Is my child trolling me with his sports fan choices?

A shared love of cricket and football isn’t as simple as it could be for Will Gore and his son

The formidable Smriti Mandhana batting for India against England in September 2022 (Steven Paston/PA Wire)

The Oedipus complex is a funny old thing. Freud spent his time focusing on the sex stuff, but really, he should have just had a look at boys’ football fan instincts if he wanted properly to understand how a son could hate his father.

After all, the notion that a boy regards his papa as a rival for his mother’s sexual affection is all very trying. But it is as nothing compared to when a lad announces to his Liverpool-supporting dad that he’s going to follow Everton.

There are, I accept, many nice boys who so love their daddy that they’ll follow their every footballing whim. But that’s not the case in our household. I, a glory-hunting and semi-lapsed Man United fan, would happily have seen my son follow the Red Devils; but he was having none of it, announcing instead one grim day at the tail end of 2019 that he was a dyed-in-the-wool Spurs fan.