The lonely passion of a World Cup fan who is a stay-at-home mum

Yippee, it’s finally here!

Time to shove aside the sofa’s manky jumble of socks, PE kit, hairbrush, scout necker and toggle, library books and cow onesie. This is MY space now.

Motherhood duties have been cancelled. Yeah, yeah, so the oldest is doing his Leaving Cert. He’ll just have to get himself home from any afternoon exams. He’s a healthy lad – the 10k jog will do him good. If the youngest wants to attend scouts and after-school German, she can thumb a lift. The middle child is conveniently already on her summer break and is thus free to serve me endless cups of tea.

The remotes are mine, all mine, GEDDIT? No one better stand between me and the telly. I’m warning yeh.

Yes, the World Cup is here. For the duration, this slummy mummy is more interested in how Luis Suarez's knee has responded to treatment with horse placenta than the fact we've just run out of loo roll.

I’m one of those rare life forms: a woman who loves football. Or, as a friend once put it, “every man’s dream”.

Compulsives

I love it so much, in fact, that I daren’t subscribe to Sky Sports. If I did, I’d end up following league matches in Saudi or cup ties in China until, when I belatedly came up for air, I’d realise I should’ve signed on for the old-age pension five years earlier.

The World Cup is perfect for compulsives like me. It’s all-engrossing, especially in the early stages, with about 12 hours of every day devoted to highlights/ live matches / blather. That leaves no time to notice the dog’s thrown up in hubby’s shoe or do anything about it.

I’ll have more important matters on my mind. Like will Cristiano Ronaldo score a penalty and, if so, will he celebrate the way he did at the end of the Champions League? (You know what I’m saying.)

But – and this is crucial – the sweet delirium will ebb. Come July 14th, I’ll finally recycle the pizza boxes and start chopping carrots, content that a month of rubbish food and limited hygiene was just the jolt our immune systems needed.

Being a mum who likes the beautiful game is, shall we say, counter-cultural. It’s lonely. Bizarrely, the two men in my family don’t give a toss about football. Both my daughters used to play, but now they scoff.

“Teacher asked for signs of summer and someone said the World Cup,” sneered my nine-year-old. “All the boys started cheering. All the girls sighed and rolled their eyes.”

If I hadn’t carried that child for nine months, I’d swear she was a changeling. How can she be of my blood?

This leaves me, as a stay-at- home mum, at a loss. Who can I talk to during the tournament about Ivory Coast’s attacking prowess, or whether Rooney will choke again, or will Messi finally shine for Argentina the way he does for Barcelona?

Synthetic pleasure

Sure, I’ll be shouting at Eamon Dunphy – that’s a given – but he never shouts back. Which makes the pleasure somewhat synthetic, like eating a bagel slathered with lite cream cheese instead of the real thing.

None of the other mums I know watches football, unless one of her kids is on the team. Great for discussing how the ref is obviously biased against our GAA club’s under-10s, less so for dissecting the officiating at South Korea vs Algeria.

My daily world is populated mostly by other women, with men playing the odd walk-on parts. Anyway, there’s a limit to how many times you can corner other people’s husbands to discuss zonal marking.

Social media? Eh. I prefer a natter.

As I devote myself to catching every minute of the tournament, I’ll be part of the largest sporting event in the world and at the same time utterly alone. It’s an existential crisis.

Such profound social isolation makes a woman desperate. During the last World Cup, I still had a child in the local playschool, and so could lurk in the car park without drawing too many strange looks. I’d wait for the one dad who collected his kids, then pounce.

This time, I can only hope I’ll have the good luck to get a flat tyre. Joey, the guy who fixes punctures, works alone, so he’s even more of a windbag than I am. And he loves football.

Mary Feely is a freelance writer marytfeely@eircom.net