Some people might think it’s ridiculous for a 23-year-old person to – consciously or otherwise – use a 90-minute game of football as a conduit for the complex emotional conflicts we all grapple with in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.

The very same people would think it’s ludicrous to be brought to the cusp of tears by a Gareth Bale free-kick, or how a 2-2 draw with Fulham can dictate my mood for the following three days.

Not everyone understands it but we – the converted – know that football can be a vehicle for something much bigger than “eleven people kicking a ball around a field”. It can represent something that remains unfathomable, inarticulate, and terrifying to confront. 

In the face of exams, taxes, heartbreak, job insecurity, life, and indeed, death, it does feel counter-intuitive that some of my biggest turmoil comes from Arsenal’s astonishing ability to concede early goals or the integrity of Bukayo Saka’s hamstrings. For after all, football really is just a game – even if it doesn’t feel like it as Declan Rice buries a half-volley home in the 97th minute before charging two-footed into the North Bank. Those wasted afternoons on the terraces – and the people you spend them with – are an undeniable anchor to some of the biggest moments in your life.

For me, the biggest of all these moments came when I lost my father at the age of eight. Ironically, my dad was never that interested in football. Growing up in the second half of the 20th century in South Wales, he was much more concerned with rugby union. In the few, treasured years that he was well enough to come and watch my brother and I play football on Saturday mornings, my dad still found the time to express his tongue-in-cheek disdain at football’s “showboating”, “diving” and “answering back”. 

My father’s disinterest in football was only overpowered by his fierce, stubborn patriotism and pride at being born Welsh. As a result, Welsh football was fine by him.

I watch a father and son celebrate a goal, and tangibly observe a passing of some bizarre, brilliant torch. And of course I think of Dad.

I tell this story because I know it isn’t unique. I know that, if I ask you to close your eyes and think of the person who taught you what it is to love this silly, arbitrary, pointless game, that person must appear in the reflection of your emotional recall. And they drag with them those special, special memories. I know the lyrics to ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, or ‘Sunshine on Leith’ or ‘The Fields of Athenry’ may have an emotional significance to you that is far beyond anything that I could ever understand, and far transcends the limits of concepts like ‘rationality’ and ‘logic’. I think it’s vital and beautiful that we all have these stories, and a picture on the mantelpiece that we can point to and say, ‘you…you made me like this’.

Much less poetic – and perhaps therefore even more ridiculous – is my toxic, love-bomb, til-death-do-us-part relationship with Arsenal Football Club. Whom I unendingly, unrequitedly, unwaveringly love in spite of the fact that I have absolutely zero connection to the club, its geopolitical background or its history. The origin story, which has many times been bastardised and modified and airbrushed in my fragile recall, lies in the hands of a four-year-old whom, thanks-in-kind to his egg-chasing father, was bereft of a club side to support. 

And so he landed on the team that harboured a genius name-sake: Henry. Thierry Henry. And everything that has come to pass since this moment, the proverbial highs and lows, have been built on the foundations of this completely capricious decision. But the extremely arbitrary nature of this choice only serves to further emphasise and embolden my hypothesis that football is a vehicle for a deep-seated, emotional, spiritual cross-to-bear that can only be exorcised in the euphoria of Wembley shoot-out wins, or the depression of a spanking at the hands of Brighton and Hove Albion (H). 

Because I truly do love the Arsenal. 

And the joy that I get at standing in the Clock End with my brother is perhaps the very happiest I ever am. Or ever could be. And, let me tell you, amongst the myriad of complicated, impossible, poignant, unspoken, incomprehensible thoughts and feelings that I have shared with my brother in our lifetimes, in the midst of the almost telepathic connection that we share, I feel so strongly and so lucidly that this indescribable, confusing, football-induced melancholy is absolutely his, too. It’s right there.

I share it with him.

Sometimes as we stand there, I watch a father and son celebrate a goal, and tangibly observe a passing of some bizarre, brilliant torch. An hereditary transposition of an affliction and a gift. And of course I think of Dad. But I also think of the many and varied role models, coaches and friends who teach us what it is to love the game. And of those that are no longer with us.

Perhaps the most important thing is that, it is in these moments that they feel most alive. Quasi-resurrected. Perhaps that community and joy and hate and disappointment and relief and strength is the closest thing I’ll ever have to holding dad’s hand again, or standing in the light of his presence, or the safety in the familiar smell of being pulled close to his leather jacket. The terraces are the only real place in my life where this intensity and strength of feeling can be expressed in an equally intense and strong catharsis. 

So much is written about football being an arena in which repressed, maladapted men can finally be overtly emotionally expressive. But I feel there is a truth to the idea that, perhaps unfortunately, there aren’t many areas of our lives in which we can scream into the heavenly abyss about love and admiration and community. 

Today, as we stand in the Clock End, we attend the deafening chorale of sixty-thousand voices bellowing the chorus of Louis Dunford’s impossibly stirring ‘The Angel (North London Forever)’. But the only two voices that truly penetrate the borders of my attention are those of my brother and I. And sometimes, I can’t help but think to myself, “God forbid the day that I would ever have to do this without you. I beg that as long as one of our voices is singing this brutal, violent, angellic refrain, please God let the other one join them.”

But the immutable, inescapable truth is that sixty-thousand voices will sing ‘Arsenal ‘til I die’ long after we are both gone, just as they did for decades before we came. We cannot bury the football; the football buries us. Perhaps the chills transmitted across my spinal cord each time I hear Louis promise “my heart will leave you never” are induced by the millions of Angels of North London that bellow the lyric along with us. The fathers, the sons and the daughters. 

The beauty, and the tragedy, is that no matter what happens in the real world, this ridiculous, meaningless, beautiful, silly game rumbles on forever. An eternal reminder of the unbearable loneliness of grief, but equally of the impossible joy of the many thousand afternoons we’ve wasted, together, on these terraces. 

Fundamentally, I think that’s why I love it. 

Because, as long as the fire that they ignited inside of you continues to burn, you cannot help but think, and reflect, and remember, and grieve them. 

And as long as we do… mae’n nhw’n yma o hyd (they are still here).

The first football match I ever attended came in the form of a family outing to watch Wales deal a 3-0 hammering to San Marino at the Millennium Stadium. If I concentrate hard enough, I can still conjure the smell of hot dogs and stale beer, and the feel of the freezing cold air that clung relentlessly to my ears that night. In the fractured reconstruction of my memory, that game serves as the chapter in which my father ceremoniously gifted me with two of the most vital components of my lifeblood; Welshness, and live football.

In some ways, at each game I go to, I am still desperately chasing the feeling of being a seven-year-old boy whose eyes were being opened to the enormous, all-consuming, radicalising swell of being a football fan. Of being part of something unfathomably huge. I grieve the boy who felt those feelings so afresh, too. For whom the whole week could happen on a Saturday afternoon.

Perhaps 18 months-or-so down the line, I once more found myself jumping into my mum’s car after cheering Wales to victory at the national stadium, this time proudly adorning a little red Wales fleece, and a blue-and-white jester hat. I don’t know why. Some kind of football paraphernalia that I’d collected at some game along the way and now, in my childish stubbornness, wore to every game.

But instead of heading home, this time we made our way to Cardiff’s Heath Hospital, to regale dad with the myths and legends of Wales’ scrappy 1-0 triumph over Azerbaijan. Through the lens of a loved, protected, footy-crazed eight-year-old, it felt like a very happy day at the time. The nurses made cheery comments about the win, and (as any human beings would) found hilarity in an utterly-unironic and quite-precocious tiny human rocking up to a hospital ward with a jester’s hat on, dishing out the post-match analysis with the sincerity of a prime Gary Neville.

Of course, when I look back now, I can only bring myself to think about the man who watched his jittery, elated son describe – in-detail – a pretty eventless, uninspiring game as if it were some biblical tale. At the end of his hospital bed. I think about him bearing witness to the joy that he had so selflessly given to me and my brother, but also of him being robbed of the years in which to share it with us.

And so – in my head – football is Wales, my dad is football, and Wales is my dad. Each time I watch a Wales game today, I feel dad’s presence more tangibly than I do at almost any other time. 

I think football, like music or theatre or art or smell or taste, has this capacity to tap into a corner of your emotional psyche that you do not even recognise, that you do not know exists, until you find yourself strangled by its cruel, magnificent nostalgia and melancholy. I cannot help but feel that every goal and win Wales experience is somehow, in some strange way, proof of dad’s heavenly support. So, yes, in the past, I have found that my eyes might just quietly well-up as I absorb a pre-match rendition of ‘Yma O Hyd’. 

And I know that, if I didn’t make every effort to conceal it, this would be an alien spectacle for everyone else around me. I know this. And I wish I could be immune to it. I wish it didn’t matter. But it does.