Nigella Lawson: Football stirs me

I don't suppose it comes as a shocking revelation that I am not exactly a sporty person. I am, as a colleague once pointed out with the kindest of intentions, built more for comfort than for speed. But even in my lithe youth I showed little promise and less enthusiasm.

"Nigella has no inclination to move whatsoever," read one games report. And as those world-wearily wise commentators say when a player gets booked for an obvious foul on the football pitch, "You can't argue with that!"

You see, that's the thing: my sloth, my indolence, my desire to walk rather than run, stand rather than walk, sit rather than stand and be supine rather than sit, has led me to sport or, more specifically, to soccer.

Rather in the manner of those bumper-sticker witticisms, it's amazing how many hours I can lie flat on my back watching people run up and down a pitch. Or - as I now know it should be called - the park.

I don't pretend to understand all the rules, or often even what is going on. I know that if asked to explain the offside rule I wouldn't do as well as Angela Merkel did when challenged by Bild am Sonntag.

I've got more napkins with more squiggles on them from men trying to explain it to me than you would believe and I'm still not sure I really get it.

My career as a football follower, however, has led me to conclude that since players, refs, commentators and pundits spend quite a bit of time arguing over it, the confusion can't be all mine.

But there are a lot of sports shown on television, and it's only soccer that stirs me. In fact, it does more than that: it moves me. I should say straight away that there is nothing of the ladette leeriness about this love.

I feel embarrassment and distaste when I hear women rhapsodise about a player's legs or generally go "phwoar". It's just tacky and vulgar, and anyway I don't share their taste.

But perhaps that's because I'm older, and maybe it's also because I'm older that I love football, love football players. I fear my affection may be maternal: I feel as a mother does so specifically for a son - both proud and protective.

There is something about football players, that particular mixture of otherness, strength and petulance that seems to sum up the muscularity and fragility of maleness. As Mae West said before me: "I like my men to be men: strong and childish."

Perhaps that's why I prefer soccer to rugger. I feel rugby shows men how they like to see themselves - noble warriors, primitive god-monsters -whereas soccer shows men as women see them: competitive, full of greedy ego and with that mummy-watch-me-jump need to impress.

I'm not claiming that watching football gives me insight into what it might be like to be a man, but I certainly like the feeling of being, if not in the boys' club, then allowed to eavesdrop on it. I love witnessing that different thing: male camaraderie.

I like it when players give a hug to someone on the opposing team after a match, or help one another up after a stumble - even if it was the result of what, in that delicious lingo, is described as a "cynical foul".

And what I love most is the affectionate joshing in the Match of the Day studio. Oh, how my eyes mist over as they rib each other and make in-jokes.

It doesn't matter that I don't always understand the references, not having followed football when Alan Hansen, Gary Lineker or Mark Lawrenson actually played, but I feel I belong.

And of course, that sense of belonging is such a great part of being a football fan.

It's not just about having a sense of kinship with, for me, other Chelsea supporters, but about being able to do what men have traditionally always done - find common ground and have an agreeable and warm chat about sport.

I'd call it bonding, except that word is emetic and the joy of this connection is that it's superficial.

Women in the same position are plunged into profundity, with all its concomitant banalities: talk of relationships, parenthood (itself a hardly inclusive club) and Real Life. Give me a break! Or else it's make-up and shoes, and after an ironic few minutes, the joke can wear off, believe me.

Funnily enough, although I baulk at the clichés of female bonding, I adore the clichés of soccer. I love the hairstyling and colouring, the earrings, the hackneyed vanity. I enjoy every footballer who comes on to be interviewed after a game on Match of the Day in a matching suit, shirt and tie combo.

And the size of those knots bursting bulgingly out of the stiff pointy collars: there's not one detail wrong. You could tell they are footballers at a hundred paces. Mind you, they do pretty well on the studio sofa, too.

My sister (a Gooner) has a conceit that there is only one shop, or rather, boutique, where Gary, Lawro, Hansen and Alan Shearer (before he was sucked back into the game to manage Newcastle) buy their shirts - or rather blouses - and whoever gets there first has first dibs on the best one.

And it's some competition. I've noticed that they overwhelmingly favour piping, trimming and other fancy detailing, and have a defiant insistence on anything that will strobe in the studio. On every count, the over-highlighted miserabilist Lawro wins.

All that's a plus, but it's not the whole of it. As women, we have too much narrative in our lives, and for me perhaps the excitement of watching football is that it just happens. I'm not following a narrative, I'm absorbed in the game.

Well, not that absorbed: I still manage to commentate myself. I provide not only a running commentary on the game, but a running commentary on the commentary.

And now we've got to what I think is one of the deepest thrills provided by the game - its language.

I adore the way that when an attempt on goal rebounds off the post, commentators invariably report this as being "denied by the woodwork". I love it that when a bawling, brawling, foot-stamping monster shouts at the referee for a decision against him, this is noted as "dissent".

I particular relish how commentators are keen to avoid any infelicity: thus, instead of repeating the name Drogba, say, too often during a commentary, he will be alternatively referred to as the "Ivorian centre forward" or "the former Marseille player".

The commentators are not there just to comment but to present us with carefully crafted linguistic offerings. I cite one favourite of mine (I think emanating from a Middlesbrough-Aston Villa game): "The apprentice is level-pegging with the sorcerer."

And then there's the literature. True, there are no great claims to be made for this oeuvre but give me a footballer's stolidly ghost-written memoirs over a smart 'n' sassy bit of chick-lit nonsense any day. Yes, I have read the whole of Totally Frank (by Lamps) and yes, I relished Cashley (as he's known in the game) Cole's My Defence.

In particular I admire how on one page he confesses demotically "As soon as my foot struck the ball, I knew it meant trouble, but there weren't no stopping it." A few pages later, he is pondering to himself (as he listens to a conversation between Davids Dein and Seaman) oh-so grammatically: "Who isn't listening to whom?"

Why do I find that touching? Well, no matter how many times that Wildean apothegm is pulled out - the old "football is a gentleman's game played by thugs while rugby is a thug's game played by gentlemen" - and for all that our football teams are overloaded with out-of-towners on huge salaries, and spoilt children who give as poor accounts of themselves off the pitch as on it, I do feel that football is the last bastion (we're in cliché-country, why fight it?) of the old-fashioned, respectable working class.

It means something to me when a player or manager refers to "the lads". Who else says lads any more? And yes, football is composed of teams but it relies on people who haven't been brought up to think that it doesn't matter whether you win or lose. I admire that honesty. Everyone minds. They really, really mind.

And that's the thing, really: it may have no narrative, but soccer provides the most compelling, most enduring soap opera I know.