I don’t mean I’d never sat on the terraces. I mean I’d never watched a match, not even on TV, because no one in my family did. It just wasn’t their thing. My father had a bad leg, and spent his Saturdays making jigsaws in his workroom. My mother thought public sports coarse and possibly even profane. So I did not know, for example, that although the game is notionally non-contact there’s a great deal of shoving and colliding. When I played it I just thought anyone who did those things was cheating and I did not understand why the referee did not intervene. Moreover, because I was averse to punishment and the social disgrace it seemed to entail, I did not do them myself. That meant I couldn’t hold on to the ball, so the other kids found me useless, and my teachers mistook my obedience for physical timidity and wrote me off. It never occurred to them to explain that the rules were flexible and interpretable, because everyone knew those things. Boys—automatically, genetically—knew them. That I did not was not something they contemplated.