You know things are bad when you’re being out-knowledged by your dad about sport. Years of carefully cultivating an image as the sports-obsessive, the one that really cares about knowing his onions rather than just being a partisan, wiped out in a second when he knew more about the new boys in the England cricket team (young Joe Root, it will take years of consistent century-scoring for me to forgive the humiliation you’ve indirectly caused me). “I thought you were supposed to be interested in sport?” Took that one squarely on the chin, and boy did it hurt. I did, and do, take a bit of pride in staying up on things in the wide world of sport.
But it’s tricky at uni. Some people manage it, obviously. You’ll have seen them, the zonalmarking.net obsessives who seem to actually increase their awareness of what’s going on out there in the football world while they’re in Oxford. I envy them their commitment. But I don’t know how they manage it.
Possibly it’s because at home there’s simply less to do, or less to do that’s within a five minute amble of where you’re sleeping. I get through, and I’m surely not alone here, hours and hours of sport at home in my own version of what a friend once termed his Living Room Stadium (capacity 4, with unretractable roof). There’s less of an opportunity cost - it’s the Heineken Cup or a nap on most Sundays - and it’s also accumulative: once you’ve got back into it you want to keep it up. Quality control and triage also giddily plummet southward, and I’ll suddenly find myself watching a Carling Cup match I have no stake in whatsoever, a second-round non-Grand-Slam tennis game, or, in what was probably the weirdest manifestation of this, every single stage of last year’s Tour de France (gruelling for both participants and viewers, though I am a Johnny-come-lately convert).
When I’m back here though, between the work, the actual playing of sport, the fun and the Torschlusspanik (look it up), there doesn’t seem to be time apart from a weekly couple of Premiership games and possibly the odd international rugby Test.
There have been high points of course. I don’t think there’s been a single series of sport that I’ve been able to follow as closely and with as much camaraderie as that glorious Ashes series of 2010/2011. More time spent in the ever-odd environment of Keble JCR than many will spend over their entire degree, throwing around ideas for a JCR urinal to make spectating a more comprehensive experience, joining in the lambasting of Mitchell Johnson and generally relishing how bloody well things were going. Salad days - though said salad was often resting on a hefty doner wrap.
That was more a function of timing though - on through the night in a fairly relaxed 8th week of Michaelmas one could potter in to watch it start either from an evening’s work or an early night out. The only thing you had to sacrifice was the one resource everyone here thinks they can do without - sleep.
Normally though it doesn’t quite work like that. Cup finals could well clash with your own finals. So what to do? Well the feast-and-famine routine between term and holidays is only a temporary thing, and for three years it’s quite refreshing. Glutting yourself on obscure horse races and low-card boxing after months of barely even seeing Jeff Stelling is cracking; and when it’s time to go back to Oxford it’s probably time enough to get off of Sky Sports Xtra.
Moreover, there’s a vast amount of sporting opportunities here aside from sitting in a pub watching the great and the good play on the telly. Rarely will any of us be able to play as much regular sport as this again so easily; at whatever level of rigour you desire, be it ramshackle reserves football or high-octane university rugby. There’s also different stuff to watch - be it 19-year olds tackling 30-year old lumps of Siberian granite in the Blues vs Russia rugby game, or a United game at the Kassam. Also, perhaps best of all, you’ll sometimes get to write about this if you want...
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