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Had a fun afternoon chatting to the boys from the Socially Distant Sports Bar podcast about my somewhat tangential interest in sports, which I realise comes mainly from the angle of enjoying the stats. I can’t believe how many hours of my childhood I wasted playing Subbuteo against myself. Even the act of playing a game that really needed two people was fairly futile, but I didn’t even play the game properly as I could never master the flick to kick required and just pushed the players round with the side of my finger. But the scope of my contest was insane. I played seasons worths of matches and not just for a few teams. I had the league ladders from Shoot magazine and would thus play four English divisions and at least one Scottish, plus cup competitions and World Cup. I don’t think I had leagues of 24 teams (but maybe I did) but it was at least 12 in each league and I played home and away and had a folder with all the scores kept in it (I wonder where that is now - I bet I have it somewhere). And to add to the futility of it all, I completely fixed it so that Leeds United won everything, until I decided to switch allegiance to York City and then they won everything.
It was more intense and ridiculous than the self-playing snooker matches, though I did play the Subbuteo on the snooker board. I must have spent so many hours of my youth in the dining room playing with myself. And yes, maybe I should start doing it for a podcast/live Twitch stream. Sadly I gave away my impressive collection of teams and equipment to charity at some point in the 1990s. I think I must have realised that I had wasted my life on this game and it was time to grow up and leave it behind and so there was a symbolic element to parting with the stuff. But it was entirely the wrong decision. I’d love to have it now, even if I didn’t play it anymore and I suspect some of those teams would be worth a bit of money now. I had some quite obscure ones. Not many of the teams came through these years of play entirely undamaged, but I am sure a few did.
What a Proustian rush it would be to have those figures again. Just thinking about the blue and red goals that I had has made me feel a bit queasy (and remember I can’t really picture them in my mind).
I also remembered about Subbuteo cricket, which was dogshit, but which I still played a lot.
As a man who still spends about a quarter of my day playing games on my iPhone, I clearly enjoyed these pointless solitary pursuits, but Jesus, think of all the books I could have read or stuff I could have done. I feel like I achieved a fair amount in my childhood days, so I guess we just had endless time back then - hopefully post Brexit we can return to those endless days of the 70s and 80s and not use these cheap EU weeks that fly by in an instant.
The podcast will be out in a couple of months I think, but there was some good stuff there and it was nice to talk to the boys about how ludicrous sport is, when you think about it, but how I still enjoy it nonetheless - and there was a long discussion about the philosophy and depth of self-playing snooker too.
