e all have moments, often under pressure, that expose our deepest needs. Mine came in mid-January. It was a midweek pandemic evening, like any of the hundreds before it. Sorting out some washing, I cheekily threw a ball of rolled-up socks at my partner. She caught them, with excessively casual disdain. The next hour descended into a game of catch more aggressive, and more competitive, than many major sporting events. Though the final result remains disputed, it laid bare an obvious, terrible truth about our current predicament: there is frankly nothing much to do during the long winter nights. Later that evening, things felt different. In a rare act of mercy, the broadcasting overlords provided Chelsea v Spurs as an alternative to round two of the five-set epic that had played out in the bedroom. Tension, drama, spectacle – precisely the things that have been absent in our lives for so many months. I’ve loved football from my earliest remembered years, though it’s tough to say when childish enthusiasm crossed over into obsessional devotion. I imagine it was somewhere in between a formative World Cup (I was 10 in 2002) and an otherwise mostly forgotten childhood friendship that ended with my choosing to support Chelsea (his gran lived in Earl’s Court and Gianfranco Zola captured my imagination). Before lockdown, my fandom was under control, brief interludes of much needed escapism in an otherwise busy and varied life. Football – and its vast accompanying wall of online white noise – was just one part of a functioning whole that included friends, family and regular excursions more than a few square miles from home. Now, there is no football content too mind-crushingly banal for me to lap up, with varying levels of shame. I’m not exactly sure how much football I’ve watched since the resumption of the Premier League in June’s grandly titled Project Restart and I’m not sure I have much interest in finding out. As well as almost every Chelsea game (a heart-pounding experience long before the extra emotional investment brought about by repeat lockdowns), I’ve laughed in real time at Arsenal’s various misfortunes and enjoyed Liverpool’s pleasingly rapid descent into relative chaos. And there isn’t a Burnley match I won’t sit through with something approaching joy. My appetite goes beyond religiously reading the BBC transfer gossip page first thing every day. Instead, the Chelsea Reddit page is more familiar to me than I would care to admit to my loved ones. It’s the terrible gutsore knowledge that when my partner blearily asks what I’m watching so attentively on my phone at 6:32am on a Tuesday morning, it’s invariably a 15-minute YouTube compilation entitled something like Football Respect & Beautiful Moments, or Neymar Jr 2021 – Neymagic Skills & Goals. Perhaps the reasons for this are obvious enough. With the lack of socialising during the pandemic, there is a void of spontaneity in our lives – an absence of unscripted entertainment. Days follow a well-worn script, weeks maintain their patterns, and even the seasons have congealed into one grey stretch of time. My ability to devour books has faded in and out. There have been several weeks where I’ve barely been able to get past the first third of a film, highbrow or not. It doesn’t matter how many edifying films you’ve watched on BFI Player, or if you finally got through Middlemarch, or whichever other lockdown cultural cliche you care to mention. Wonderful as these might be, they aren’t a substitute for the things we’ve been denied for so long. I’m not trying to claim that football has obliterated every other interest I held dear, but it has proved the most consistently durable these past few months, a uniquely robust consolation in time when others have occasionally waned. What does a Chelsea FA Cup tie against lower league opposition offer that other forms of entertainment can’t? The answer is deceptively simple. It provides 90 minutes of glorious respite from the relentless churn of identikit days. For that brief window there is a world where, perhaps, anything might happen, even if it often doesn’t. Full of unscripted drama and emotional release, without the anxiety of any real world consequences. And with each managerial meltdown or VAR crime against humanity, there is – if quite literally nothing else, the arrival of something new to talk about that isn’t the perpetual cycle of pandemic discourse. Even the stalest nil-nil draw has its own poetry in these straitened circumstances: a fresher form of boredom than the one we’ve all been forced to endure this past year and who knows how long beyond. It’s also possible that this all might simply be a howl of denial. I like to tell myself that in less suffocatingly constrained times, I wouldn’t know the new Chelsea manager Thomas Tuchel’s views on veganism, or spend terrible lunch breaks following an online debate about the merits of Frank Lampard’s sacking. But I know that deep in the sorry depths of my heart, the pandemic only gave my obsession a new lease of my life. Francisco Garcia is a London-based writer and journalist