On any given Saturday our fellow men, engaged in wonder at of God’s creation on most more normal days, divest themselves of sanity and run about a bit. I used to like running. When I was a small and serious chiddler I would dash from place to place as if I was going for the last plane out of Stalingrad with a stomach wound. And while I did this I would shout ‘run around!’ and ‘whee!’ with gleeful waspishness. The same practice is now undertaken by grown adult men. The only distinction is their weight, height, and taste for a different sort of coke.
If God had meant us to play sport, he would have given us cricket bats for arms. We were meant to hunt buffalo, procreate, and grunt, at times annoyingly. Exercise is not intended to be fun. It is intended to provide public school games masters with an excuse to blow whistles and, let’s be honest, wish they were blowing the boys’ whistles. Any attempt to make kicking things and throwing things and jumping over things into anything other than what they are- the conversion of food into muscle energy- will flounder and die on the beach of deaded things. When someone says they like sport, it just makes me depressed, and all I can expectorate is ‘gam’, or something like it.
Also, you know that habit people have of saying ‘we’ to refer to their team? Not a fan of that. We scored a goal. No. Your team scored a goal. Actually, scratch that. The team you watch and know things about has scored a goal. You had nothing to do with it. If your team is Rangers, and your main purpose is to cleave a papist with a pint glass and a pickled onion, then you have a right to talk of we, because that is the purpose of Rangers. But in most cases that is not the purpose of football teams.
Oxford sport is incomparably shit. It exists solely to enable cretins to enter the university and spend time they should be working in the gym, in Jamal’s and in women. Their propensity to wear sports clothes annoys me, their propensity to spit in the street annoys me, their propensity to do Geography and pretend it’s a degree annoys me. And above all their witless, ceaseless blathering; not merely about sport but of it, as if the post-match banter is necessary for in-match success. It isn’t, it means the rest of us have to pretend to care; and if we go away and hide a while they think we’re being boring. We’re not; you are. Oxford sport is boring. I watched the Boat Race last year for the first time. By the third minute I was clawing at the walls. Mein gott was it terrible. Amateur sport is to sport what sport is to civilisation: a blot, a blemish, an ulcer and a joke.
