Is my child trolling me with his sports fan choices?

A shared love of cricket and football isn’t as simple as it could be for Will Gore and his son

The formidable Smriti Mandhana batting for India against England in September 2022 (Steven Paston/PA Wire)

The Oedipus complex is a funny old thing. Freud spent his time focusing on the sex stuff, but really, he should have just had a look at boys’ football fan instincts if he wanted properly to understand how a son could hate his father.

After all, the notion that a boy regards his papa as a rival for his mother’s sexual affection is all very trying. But it is as nothing compared to when a lad announces to his Liverpool-supporting dad that he’s going to follow Everton.

There are, I accept, many nice boys who so love their daddy that they’ll follow their every footballing whim. But that’s not the case in our household. I, a glory-hunting and semi-lapsed Man United fan, would happily have seen my son follow the Red Devils; but he was having none of it, announcing instead one grim day at the tail end of 2019 that he was a dyed-in-the-wool Spurs fan.

This was moderately peeving, but something more surprising was to follow. In the Covid winter of 2020/21, my life was improved markedly by listening to India’s cricketers beat Australia in a wonderful series of test matches down under. My son, for the first time enthused by cricket, picked up on my joy and for a moment it seemed as if we had experienced a meeting of sporting fandom minds, as we ganged up against the Aussies.

Over the next couple of months, we talked incessantly about cricket, and played a million matches with a foam ball and bat in the hallway, looking forward to that summer’s series between those Aussie-conquering Indians and England. I said I reckoned we’d have a decent chance. My son agreed: “Yeah, we are gonna smash the English boys!”

For a moment, I thought it was a joke. But no, he was absolutely serious – after the triumph against Australia, he was apparently an Indian fan through and through, and England were another avowed enemy to be dispatched. When India ended the series 2-1 up (albeit with one, Covid-affected match still unplayed), my son couldn’t wait to rub it in.

By the following summer, the India enthusiasm had not abated, and I had come to feel quite affectionately for it. I got tickets for us to watch India’s women play England at Lord’s, my son proudly donning his India replica shirt and cap, and making a homemade sign to show his support for his favourite player, Smriti Mandhana. It was all very cute, until the match ended via a controversial run out, which left England fans fuming, but my son and his fellow India fans whooping with delight. I started to wonder if he was deliberately trolling me.

The same thought occurred last week, when I told my son that I’d got tickets to Cambridge United’s upcoming match against Bolton Wanderers. Cambridge had been my hometown team as a child, and I was a regular spectator with my dad in the 1980s and 1990s. My son was thrilled, but then said: “Just so you know, I’ll be supporting Bolton.” Apparently, this was because another team he feels a peculiar attachment to, Morecombe, were consigned to relegation last season by virtue of Cambridge winning their final match – and he hasn’t forgiven them for it.

At the age of eight, these unusual fandom choices might, on the face of it, seem quite charming. But we’ve all known people who turn up to uni, or to a new office job, and announce some peculiar interest or view, seemingly to provoke a debate or to demonstrate how intriguing they are.

I had a friend who claimed he didn’t support England because the international game was just a distraction from the real business of domestic leagues. Another mate started university as a Man United fan, but at some point decided that wasn’t very cool and suddenly it turned out he’d been Fulham all his life. An adorable quirk at eight can easily become a ludicrous affectation in adulthood.

Will my son maintain his support for any or all of his current favourites? The cricketers of India and Hampshire, and the footballers of Tottenham, Sheffield Wednesday and Morecombe probably don’t know how lucky they are. But of course, if Freud is to be believed, all sporting activity and fandom is just sublimation of base instincts anyway. If my son ever books himself in for some psychoanalysis, there’ll be a lot to talk about.