John Walsh: A foreign land where they appreciate our football

I was sitting in Nairobi's finest restaurant watching Chelsea v. Manchester City

I'm not what you'd call a natural football fan. My heart does not thrill to the news that Tranmere Rovers has inched up or down a couple of points in League Division This or That. I'm mystified as to whether League Division One is what we used to call League Division Two, or if it's been shunted down to League Division Three because of something called the Champions League. I listen to the post-match comments of taciturn, heftily-accented team managers called Arsene or Joe-Say or Rafael and I hear only meaningless truisms about the run of play.

I do, however, enjoy being an occasional partisan supporter. My chronic non-interest in whether individual teams win or lose falls away when England are playing an international match. I have put in the hours watching World Cup tournaments with my children over the last 18 years and weeping at penalty shootouts. I remember, at the end of England's 5-1 defeat of Germany in 2001, telling my son it was a moment of history he'd always remember.

These are throwbacks to when I was a real fan in the Sixties, when I would hit Stamford Bridge on Saturday lunchtimes. The obituaries that followed the recent death of Peter Osgood brought it back: the seemingly unchanging line-up of Peter ("The Cat") Bonetti, Johnny Hollins and the super-striker ("Osgood is good," we'd yell, over and over, "Osgood is good!") It was a key, pre-sexual rite of passage when I experienced my first goal and felt a giant phalanx of rough humanity leaping heavenwards and lifting me ecstatically with them.

It didn't last, however. The Shed became a nasty, violent place. I stopped going and grew bored with the dullness of English football, the listless passing, the time-wasting, the clueless punting into touch, the vapid pensées of Sven-Goran Eriksson. I had a vestigial fondness for Chelsea - they were now my son's team - but I couldn't keep up with the weekly changes in the line-up. I was ready to agree with anyone who bitched about the national game - how preening and venal, how violent and unsportsmanlike it had become.

Until the other day, that is. I was sitting last Saturday in Nairobi's finest restaurant, the Carnivore, killing time before my plane left, when the S Channel tuned in to Chelsea v. Manchester City. The bar was filled with local Kenyans, well-off chaps in jackets and ties, cool dudes in surfer vests, van drivers, students. "Tell me," I asked a taxi driver called Sammy, "Why do you like watching English football? Isn't Nairobi FC playing today?"

They might be, he said, but that didn't interest anyone. "English football is classic. It's the way the game is supposed to be played, but isn't." He sipped his Tusker beer. "You can see real strategy and thought. Forms of attack, all worked out and practised in advance. In Kenya, you never get that. Here, they just whack the ball and hoof it up the field."

That's nice, I thought, a vote of confidence - but it was only the start. Twenty minutes into the game, Didier Drogba made a brilliant diagonal rush on the City goal, then turned a full 180 degrees in a second, stepped round a defender and whacked the ball home. The crowd roared and smote their fists and shook their heads - but they weren't like a crowd of partisan yobs, just hotly appreciative sports fans. "Nobody in this country," breathed Sammy, "could ever do that." Four minutes later, he scored again, after trapping the ball with his hand (accidentally), leaving the City defenders ineffectually appealing to the referee. The crowd loved it. Was the handball a crime and the goal immoral? No, it was clever tactics - cleverer, at any rate, than standing there shouting, "Handball, ref!" When Drogba, in the second half, got a small poke in the eye and collapsed like a felled steer (in the penalty area of course) the bar crowd watched his gamesmanship with muted disapproval - and when no penalty was awarded by the referee, they cheered this sensible piece of decision-making.

It was like seeing English football through new eyes. Here was an audience who watched the game as something between a gladiatorial struggle and a chess match, who could admire the skill of Joe Cole and Danny Mills equally without wishing to kill the fans of either (or that irritating referee, come to that), who nodded sagely at the odd bending of the rules but liked the triumph of fair play, who produced a low sub-orgasmic groan when Drogba performed one of his blinding runs, who cared nothing about tabloid headlines, transfer fees, football-hating columnists or even the reputation of England fans all over Europe. They just thought English football was "classic", no more and no less. Classic - "something of established excellence" according to my Chambers Dictionary. We should be proud.