This Sporting Life?

According to David Baddiel
'Sports fills the God-shaped hole'
both in his life, and in the life of his country.

Was this meant to explain the appeal of sport?
Something played by the few, watched by the many
where the aim is to find something parochial
for fans to attach themselves to? Where only
those in the higher ranks are well rewarded?

Where the more indirect the access
the viewer has to the game being played
the more the tabloid press takes over any narrative
about the form of the most admired or maligned team?

It was a sort of tithe every week
when millions of male heads of households
spent £1 a week on football pools forms
which they let their children to fill in,
the man knowing that he would never win.

But the win for him was giving his children a role
that hid from them how much money he spent
on himself in other ways, that rewarded only him,
that it would have been awkward to explain,
if ever he was asked about the financial mechanics of it.

David Baddiel was right,
but more in the way that organised sport
expiated men who disliked being married
from explaining how far from their marriage vows
they strayed, as they mistook faith to be a gamble
where their church was the bookies, and the truer
they were to it the more ritually they hid their losses.

I am now too old, too unfit, and anti-competitive
to take even a passive interest in sport.

If I saw sport to be about anything now,
I would see it for the money it attracts
where that divides people, via gambling.

I would want to find the win-win,
relational value in it, with 1-1 mentoring.