After that game, my dad suggested that I try football instead of soccer.

I started playing soccer as a young kid. I wanted to be just like my dad.

My dad really started to love football during my sophomore season, which meant a lot to me because he could see me playing a sport where I really excelled. I want to make my dad proud of me.

In soccer, the form of the encoded adjective is well-developed.

Billy has a soccer background and he's applying it to football. He's worked with John Carney (of the NFL) and went to some camps. I like our odds with extra points this year.

As I get older, the tyranny that football exerts over my life, and therefore over the lives of people around me, is less reasonable and less attractive. Family and friends know, after long years of wearying experience, that the fixture list always has the last word in any arrangement; they understand, or at least accept, that christenings or weddings or any gatherings, which in other families would take unquestioned precedence, can only be plotted after consultation. So football is regarded as a given disability that has to be worked around. If I were wheelchair-bound, nobody close to me would organise anything in a top-floor flat, so why would they plan anything for a winter Saturday afternoon.