I’m going to ruffle a few feathers here. I know I’m in the minority, so statistically I’m going to annoy at least 100% of my three readers. Maybe more. But it is a subject that has plagued me all my life. Not just in the Autumn of my years.

“What is he on about?” you ask.

“Sport” says I.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not against sport as such. It is very healthy for the kids to go out and kick a ball around the local playing field. Running is good too. It comes in handy when you are about to miss the bus, or when the girlfriend’s husband comes home unexpectedly.

What really irritates me is the obsession with sport. I hate sport personally, and that is my right. You like sport and that is your right. Just stop ramming it down my throat. Take it off the telly. Stop talking about it except among yourselves.

There is an assumption that we all love sport. There is a sport slot on every RTE news broadcast. Why isn’t there a gardening slot too? Or a pet lover’s spot? [“Today, Tiddles gave birth to five kittens. We go live now to our reporter outside the vet’s surgery….”] Every day we have to sit and listen to some prat waffling on through a list of sports. And there are so many. Soccer, GAA, rugby, athletics, motor racing, golf. The list is bloody endless. And we have to get the inane details. The exact results of every horse race, the endless lists of soccer scores, how Beckham has chipped another fingernail.

Soccer is the worst. Endless programs devoted to it. I can’t go into the pub without someone asking what I thought of the game last night. I don’t care about the game last night. I didn’t see it. I was too busy trying to find a channel that wasn’t showing it.

And if the game isn’t bad enough, we have to wade through the analysis. “And what do you think the result would have been if he had missed that goal….” I ask you! All sports commentators seem to have the intelligence of amoebas. [Sorry, amoebas. I don’t mean to insult you. It’s just an expression]. I swear to God I heard one say recently – “Ireland scored their first goal after only two minutes, but from then on things went from bad to worse”. They have so many clichés that they throw them in without thinking.

And they are devoting their energies to talking about soccer players as if they [the players] were gods. Cop on! Soccer players are simple minded blokes who can only do one thing in life, and that is to kick a bit of plastic around a field. And they are paid sums of money that are frightening. A premiership footballer earns more in one hour that an African family can expect to earn in 50 generations. They are not worth it. Most of them have an intelligence rating that is so poor that if they dropped one point on the IQ scale, you’d have to water them. They are a bunch of primadonnas who burst into tears if someone touches them.

Another thing is the Irish obsession with British football. I know blokes who still rant on about the famine and the Brit occupation of our fair land for the last 600 years. But next thing you see them, wearing their Liverpool or Manchester United shirts and roaring at the telly as if their lives depended on it.

It’s getting so bad that people are painting their cars in team colours, and naming their kids after players. Why not name them after your favourite flower? [“Have you met my son Convallaria Majalis Murphy?”]

The worst of the lot is the World Cup. Every four years I lose the will to live. It goes on and on and on and on. Everyone is talking about it. The newspapers and the TV are full of it. You’d think it was Christ’s second coming. I say every four years, but there is now a two year run up to it. And when you think it is over for another four years, they start on about the Olympics. Oh God!!

If you like sport so much, why don’t you just get out a ball and kick it around the road. Preferably the M50.