In the euphoria of Melbourne Victory’s late equaliser against Adelaide, I gave thanks for the fact of my late in life (25yo) discovery of football, which I then called soccer, and sometimes still do, depending on circumstance. This is my favourite bit of Australia United, cut and pasted from ‘We’ll Always Have Kaiserslautern’ (Ch2), but it could equally be called ‘How I Learned to Start Worrying and Love Football’.

A Japanese television crew wobbled into our carriage and asked us the question, ‘What is football?’ I weighed my answer, wondering if I should offer some chin-stroking pontification on the Australian politics of the word ‘football’ – how four codes were squabbling over it as though embroiled in a neighbour-to-neighbour fence dispute.

But there’s a time and a place for that debate and it’s surely not when you’re an hour from a World Cup venue, on a train full of round-ball fans. The Japanese interviewer had felt the air, and wanted something transcendent. He gazed at us, urging one of us to pull out something special, like the existentialist Frenchman from Algeria, Albert Camus’ much-quoted line: ‘In football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite side’; or Nick Hornby’s lovely quote in Fever Pitch on fandom as a means of escaping real life: ‘Who wants to be stuck with who they are all the time?’

I genuinely think I was on the verge of something – a memorable, pithy aphorism that traversed notions of nationalism and the idea of football as a sort of sporting Esperanto when suddenly the on-board sound system kicked in. Living Next Door to Alice was being played at serious volume. I was going to have to work hard to make the six o’clock news in Tokyo.

‘Football is the best international representation of sport …’

‘Alice! Alice! Who the fuck is Alice?’

‘And it’s never better than … um … than at the World Cup …’

I was gone. All I could think was that someone, somewhere had to get used to not living next door to Alice. Rita buttered up well, describing football as her heritage, her reason for getting out of bed in the impossibly early morning, and then did us all the favour of asking Kenji, the Japanese cameraman, what football meant to him.

‘I love football because football is very similar to life,’ Kenji said. ‘Because just like life, you have to take care about the very short-term future, and then that passes to the next future, and then the future after that.’

The whole cabin nodded, processing a sentence that had wafted across us like a Stephen Hawking thesis. Eventually, I asked Kenji whether he thought there were differences between the way the Japanese and the Australians played football.

‘The Japanese think too much. Australia is much more playing with feeling, with heart.’

Kenji had barely finished his sentence before a conga line of Aussies emerged through the glass door of the carriage. ‘Sushi, sushi, sushi train … sushi train, sushi train,’ they sang as they snaked joyfully past our cabin. Maybe Kenji was right. From the look of them, they were living for the short-term, with no notion of incremental successive futures. They were just being the best sushi train they could be.

***

It was the tournament where the football fans taught the newcomers to sing. The reality is that singing is not a big part of Australian sport. In cricket, it may be that in the game’s gentlemanly traditions, singing was seen as boisterous, rowdy behaviour that simply ‘wasn’t cricket’. The Barmy Army are in the process of turning that on its head. In Aussie Rules footy, it’s almost completely absent ─ maybe because the grounds are bigger, and so don’t lend themselves to the intimate act of singing. Maybe it’s because integrating two sets of fans dissolves potential choirs. Maybe it’s because the thrill-a-minute, wham-bam action of Aussie Rules doesn’t sit well with singing, which flourishes in a lull. As for rugby, it does have singing – the Welsh, Scots and English are particularly strong of voice – but it tends to be old standards sung boisterously at the start of games, like Land of Our Fathers or Scotland the Brave.

Football is the code where singing thrives before, after and during games, and where the song book is vast and ever-changing. It’s not, as many heathens claim, because the game is boring and there’s nothing else to do. It’s more that between the intense but often sporadic climactic highs and cathartic lows ─ there is down time. Time to absorb the rhythm of the game. Time to study the patterns the players make in position or with the ball as they strive for advantage. Time to fear. Time to fret. And certainly, time to sing.

To fans of other football codes, the ones who accuse soccer of being too low-scoring and therefore boring, the only way to discover the beautiful game is by abandoning neutrality. Take the plunge. Pick a team. Make the fan’s decision to pin a healthy slice of your temporary happiness to the fortunes of that team. Suddenly you’ll discover why football is the most blissfully stressful of all games to watch. Become a barracker and, in an instant, the ridiculous skill of curving a ball 35 metres onto a teammate’s moving forehead won’t just be a matter of abstract beauty, a sporting curiosity to hang on the wall; it will be of living importance to the chances of your team. To be a fan is to experience the explosions of joy and the daggers of disappointment a single goal can bring, and in all the time and space between, there is the fear. The fear of what might happen. The knowledge that in such a low-scoring game, every act is important.

I thought back to what Kenji had said on the train. Watching football is indeed about mapping futures, moving from one to the next. Even an inexperienced football fan will quickly start spotting patterns. That team goes wide to the wings, a player is released near the corner flag, the ball is crossed to the strikers, and hopefully, it connects sweetly with a foot or head. But the magic of the game is that the predictable pattern is sometimes tossed aside by a burst of speed, or a brilliant pass or a step-over dribble, and suddenly the brain is working again, casting aside the predictable future outcome and re-evaluating for the next most likely event, given the surprise change of circumstances. It’s a continual guessing game, and when there’s emotional investment in the outcome, it’s continually stressful.