think my dad would have approved of the progress football has made. He’d have loved the comfortable all-seater stadiums, the new state-of-the-art grounds and the managers with their European accents. Yes, dad, I think you’d have grown to like football.