My last imaginary World Cup: I’m too old for professional football

IT HASN’T been easy but I have had to face reality. This will probably be my last World Cup.

I should clarify — this is the last World Cup that in my wildest day-dreams — I could have played in. At 36, if I had been fit I would have been the sixth oldest player at the World Cup and the third oldest outfield player.

I’m even older than Andrea Pirlo. He’s the Italian footballer who directed the defeat of England. In appearance, he looks like a cross between Gerard Depardieu and Chuck Norris. This is a man who looks like he could orchestrate a daring heist while seated in his study tasting wine and wearing a silk smoking jacket. You couldn’t have Andrea Pirlo calling around to your house. He’d be there at the door talking to your wife and she’d be laughing and touching her hair and Pirlo would compliment her on her choice of colour for the hall.

And like England’s midfield, you’d be powerless to intervene while he made an exquisite pass.

The realisation that this is my last world cup as an imaginary player has not diminished my enjoyment. Despite it all, I’m still a sucker for the competition. The whole package — from the academic newspaper articles studying the goal per game average of the last five world cups, the TV panels composed of ex-footballers in shiny suits, trying to decide where your loyalties lie in games like Bosnia Herzegovina versus Iran or Honduras versus Ecuador. I even fall for the emotional manipulation of the advertisements showing footballers deep in hero mode as they go out to do battle while a little boy watches a match on a television on a stool outside a shack with his grandfather and they’re in the favela but it doesn’t matter because FOOTBALL and then the Multinational Company who make the thing we are supposed to buy link their brand to heroism and favelas with a short slogan like: Football. Life. Our Product.

Simply because of the type of game football is, there is always the chance that an underdog will win. No matter who you are in the ‘money talks’ club game, the country you play for is still largely an accident of birth. Therefore, in nearly every world cup at least one team captures the imagination. This year it might be Chile.

Back in 1990 that was Ireland when they got to the quarter-final. Obviously, some of our football was so stifling against the beautiful Romania of George Hagi and Marius Lacatus that it was like watching your parents rob a shop to get food for dinner. It was distressing but necessary. But it gave birth to so many dreams. I don’t know what it’s going to be like at Russia 2018 — homophobic probably — but at 40 years of age, I will not even be available in my day dreams. I’ll have to settle for imagining doing punditry — sandwiched in between Roy Keane and Kenny Cunningham’s eyebrows, making astute predictions about Switzerland being “everyone’s dark horses”.

But for now, I’ll enjoy the beautiful game while I’m still able. To dream.