Football Moments

---

What are your favourite sports to watch and play?

---

I have loved football all my life.

I remember as a small boy, falling in love with a game without knowing quite why.

Or the strip of colours catching my eye when I’m seven, and the strange logic of childhood doing the rest. Supporting Aston Villa, for no other reason than they matched the colours of the boyhood club I played for. It’s odd what sets a hook in you. A colour. A glance. And then, somehow, a lifetime.

The feel of playing competitively for years and years — the quiet satisfaction when a team clicks, when a pass lands just right, when you’re part of something moving together. Fifty years of it, which sounds absurd written down, but that’s what it was.

Today the moments look a little different.

Today is the final day of games in the Champions League league phase. Iti s one hour before kick-off, I will go the TV room at college because watching alone isn’t really the point. The room will fill with students. The tribes forming in the corners — Real Madrid, Manchester City, Arsenal, Barcelona, Paris St Germain. The noise rising as if the volume itself might influence the result.

The constant flicking between channels on a final day of group games, because something is always happening somewhere else, and nobody wants to miss the turning point.

The banter — half serious, half theatre — people making predictions with ridiculous confidence, then rewriting history five minutes later. Groans, cheers, complaints about referees, sudden joy that spills out of the body before it reaches the brain.

Then, tomorrow morning: Europa League. My team, Aston Villa, top of the league and assured of going through. Not a guarantee of glory, but enough to keep the pulse a little elevated and the conversation lively.

And then the long run toward the final in Budapest on 31 May — a date that feels both fixed and far away. I’ll be on holidays that week, so I’ll miss the full TV-room chaos at home. But I know myself.

I’ll still check the score.
I’ll still feel the swing of it.
I’ll still follow it at a distance.