When My Son Starts Bringing Girlfriends Home, Will it be ok to Discreetly Leer at Them?

Parenthood brings with it a lot of big questions: which school should my child go to? Should I ban, tolerate or simply join in with experimental drug taking? How will I explain the birds and the bees? What actually is the story of the birds and the bees, if I should decide to use that time-tested analogy? Can I find it on the internet? Does it involve cross-species sexual relations, as the title suggests? If that's the case, is it a good message to pass on?

Anyway, I digress. Being father to a boy provokes a sub-set of far more specific questions: when he starts bringing girlfriends home, will it be ok to discreetly leer at them? Will we have an Oedipal showdown for the love of his mum/ my wife at some point? Can I throw the fight without making it
too obvious, then set up home with one of his aforementioned girlfriends? Finally, and most importantly, which football team should I indoctrinate him into supporting?

When I were a lad, it were easy. I happened to pull on a plain blue t-shirt when I was 4 years old. I asked my Dad what football team's kit it was. We were living in Wales at the time. Thankfully, rather than answering "Cardiff", he decided, quite arbitrarily, to pretend it was a Chelsea shirt
and the love affair began.

It was easy to love Chelsea back then. Every Saturday night, I'd dissolve into tears of joy, frustration or both as I watched our strike force of blond totem-pole Kerry Dixon and wee Scottish terrier David Speedie having lumps kicked out of them by the likes of Steve "Headband" Foster and Terry "Am I bleeding? I hadn't noticed" Butcher, but often prevailing. We worked our way up to second place in the league and only needed to beat lowly Oxford at home to go top. Of course, we got a nose-bleed and were annihilated 4-1, only recovering our form when we'd slipped to a much more comfortable mid-table position. Infuriating, gritty, beautiful and deeply rewarding. Our players were sourced from clubs like Wrexham, Walsall and Reading, were paid a fiver a week and celebrated victory by drinking beer out of proper glass pint pots with handles and occasionally sneaking a crafty Woodbine. It was like a ruddy Alan Sillitoe book. You couldn't help but love these loyal, simplistic, thuggish men.

Today's crop of sulking mutli-millionaires are bought for many times more than the GDP of the countries they hail from. They are brought here when already superstars, proven winners, so the transaction carries no risk and there is no need for development. They churn out technically excellent, utterly soulless performances weekly, not for the fans, their team-mates or the club but for themselves and their stock. They unwind post-match with a bit of light assault and the odd rape. Their attitude absolutely stinks*. I mean, who, apart from his mum, could honestly love pouting mercenary Didier Drogba?

So, getting back to my little' un and who he should support, it'll be a few years before it becomes an issue but I can only imagine things will get worse in that time. I need to trick him into loving grass roots football and eschew the guaranteed glory afforded to followers of The Big Four. How can I convince him that perennial failure is ultimately more satisfying than winning the quintuple with a £300m squad and a dressing room that sounds like the Tower of Babel? The answer may be to get him a red shirt when he's 4 and tell him that it's not a Liverpool, Arsenal, Man U or even Middlesborough kit but actually Charlton. They're not far from us, so I can take him down there to seal the deal. Sorry little fella, you'll hate me for a while but when you're mature enough to know that the Unibond League is where the true heart of football lies, you'll turn to me, chewing on your cheap meat pie and whisper "Thanks Dad". Only I won't hear you because I'll be over at Stamford Bridge watching us play Juventus.

* Source: www. sweepingstatement.com

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