How my heart condition taught me to truly read the game of football

Sitting watching football at home on TV through my childhood and teenage years, most often in the company of my parents, I learned a great deal about football. I heard stories from my dad about his own football playing days and his later stints as a referee. Sitting in our living room, my parents on the couch and me on a seat close to the back window, nearest the TV itself, we really seemed to watch games: not passively but actively.

The footballers I most admired as a child – my first role models who weren’t people I knew – were the ones I perceived as not being “flashy”, not your Klinsmanns or Ginolas, but the kind I thought were serious and determined players: Roy Keane, Denis Irwin, Gennaro Gattuso. I loved players who were clever, who understood that a lot less energy could be expended by being in the right place at the right moment in a game. Midfield generals. Solid centre backs. Players you might describe as good readers of the game.

Early on, playing football in school during PE or at break time, or up on the field near the streets around me, it became clear that I was never going to be especially fast: short sprinting bursts were not my forte. I was born with a serious congenital heart defect that severely limited my exercise capacity as a child. I couldn’t rely on speed to burst my way through and breeze past people on the wing or down the middle. Anyway, I tended to favour playing as a left-back and occasionally in midfield. These were the positions where, as I understood it, you were a kind of spectator of the main action: the opening up on the wings, the crosses, the piercing attacks towards the penalty area. In midfield and in defence, you were often trying to stymie play as well as create and generate. You were watching. A spectator at the centre of the action.

Most of my footballing experience has been as a spectator, something I suspect is true of most of us. I was a good reader of the game. It was about the only compliment I tended to receive in school playing matches. I was determined and even aggressive and reckless in throwing my body about in the school sports hall or in the playground. My touch was not what you would call deft, and I wasn’t a playmaker as such but I could read what was going on and try to position myself in a place where I could either minimise my obvious deficiencies as a player.

open image in gallery

My life as a spectator of football has been a more varied one than my short life on the pitch. I grew up right as the Premier League transformed the top division of English professional football from something eyed with suspicion and distaste to a global spectacle. I was born just in time for the hegemony of Manchester United under the yet-to-be-knighted Alex Ferguson and was a Manchester United obsessive. Many of the books I remember from my childhood were Manchester United annuals, telling the story of the past season, and books telling the history of the club. I had the new jerseys whenever they came out, even the infamous grey away jersey which I hardly ever wore.

I can remember in the early 2000s queuing at midnight in a local sports shop in my hometown of Waterford, for the newest Manchester United home jersey the same season Rio Ferdinand began playing for them. It was expected that Ferdinand would wear number 6, which he did briefly, before becoming number 5. I still have the jersey with Ferdinand 6 at home in my parents’ house. I was just a little too old for the Harry Potter phenomenon, this was the closest I got to a midnight opening for the new books.

Football existed on so many planes for me: it was a sport played by my older brother and my brothers-in-law, it was something my dad refereed and managed (a local pub side), and it was something on television every weekend around which we as a family would gather. It was even something I could go see locally – the local district league and Waterford United, the storied local club in the League of Ireland, Ireland’s footballing top tier.

open image in gallery

At the same time as I was surrounded by football every day, I was increasingly aware of my limited abilities in the sport: I was strongly discouraged from doing anything except playing pick-up games on the street at home. That meant no joining local clubs like all my friends, no training and no matches on Saturdays. I could watch football on Match of the Day, and on Sky when we got that. I could go see people play the game at local grounds, but I was always a little apart. I was increasingly a spectator of the game. In school one season I remember our team did especially well, meaning class trips around the country for provincial cup finals. I was considered something of a mascot for the team. It was a consolation for not being able to play, a way of including me. A football team needs its supporters.

At the same time, in my teen years, even as I went to watch more and more live football, I was becoming more and more of a reader. After a childhood where I was very interested in books, I went through a phase of mostly reading music magazines (Q, Uncut, NME) but few if any books. I started to read again once I picked up some music biographies in my middle-teen years. Suddenly the heady mix of music, football and books combined in my life.

A lifetime of watching football matches, watching closely for those often too brief moments of magic inside 90 minutes helped me develop the patience to watch so much else: movies in which it seemed nothing happened except for the briefest flashes of brilliance. This extended to the theatre too. There was so much to appreciate on the pitch, on the stage, on the screen. It is easy to admire the individual flashes of brilliance, a Cantona goal, a Ronaldo run or Messi burst that could be beautiful, but so too was the near-imperceptible efforts of the other players, the bit-parters, those who swelled the scene. Footballing fame is fleeting, and the majority of footballers’ names are forgotten over time, though it takes many to make a team.

open image in gallery

In a now famous, oft-repeated though seemingly apocryphal quote, Albert Camus made clear the importance of football to his understanding of the world: “What I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football.” There are many ways in which we can experience football, all of them linked: a player watching helplessly as a winger blows past, a referee trying to watch and anticipate intention, a manager on the sideline trying to impose order on the chaos, a supporter in the stands forced by turns to keep their gaze fixed even as they cannot bear to watch, or the fan at home on their couch watching on TV, the laptop. We are all watching.

I have lived away from Ireland for more than seven years now. The life of the football spectator was a good grounding for the experience of being in a new country. A keen eye for the telling detail – of the little differences – can help you see what’s happening all around you. To pre-empt a situation. To make the right move. That attitude – learnt first among friends watching Waterford in League of Ireland, and since at grounds from Prague to Oslo and beyond – the reader’s response to the world, I got first not from the pages of books, but from football. It was there I learned to be a close reader.

Like reading, when watching a match you are both in and out of the action, spectator and participant: receptive, open to the emotions of the action, allowing yourself to be carried away. This is especially true of the spectator sitting at home watching on television – they are most like the solitary reader of books, in a world of imagination – imagining themselves to be an extension of the supporters in the stadium, shouting as though they can be heard. Football needs its spectators, its readers. It’s still the highest compliment I know: a good reader of the game.

‘Pacemaker’ by David Toms is out 15 September. Published by Banshee Press