Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Like every 'good' parent, Phil Hogan regularly stands on the sidelines while one of his sons plays football ...

Funny game football. "Remember to give him some encouragement," my wife says, "all the other dads do." She's right. There they are, standing 45 degrees to the touch-line with the neck veins bulging, steam coming out of their ears. "First touch Darren - what did we talk about!" The funny thing is that dads turn upin the kit too. OK, practically everybody wears trainers now, but track suits have become the weekend slacks and sweaters of a whole new generation of parents who need elasticicated waist bands. But no one really needs goal-keeping gloves to watch. But you have to go along: we live in 'the age of the participating parent'..

I'm not trying to hark back some golden age, but when we were kids, if your dad suddenly turned out at the football pitch it meant there had been a death in the family. Our fathers didn't kick ball they went to work and came home whistling "Apache" by the Shadows.

Maybe I had a deprived childhood… I certainly started having a traumatic one when my parents sent me to a school that played rugby. I had never played rugby before and was shocked to discover that a game so brutal could have such unfathomable rules. Though I soon realised that there was only one you really needed to remember - Don't touch the ball!

Cricket was even worse, a game which manages to be both boring and dangerous at the same time. You stood around doing nothing for hours until it was your turn to get hit by the ball whilst you were watching the girls play tennis. It's still a mystery to me, the way they can play for hours, days and months, and still manage to draw.

One of the worst things about an English summer is people coming up to you and saying, "Well, it looks like we're in for the follow-on…" I try to be politely uninterested but, "You're a Yorkshire man," they say, "What kind of a Yorkshire man doesn't like cricket?" "Well you know, the kind that doesn't keep whippets in the bath…"

I hope my son doesn't take up cricket, but if he does, I won't stand in his way.