It’s the middle of summer, which means a new football season. The glory game hardly sleeps these days: we’re in the midst of the Women’s World Cup and there is the constant spectre of the Saudi power grab on men’s elite football. As a fan, I’ll still embrace this hypothetical moment of renewal. But the big kick-off for me will come in early September with the return of the Thursday night football game that, for the last 25 years, I’ve played in almost every week.
I first got involved with it in 1998, when I was invited along by friends in the time-honoured way. Most of my Thursday evenings since then, amid changes of jobs and circumstance, have been defined by a routine of ferreting around the house for contact lenses, grabbing whatever bits of kit I can find and shoving a towel into a tatty old orange bag. At about 8.20pm, summoned by the beep of a horn outside the house, I’ll squeeze into the back of a car that was patently not designed for four portly middle-aged men.
