London is a notorious city to travel in. According to one account, the average speed of travel across the city has not changed in over 300 years. The situation becomes exacerbated further when winter comes in, especially this year’s edition which promises to be the worst in 30 years. Yet last night, I found myself braving the elements to take on a two-hour journey, all to catch the last 15 minutes of a match.

Unfortunately, the team I was supporting was decimated, to put it politely. You can read about it here, but as far as I was concerned, there was a more pressing question I needed to answer. Why did I care?

At first, my meditations flocked around the match in question, which involved two teams I had no link to, had never seen in person, and was probably never going to be able to either. But perhaps the sheer magnitude of the loss forced me to delve deeper - why do we follow any sports at all? Especially people like me, who have been so bad at all sports that they are forced to buy the equipment in their local gully before anyone reluctantly puts them in the team.

Sports as war

Ok, that is a rather sensationalist claim, inspired by George Orwell's observation that all sports was ‘war minus the shooting.’ But its not completely off the mark.

Modern football, for example, evolved from annual events where neighbouring villages would compete to drag an animal carcass across a lengthy field. The whole fiasco would result in outrageous violence and often, fatalities.

However, the noblemen realised that if the villagers would be allowed to vent their emotions, angers and frustrations through such events, they would be less likely to involve themselves in actual warmongering, particularly against their overlords.

To date, a lot of sports allow themselves to serve as a way of channelling machismo, aggression and frustration. The Pakistani artist Faiza Butt has done some fascinating work showcasing how sports allow ideas of masculinity to be represented and reified. As a recent blog noted, channelling machismo is not always the best recipe for success. However, it continues to be the way forward for sportsmen, but more importantly sports followers.

Getting excited, angry, vengeful, bullish, threatening on the fluctuations of a match allows supporters to come to terms with their own emotions that they perhaps struggle to express otherwise due to the bounds of civility, legality and social norms.

Sports as narrative

One day I was being deliberately sexist (I do that as part of my roguish charm routine. It’s not always successful, but I am married, so clearly it worked when I needed it to) and claiming that women are vacuous because they like watching soap operas. My wife had a pithy response – watching a soap is no different than following a football team.

What? At first, I began to pout and snipe, angrily demanding she take it back. But later, I started to think about what she had said.

Every day, I find myself scouring blogs and articles which dissect the latest sporting events, the reactions of the competitors, the intrigue of the administrators, the drama, the suspense, the excitement.

However, I recently realised that the restrictions of work and personal obligations meant that I was rarely able to actually watch the sports I was following so diligently. I could not stop going into work, or avoid picking up a relative from the airport just because a sporting event was playing live.

More interestingly, I hadn’t even realised that I had been reduced to following these sports through some scattered highlights, and a plethora of words on websites, tweets and forums. So I wondered, why am I so eager to follow the interpretation of events I am not even watching?

The answer is that our own lives are messy, seemingly random experiences. Sure we have goals and dreams, but our trials and tribulations are constant and monotonous, our ‘defining’ moments occur haphazardly and irregularly, and it is often difficult to discern any tangible meaning from the procession of our daily routine.

In contrast, sports follow pre-defined patterns. There are seasons, tournaments, leagues, rankings, competitions. The adversary is easily defined, the end is easily identified. There are winners and losers, champions and chumps, heroes and villains.

We can’t watch every match, but we can follow the score, day in day out, through out the season. And doing so, it helps provide a steady tale of ups and downs, of victories and defeats, of hope and sorrow. And so if our own lives seem messy and complicated, sports (and indeed soap operas) allow us to follow something that does seem to make sense, and end with a nice ceremony.

Sports as art

For a lot of people, a trip to an art gallery can be bewildering. Very few things seem to make sense, and fewer still betray any idea as to why they were deemed important enough to be put up in such a sacred manner. Which is why, a lot of attendees are there to curry favour with others, to be seen and talked about. But that’s not true for everyone. Appreciating art requires an understanding of context, but also technique. The knowledge of both allows one to appreciate a work for what it’s trying to say, as well as the difficulties and the limits, of conveying and representing what has been said.

Sometimes, watching sports is truly akin to appreciating art, and in that sense, it becomes divorced from the experiences described above. Sometimes, we watch not for who is playing, and who we want to win, but rather to watch something incredible unfold.

We watch to see limits being challenged, to see previously someone breach what is considered possible. We watch to see roles being changed, new interpretations being created, new ideas brought to life. We essentially partake in a supremely creative process, where the appreciation comes not from our own affiliations and prejudices, but rather our desire to watch new possibilities, new meanings to emerge.

Truly great performers are like great painters creating new styles, great writers discovering new forms of expressions. A Messi dribble, a drive from Lara, a shot from Federer is watching a new form of expression being created, and in such a moment, narrative and emotions matter little.

Sports as transcendental experience

It was 2004, and I was in a concrete cauldron in Karachi. By all accounts, me and 30,000 other people should have already headed home. It was lunch, and India had just posted the highest total the ground had ever seen. In the days before mammoth chases were common, and the fact that this was Pakistan’s notoriously hollow batting doing the chasing, the target of 350 seemed like an impossibility.

And yet somehow, the crowd hung around, ignoring the initial parts of Pakistan’s chase and amusing themselves with shouting out obscene comments to the outfielders, and buying copious amounts of food from the stalls nearby.  Somehow, they resisted their usual penchant for stoning the opposition captain, or rioting in the stands.

And somehow, even more improbably, Pakistan starting making a fist of the chase. Somehow, the boundaries kept flowing. Somehow, that glorious saviour Inzi kept shuffling his cards and producing aces. Somehow, the most impossible of chases, against the most fiercest of rivals, began to materialise.

And it was there, in the last few hours of that match, that I suddenly lost myself. The entire stadium began to pulsate as one giant beastly cacophony of sound. Bottles were relentlessly smacked against plastic seats, Mexican waves cascaded continuously upon themselves. Roar after roar after roar continued to be emitted. It didn’t stop for dot balls, it didn’t stop for over breaks or drinks breaks. It didn’t stop for fall of wickets.

And when the match reached its climax and Pakistan lost in one blink of an eye, the roar stopped for a moment, before beginning again. The stadium’s relentless noise transformed into applause for a team which had been pelted with rocks the last time it had played there.

And when it all ended, I realised that for the past few hours, I had no awareness of my self, my individual self. The entire experience had felt otherworldly, eerie even in retrospect. There had been no concept of individuals, no concept of political feuds and human follies. No concept of victory or defeat even. It had been a sustained moment of pure exhilaration.

And every sports fan who tastes such a moment, who participates in that obliteration of the self and the connection with all of humanity around them, who experiences emotions beyond those that can be described by words, keeps coming back for more.

For all its faults and pretensions, sports remains one of those mediums where we can experience something truly beyond the ordinary. Something which affirms our belief that there is more to life, if only we choose to embrace it.

And out of all the reasons, that is the most noble one for following sports.

The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.