Game of two generations

Football is more than a sport - especially when it's the emotional concrete in fathers' relationships with their sons.

WE MAKE an impeccably choreographed double act in front of the TV - each gesture in unison, every movement timed to perfection; our very brows knit simultaneously, our mouths form O shapes for a sharp intake of breath. I am watching the World Cup with my seven-year-old son Darcy. We make the moves by instinct, now quietly concentrated, now leaping from our chairs with the guttural male roar that turns my wife's stomach.

The boy's learning fast. Only last year he burst into tears, thinking something terrible must have happened when I let out a loud whoop of celebration at a Chelsea goal while watching a match on TV. Now he makes more noise than I do. After a recent game with Broomwood Boys under eights, Darcy announced: "Let's go to the pub and drink beer." And it's not all conditioning: his 10-year-old brother Tom has the full complement of boisterous male characteristics but has never seen the point of football.

Darcy is, give or take a few months, the age I was in 1966, when England's only World Cup victory became one of my key early memories - and which has blighted watching England ever since: unlike earlier or later generations, I have been conditioned to think that England do have a right to win the World Cup. More bizarrely, perhaps, Darcy wants Norway to win.

Back in '66, we didn't need tabloid newspapers to tell us the final against West Germany was a replay of '45, and Alf Ramsey had already let us know that Argentinians were animals. Kids these days just don't get it. Why Norway? "England have won the World Cup once before, so it's only fair," Darcy explained to me. "Besides, Tore Andre Flo plays for Norway." This young beanpole of a striker joined Chelsea last year and quickly established himself as Darcy's favourite player - he wanted to invite Tore Andre for Christmas lunch with us because he was such a long way from home. Forget about the Euro: football's mega-bucks, multi-national Premiership has already destroyed national boundaries for Darcy's generation.

These differences count for little: watching football together is as close as we get, father and son, just as when we play one-a-side games in the park with coats for goals. He is always Chelsea, winning 10-9 after an epic fightback against my Middlesbrough, Arsenal or Atletico Madrid. The take-it-in-turn commentary has hardly changed in the three decades since I first played: "He shoots, he scores, and it's a wonderful goal as Chelsea claw themselves back into the game."

More than that, and quite uncannily, I have not changed in those 30-odd years. I am not an adult making a leap of the imagination to meet my son on his seven-year-old's territory: while we play, I am, once again, the boy who watched England win the World Cup in 1966. Forget primal screaming, rebirth therapy, LSD - through the agency of football I have achieved that holy grail of psychologists, the controlled regression. I have delved deep into my subconscious to recapture the clear, innocent vision of a child. And, as we play, I recognise my childhood reincarnated in front of me as my son.

The links go further. When I recall England's march to triumph in 1966, two specific memories come to mind: I was always wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown, and my father was always watching with me. For the following 10 years, the closest, most relaxed, most exclusive relationship I had with my father was in front of Match of the Day. So the act of watching football with Darcy gives him a direct link with a grandfather who died 15 years before he was born.

Some time ago, I was in a room full of students invigilating an exam when, to my astonishment, I found myself in tears reading an article in which a father said he could no longer bear to watch football on TV since his son had left home for university, so acutely did he feel the son's absence. How I recognised the emotion. For too many years I have watched football alone, faintly dissatisfied, or, on occasion, sought comradeship in a pub with a big screen. Now Darcy is old enough I realise that, for me, watching football is not about watching with mates: it is a father and son thing.