Hello. I'm Ed.

“He couldn’t understand why anyone would play a game where both sides agree on the rules”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Guilty as charged I’m afraid. I don’t know anything about sport. I don’t support a football team, I’ve never been to a live sporting event (actually I’ve been to one, an America vs. Scotland rugby match – I fell asleep somewhere during the first half), I don’t know what the offside rule is, I’ve only watched about four competitive fixtures of any sport on TV from start to finish and I haven’t played a competitive team sport since school.

Let me illustrate my point with an anecdote. A few years back I was (unwisely) asked to do some work for Reebok, and was up at their offices in York. They asked me to interview someone for them, a jug-eared unassuming bloke who until about halfway for the interview I assumed worked in their marketing department. He introduced himself as he came into the room. “I’m John Terry”.

“Hello John,” I said. “What do you do?”.

This has its disadvantages; there are certain rounds of pub quizzes when I go quiet and stare out of the window, conversation with cab drivers tends to be limited to their views on immigration and the standard male icebreaker of “so what did you make of the game on Saturday?” tends to not so much break the ice as bounce off it. As an insecure teenager I went through a period of learning a few salient facts every few months about the current views on “Beckham’s ball skills”, “the fucking Australians”, or “why Tim Henman is going to make it this year” so I could throw them into sport chat like grenades but not actually have to waste time watching the stuff. These days I don’t bother, I’m just open about my total cluelessness towards anything that might be printed in the last ten pages of the newspaper and let people deal with it (or in Dan’s case, obsess over it unhealthily).

But there’s also a massive upside.

Gentlemen, I have so much free time. I probably actually do more exercise than most of you (rock-climbing, swimming and hiking if you must know), my Saturday afternoons and Monday evenings (is it Monday?) are blissfully free, I’ve never had to learn a bunch of sporting stats, or pay for Sky sports, or buy insanely over-priced team shirts. Girls love me.

Why am I like this?

“I blame my father”. That’s my standard line when the question of why I don’t know who Arsen Wenger (sp?) is, or why I’m not sure how many people are on a football team, or why I couldn’t name any current member of the English Rugby side comes up. But this probably isn’t fair as whilst he may not be mad-keen on football, wild horses couldn’t drag my Dad away from the television when the Oxford Cambridge boat race is on, and my brother is such a rabid Arsenal fan that he goes without food in order to be able to afford a season ticket.

I just think I missed the boat at some point. As a kid my favourite games were the ones where the rules were invented as the game progressed, the sports I was good at whilst at school weren’t the ones that involved linking arms on the back of the coach and singing about Father Abraham and there comes a point (about 10 years old I think) when you accept that you just don’t care all that much whether you should be supporting Liverpool or Man U and instead want to talk about Dangermouse.

But, all of this being the case, Dan has laid down the gauntlet, and I’m willing to give it a go. I’m thinking of it more as a social experiment, the dealer’s first freebie of the opiate of the masses, but I severely doubt that I’m going to develop a full blown habit.

I’ll give Dan a year. One year. If he invites me to go to a sporting event I’ll go. If he wants me to sit in a pub and shout at a bunch of grown men running about in quaint and curious uniforms I’ll do it.

I may not enjoy it, but I’ll do it and at the end of the year I’m betting that my pulse still won’t race when I hear Des Lyneham’s dusky tones, that I still won’t care that Wotsisname Abromovitch (sp?) is “buying football” or whatever, or that the Ashes, or Football, or Championship Tiddlywinks are “coming home”.

Then Dan can leave me alone and I can go back to adoring women and Dangermouse.

Let’s call it a bet. A sporting bet.