When Ernest Hemingway prepared to write, he would imagine himself stepping into the boxing ring to do pugilistic battle with Tolstoy, Dickens or Balzac. Hemingway had an old-fashioned view of the sexes and chivalrously refrained from make‑believe bouts of fistic fury with George Eliot. Most fight experts agree this was a wise course on Hemingway's part, figuring the Astley Tornado would have dropped the American for the full count some time around the ninth.
Hemingway's fellow scribbler Jeffrey Archer, meanwhile, continues to nurture the boyish daydream of opening the batting for England at Lord's.
Oddly enough, watching the former Tory peer playing in a Test match also happens to be a recurring reverie of my own. Although in my version he is not elegantly compiling a century before lunch but having bouncers ping off his noggin with a sound like somebody striking a ripe peach with a meat mallet.
Lord Archer's creative powers are the stuff of legend and clearly far greater than my own, for I find that these days – as I career down the back slope of my 40s like a skeleton bob made of lard and giblets – I am no longer able to envisage myself as a sporting hero (or, to be honest, any other sort of hero – unless there's some figure from the Greek myths who earns eternal fame for his ability to remember the Test career batting average of BS Chandrasekhar in the time it takes to eat half a pack of Tangfastics).
Once you reach 40 it becomes increasingly difficult to fantasise about being a brilliant sportsman or woman. Because even a fantasy must have some tenuous toehold in reality and, once you reach that age, the toehold for the idea that you might knock seven bells out of Floyd Mayweather has crumbled away to leave a sheet of highly polished steel.
When this occurs you have to seek an alternative. At one time there was a recognisable turning point in a man's life – the moment he went from daydreaming about playing football to fantasising about owning a football club. Where once you were spotted in the park slaloming effortlessly round waste-bins and tramps and catapulted to World Cup glory, now you write series of international poptastic hits/invent an air-powered engine/win the lottery six times in a row and use the money to buy your football club.
In this fantasy you were always a model chairman. You brought in all sorts of radical measures: invested equally in local young talent and top names from around the globe that "will excite the fans"; allowed kids in free for FA Cup ties; rewarded the loyalty of season‑ticket holders with reductions based on the years the fan has spent sitting behind the goal saying: "He'll never score from here."
You were a hands-off chairman. Of course you were – after all, that's why you had appointed one of the brightest and most innovative coaches in the continental game to delight the fans with his free-flowing football. But every so often you popped into the dressing room at half-time and modestly offered an acutely brilliant piece of tactical advice that turned the FA Cup final decisively in your favour.
Soon the stadium – which you refused to allow to be named after you despite the fans' petition – rang with chants of praise featuring your name, while Sky cameras caught you blushing humbly amid a throng of former stars and adoring blondes. One of the most important milestones in a man's life was when he stopped wanting to be the new Pelé and started wishing he was the new Jack Walker.
That at least was what it used to be like. No longer. Because one of the most brutally damaging effects of the recent emergence of Premier League clubs as rich men's playthings, one that has not so far been touched on in the press, is the effect it has had on the fantasy chairmen of England. The influx of oligarchs and oil barons has purely and simply pushed the price of even a moderate football club way outside the reach of even the most vivid imagination. Money has ruined real football and it has trashed daydream football, too.
So what is left now for the sporting daydreamer? Non-league football is hardly the stuff of fantasy and IPL cricket is almost as expensive as the Premier League. For some years a friend of mine has been busily engaged in leading the club he follows to the pinnacle of the world game using his "magic scarf".
In my friend's daydream the scarf makes the wearer invisible, allowing my friend to sneak on to the field and change the course of the game by tripping the opposition keeper, stopping the linesman from raising his flag as a striker bursts through on goal and causing Ashley Cole to run from the field in embarrassment and humiliation after his shorts are repeatedly pulled down by an unseen hand.
My friend, however, never actually touches the ball, tempting though it is to deflect one in with an invisible back-heel. Because as he says, to do so would be to abuse the power of the magic scarf. All fantasies have to have some limits.
