God, the afterlife and Bayer Leverkusen

Trouble with my mother these last few weeks. Not the usual sort. Trouble with your mother when you're my age normally means meeting resistance to the suggestion she'd be better off in a comfortable nursing home by the seaside, leaving her house and savings to you whether or not she remembers who you are.

Whereas the trouble I'm having with my mother bears on the relative merits of David Beckham and Zinedine Zidane. At a time when I'm looking to her to distil the wisdom of her years, when it would be calming for me to hear her thoughts on God, the spirit, and the afterlife, my mother has become a football fanatic.

That it could be worse, that she could develop into an actual football hooligan if we gave her half a chance, I do not doubt, having witnessed the violence with which she pooh-poohed my case for Zinedine Zidane. In advance of the World Cup, therefore, we have taken the precaution of sending her photograph to the police and confiscating her passport.

This all began with Zidane's winning goal against Leverkusen in the final of the European Cup. I say "all began", although in fact I had been noticing for some time how accurately she was picking the Manchester United line-up a day or two in advance of Alex Ferguson's final selection. "I think he'll have to give Veron more width this week," she told me recently, "and move Scholes further forward."

Which was exactly what happened. But since they still lost, I didn't think that was so smart of her. And talking about Manchester United doesn't really count as football knowledge when you live in Manchester, as my mother does. Every Manchester matron will sing the praises of Keane and Giggsy without having a clue what they actually do for a living. They are abstract icons of the city.

But then came the final of the European Cup, Zidane's volley, and everybody saying it was the best goal ever. My mother rang me the next morning. "I've never read so much rubbish," she said. As it happened I agreed with her about that. The best goal ever, in my estimation, was scored by me when I was playing for the prefects against the rest of the school in 1958.

This, too, was a volley, an instinctive response from a devilishly looping cross from the left, and this, too, only went into the net because my technique was perfect, pivoting from the hip while maintaining an exquisitely stable fulcrum, balancing movement with stasis, head down, eyes up, boot at an angle of about 23 degrees to the horizontal, and, for the smallest division of a second, my heart still as a mouse.

Because I had never scored a goal in my life before, and because, as goalkeeper, I shouldn't have been taking up such an advanced position anyway, and was only there because I thought I'd heard the final whistle and that the game was over, most witnesses dismissed my effort as a glorious fluke. Which was why, when my mother said something similar of Zidane's goal, I blew my top.

"Some players have only one goal in them," I said. "All their missed goals being but preparations for that. It's the misses that are the flukes, and the one that goes in is not the exception, but the summation, of their talent."

"You're not listening to what I'm saying," my mother said. "I'm not arguing it wasn't a good goal. But that strike of Beckham's early in his career, seeing the goalkeeper off his line and clearing him with a kick from the other half of the field, was greater."

"Yeah," I said, "I know the argument. Because he was still young, and this was an omen of things to come, blah blah. That's benefit of hindsight praise. Would you have said the same had Beckham broken down and never played again?"

"Don't talk like that," my mother said. "Not at this hour." (She didn't mean at this hour of the morning, she meant at this hour of national need.) "What made that goal great," she went on, "was precisely that it wasn't spontaneous. Zidane had no option but to score or miss. As a skilled distributor of the ball, Beckham had many. He looked, weighed up his alternatives, saw who was or wasn't where, made up his mind, measured, and shot. That's genius. Not even Einstein could have calculated that angle of trajectory in so short a time."

"You don't know that for sure," I said. "You've never seen Einstein play." I was so angry that I accused her of latent anti-Semitism, for taking it as read that Einstein wouldn't have been much of a ball-player because he was Jewish.

Unfair of me, I know. But I was rattled. I had always looked to my mother as a shining example of worldly disdain. It was in her name that I had turned my nose up at pop music as a boy, trashy literature, fast cars, leggy blondes. It was in her name, let's face it, that I only ever scored one goal.

Now here she was, having trained me in all the habits of an oppositional nature, expressing the conventional enthusiasm of an adolescent schoolgirl. No wonder I was upset and, all right, just a little jealous.

More to the point, she was about to meet my partner's mother for the first time, and I didn't want her showing me up. In the event, the meeting went well. We sat them down over a Chinese meal and talked among ourselves while they discussed God, the afterlife, and other matters incident to the elderly.

At one point I couldn't help hearing them say how well they thought we worked together. What a mutual understanding we enjoyed. What pride they took in us as a pair, and what hopes they held out for us. I smiled at my partner.

"They seem to approve of us," I mouthed. But all at once I realised I was mistaken. Our reverend mothers weren't discussing us at all. They were talking about Owen and Heskey.