Football bores can drive you to Gazzas (tears)

FOOTBALL. We play it, we watch it, we call it beautiful and we pay lots of money for it. Now we speak it as well.

I know I’m going to get a pasting for saying it, but football has developed far beyond banter and has become a language in its own right, with far too many otherwise interesting people being able to speak solidly for minutes on end in coded terms about the beautiful game. It’s boring me to Gazzas (tears).

How can so many people devote such obsessive levels of interest to a single subject? If I were to give you seven minutes of intense conversation about mobile phones, the next election, Strictly Come Dancing or insurance comparison websites - all good and current subjects, remember - your eyes would glaze over within 30 seconds. But we’re talking football, so it’s Liverpool FC (fine by me).

I have no idea who the characters in Eastenders or Coronation Street are - and I don’t care either - but I know exactly who Gerrard, Rooney, Benitez and Mourinho are, because I’m forced to hear about them every day. It’s like your children endlessly reeling off information about The Tweenies, only the children are much older and actually able to buy all the merchandise.

One of the worst weekends I’ve ever had was having a mate force me to watch an Everton game and pummelling me with information about each and every player. He wasn’t talking to me, he was talking at me, and he didn’t care whether I found it mind-numbingly dull or not.

I don’t hate football, but I do find the mass of people who feel the need to rabbit on about it all the time Cristiano Ronaldo (extremely annoying), and even if you’re not one of them you’re still expected to know all the players’ vital statistics. It’s as if train spotting has been made mandatory for the entire population.

Go forth, enjoy football, follow your team with pride and talk about it with your mates down the pub. But - and I’m asking really nicely, to all you defiant football fanatics out there - please don’t be boring about it.

Sorry everyone, but I’m dreading South Africa already.