While I love cricket, and mainly write about it, it is not my only sporting obsession. My first love was football, specifically English football. It gripped me when I was 12 and has held me till now.

This early fixation endured well into my teens. But this was way before the Internet came along and ruined society, so instead of endless hours scouring YouTube for match highlights without Turkish commentary, I would get Shoot! and Match magazines from England. CNA imported them, and the branch at Balfour Park had a pouch with my name on it where they would set aside copies for me each week, lest they sold out before I got there. I loved those magazines and I devoured them, almost literally.

Right from the beginning, I started removing the pictures and sticking them up on my bedroom wall. This continued for a long time, and at an age when I had friends decorating their walls with all sorts of pin-ups, my bedroom sported an ever increasing mass of football imagery. When the walls were finally complete, I started on the inside of my cupboard, and when that too was full, I moved on to the ceiling. Opening my eyes each morning, I was greeted by the smiling face of Dennis Irwin holding up a Manchester United scarf, and the drudgery of getting ready for school was made easier by my morning chats to Ally McCoist and Darren Anderton as I rummaged through my sock drawer.

If I wanted to actually watch games, my only option was the weekly Monday night roundup on M-NET. Over the course of several seasons I recorded each episode, and would watch them over and over again, till the commentary was etched in my brain. The rule was I could never record over an existing episode,  so at an age when many of my friends were filling their bedroom cupboards with all sorts of video collections, my videos had far less titillating titles, like ”Season 89-90, weeks 6-9”.

This drove my parents nuts, and they insisted that my football obsession, and my insistence on plastering my room was interfering with my schoolwork and that I had to take the pictures down. I was having none of it. After several years of disagreements and arguments, in a final act of desperation my father sold the house and told me to go live somewhere else.

Of course this was in another age. My bedroom may no longer resemble the Sistine Chapel of football, but we are no less surrounded by sport and commentary.  This morning I was driving to work, listening to one of my many football podcasts, and the conversation turned to Arsenal midfielder Jack Wilshere and his hesitancy in taking up his latest contract offer. Like many footballers over the years, his is a name that has never been far from my general sporting consciousness. I have listened to countless podcast discussions about his career; from budding starlet, to future England captain, to his propensity for injury, and his general failure to live up to his full potential. Listening to the five minute discussion this morning, a thought struck me.

I have absolutely no idea what Jack Wilshere looks like.

Very unsettling. For someone with my level of sporting interest, a general idea of a sportsman’s appearance is not too much to expect. So is something special about Jack that I don’t know him, or is this a symptom of our modern day information overload? Is there so much of it out there that we have lost our ability to focus?

So I turned off the podcast and ran a little mental exercise. I ran a roll-call of the first ten famous sportsmen that came to mind to see which of them I could pick out of a line-up.

Randomly, the ten that came to mind are:

• AB de Villiers – yes.
• Alistair Cook – only with his helmet on.
• Usain Bolt – no
• Neymar – He used to have orange hair, I think. That picture probably. Otherwise, no.
• David de Gea – I know he’s tall and blonde, but maybe that’s because I grew up with Peter Schmeichel in the Man United goal.
• David Silva – no.
• Jordan Spieth – no.
• Any of the current Springbok squad – at a stretch maybe one or two.
• Maria Sharapova – duh!
• Kevin Pietersen – he’s on my dartboard, so yes.

Not a great pass-rate.

So how did it come to this? Has the modern age really brought me to a point where Springboks themselves could rob me in broad daylights and probably get away with it?

I know exactly where the blame lies: Cricinfo. For years I have marveled at its ingenious ability to keep me wholly engrossed in a match for all five days, all the while maintaining the illusion that I am being productive doing something else. I keenly followed the recently completed Ashes with great interest, but I didn’t watch any of it. Not a single delivery. Cricinfo is just too good, and at times very funny. On the odd occasion when I am able to watch live cricket, I have Cricinfo open as well, just to see how they describe the action. Pretty much in the same way I greet news of any Arsenal defeat by frantically searching Twitter for Piers Morgan’s hysterical overreaction. Seriously, if you have never done that you must.

It seems we have evolved to a point where watching the games themselves is sometimes secondary. Maybe I don’t need to know Jack Wilshere. Maybe his face is less important than his ability to generate a discussion that keeps me occupied in a traffic jam.

Is society better off? I don’t know. I’m not necessarily complaining. I don’t enjoy it any less, it’s just that the nature of the experience has changed. It does get me thinking though, what will be the next stage in our evolutionary development as our machines change the way we interact with the things we know and love?

Maybe CricInfo should create an add-on called “BossInfo”. A system that alerts you when your manager is getting too close, giving you enough time to minimize the screen.

Or what about a weekly “Wife” podcast. Forget Jack Wilshere, I could drive to work and listen to how the house is a mess, the kids are not doing their homework, and how badly we need a holiday. I could even click “Stop” when I’ve heard enough.

Something to think about.

GPF