BY THE time you read this, the Spanish football team might already have made Hollandaise sauce out of their opponents.

Or, said opponents, the Dutch might have pulverised the Spaniards into Iberian ham at the final in South Africa. Either way, it’s all the same to me.

As a non-sports fan, I paid enough attention to the World Cup to irritate my friends with bad post-match puns on Facebook (“German World Cup dream: Klose, but no cigar. Still, Neuer say Neuer again!” read one of my recent status updates. Cue: collective groan).

And, apart from idly tuning in when my eight-month-old baby woke up to drink milk, I didn’t quite make the effort to catch live football action in the wee hours of the morning.

Then again, there was no escaping the football fever in the air: I found myself bonding over the game with my elder son, Julian. But not in the “Let’s drink beer and shout at the telly!” or “Put on our boots and go kick a ball around!” or “Kick a ball while I shout at you!” way that fathers and sons usually do.

Instead, my four-year-old and I bonded over football like two people stumbling upon a foreign land with strange customs, but happily deciding to make a holiday of it.

It started one night when the Supportive Spouse was out watching football on a mega-big screen with his friends. Missing his papa, Julian suddenly asked me if he could watch football, too.

With no access to World Cup matches then, I surfed to the garden-variety football channel.

Never mind that the rest of Singapore was glued to the Japan-Netherlands match beaming live that night – Julian and I were perfectly content to watch a re-run of a German Bundesliga match between FC Koln and VfL Wolfsburg.

It didn’t matter that we had no idea who or what both these teams were. It was enough to just sit side by side and look at a bunch of men run up and down on grass.

Suddenly, I had a brainwave. I went to the cupboard and unearthed a pint-sized official England 2010 jersey – a present that a couple of close family friends had brought home from London for Julian.

While I’m not a fan of that team, I thought it’d add to Julian’s immersion in the game’s culture. When I put it on him, the boy fingered the silky white material and pronounced it “ooh, very nice”.

“I really love watching football, Mummy,” he kept declaring. Five minutes later, when I looked at him, he was fast asleep. The light from the TV screen played over his snoring face and he looked cute as a button in his wrong-country kit.

Our mother-and-son football nights carried on in the same vein. While watching the Germany v Argentina match a couple of weeks ago, he asked: “Which goalkeeper belongs to which team?”

“Uh. The yellow one to the black team, and the green one to the light-blue team,”

I replied, referring to jersey colours, because I didn’t know the players’ names.

“And there is only one set of goal posts? They take turns?” he asked again, confused.

Puzzled as to what he meant at first, I finally realised that he wasn’t used to the conventional camera jump cuts when it came to football telecasts.

I had to explain to him that there were two goal areas at opposite ends, even though home viewers often couldn’t see the entire pitch.

Nor were Julian’s methods of supporting the teams conventional. “Let’s cheer very loudly when the black team scores a goal, okay?” I suggested.

“Okay! And let’s fall down on our backsides when the light-blue team scores,” he countered, collapsing on the ground with his feet in the air.

The boy’s penchant for faking a spill might just help him fit in among some highly paid players one day.

So, if there’s one thing that the World Cup impressed upon my son, it’s probably how to be a contrarian – a quality I prize, to counter all the herd mentality in the world.

Even as a whole stadium of people are bellowing for things to go one way, it’s a good thing – and there’s fun to be had – in not giving a vuvuzela and just doing whatever you like.

myp@sph.com.sg

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