We go again: why I can’t shake off my addiction to playing football

L ying in bed last week my wife asked me how I old I was going to be on my birthday. Forty-four was the disappointing reply. Forty-four feels completely grown up. There is no way of spinning it. You are an adult.

I then questioned myself. Perhaps I’m a year younger. I was born in 1979. So if I turned one in 1980, then I was 10 in 1990, 20 in 2000 etc. So I was turning 43!

I slept well – I’d gained a year of my life. But there was a nagging doubt that something wasn’t quite right. I checked again. The internet said I was already 43. Now at one point Wikipedia declared me a member of the British National Party and in a relationship with Louis Walsh – so not necessarily to be relied upon.

But I did the maths again (before Rishi Sunak asks, I have maths A-level, further maths in fact!) and that rudimentary failure to realise that one plus 10 does not equal 10 had me back where I was the night before: 43.

You’re 43 until you’re 44. And now I am 44.

Forty-four and suffering from plantar fasciitis – my podiatrist has told me to avoid all sport until June. Insoles, shockwave therapy, massage, acupuncture, golf balls, tennis balls, frozen Lucozade bottles, heel raises, a small vibrating thing I bought online to Velcro to my heel, a lifelong commitment to calf stretching – nothing is quite working. But Jonny Evans got through it, so there is hope.

Unlike Evans I have no meniscus in my left knee. Then there’s the inability not to finish an entire block of Tony’s Milk Chocolonely in one sitting and the exhaustion of being a parent with a one-year-old whose default waking time is 4.25am.

And yet this Sunday – season starts late in Australia – I begin the 35th (I think) successive year of my 11-a-side career.

From school under-10s