There is a crick in my neck, a rick in my back, and a permanent ache behind my eyes. A friend refuses to offer sympathy. “You did this to yourself,” she says as I pop paracetamol. Thousands of hours of medical research are ploughed into elite sport, but where are the studies into the physical and mental demands of keeping up with it?
While winter may be fiercely programmed, it’s the multi-disciplinary bunfight of summer that is the ultimate test of a sports fan. Right when our diaries demand we’re at our most sociable, our most available, our most outdoors, the calendar loses all sense of perspective and dumps events on us like it’s trying to save them from a burning building. We stand below, arms hopelessly full, desperately trying not to drop anything.
The past fortnight has offered a pair of excellent, if contrasting, case studies. The first was the weekend of the Euros final; also the Lions’ crucial second Test against Australia and England’s critical fourth Test against India; also, my Norfolk friends’ silver wedding anniversary. They couldn’t have known, when they married 25 years ago, that their celebrations would clash with multiple major sporting events, but they wouldn’t have cared either: Nigel and Claire loathe sports, and don’t own a TV.
A better person might have respected their life choices; a true friend would have left their phone behind on the scheduled Saturday morning beach walk. My screen glowed like a tell-tale heart in my jacket pocket, one hand clutched around its silent stream of rugby union content. If humans were more advanced life forms, the information could have beamed up my arm direct to my optical cortex; instead, I had to keep stopping to roll up my trousers, take off my shoes, “marvel” at the view, and any other excuse to sneak a look at the screen.
When the Lions were back within two points, I made my own 99 call: a tactical ice-cream purchase that allowed me to backmark the group and risk turning up the volume. It was low tide on the north Norfolk coast, and the 5G had given out by the time I was halfway to the water’s edge. The picture was frozen on a heavily pixelated scrum at the time I heard the winning try. The return of phone signal near the dunes brought the news that India were 0-2 in the cricket.
Extreme circumstances are supposed to reveal your character. In my case, all it takes is a weekend in Norfolk with limited data coverage and a wifi-less bedroom. I think of myself as both a lover of the countryside and an excellent party guest. And yet when push came to shove, I wasted an entire afternoon ignoring the giant puffball mushrooms, hovering red kites and scuffling hedgerow pheasants around me, instead thumbing fruitlessly at an Old Trafford scorecard that refused to update.
The Euros final was the trickiest moment to negotiate: the anniversary couple had booked us in at a fancy wine bar, where the live jazz went on until 6pm. I managed to position myself at the end of the table next to a football-loving friend, and we only got busted when someone moved the ice bucket in front of us and her phone fell over, screen-side up, to reveal Lauren James being subbed off. “Is the game going well?” someone asked. “No,” we replied in unison.
By extra time we were back at the house, where we sorry-notsorryed our way into the living room with a laptop. The only three of us interested in this historic, nerve-shredding title defence tessellated our hips on to a two-person sofa and watched soundless images, while the rest of the guests sat opposite making determined conversation over our yelps, groans and explosive swears. It was, as someone noted, a room of two halves.
If you think the above is ridiculous behaviour, firstly, you’re not wrong. Secondly, it only got worse last weekend. After the hijinks of Norfolk, an entire two days on the sofa with the rugby, cricket and Formula One all available on Sky Sports presented itself like a spa break. Instead, the endless flicking back and forth – between Bundee Aki’s drops in Sydney, Lewis Hamilton’s qualifying woes in Hungary, and England’s rollercoaster ride at the Oval – brought on a tension headache so powerful and insistent I had to spend half of Sunday in bed, being soothed by the background burble of Test Match Special.
In truth, I’ve been overdoing it since Wimbledon. It is both the blessing and the curse of the modern sporting fan to be able to have what we’ve always wanted: all the coverage, all the time. If the thing you love is available to you, who but an ingrate would cut themselves off?
The ironical coda to all this was the knife-edge finish to the England’s Test series on Monday morning, right when most of us were back to work. Foolishly, I had arranged an unalterable hour-long meeting in the centre of London at 11am, so I recorded the game’s climax to watch on delay, and determined to get myself home without discovering the score.
It took every ounce of concentration to fight my own muscle memory and resist the repeated urge to reach for my phone. Shuffling my way through the underground, I stared at my shoes like a teenager, terrified to look up in case I crossed paths with any fans on their way back from the ground. I was only a stop away when the train briefly surfaced and I heard the ping of a text.
I’ve never understood, before, why Orpheus checked on Eurydice. Suddenly there I was, acting on instinct, fatally turning my head. “2-2 the only fair result!” my eyes took in, as the train plunged back into a tunnel. Oh well. Maybe it was time for an intervention. These last two weeks have not been good for me.
