So I'm here with my dad in the living room in Liverpool.

My dad's just had a brandy.

Oh, that's my dad's brandy laugh.

I'm Rodger Bennett.

And I grew up in Liverpool, England, a city in which football, soccer, is pretty much everything.

In Liverpool, I'm known as an Evertonian, just like my dad before me and his dad before him.

What's an Evertonian?

I hear you asking, obviously, in an American accent.

It's to be a fan of a football team, a soccer team.

One thing you've got to understand about growing up in England is that we define ourselves by our football affiliation.

And when I tell anyone that I'm an Evertonian, they know immediately that I fill my life with tiny, carefully regulated bursts of hope.

It's often a lesson in life-suffering and about enjoying the moment. Would you say that's fair?

Well, you never know in life what's coming along.

You have to look forward, but you never know what's going to be.

I have been saying that about Everton for years.

Albert Kammout, bit of a writer, but before that, he was almost a professional grade goalkeeper.

He was alleged to have once said, everything I know about morality and the obligations of men, I owe it to football.

He may or may not have said those words, but it's exactly how I live my life.

Football made me feel things. Emotions about victory, defeat, happiness, doom, all of which I'm largely numb to in real life.

Now the apex of every football fan's calendar is the World Cup, a circus which happens every four years.

Some of my earliest memories as a kid revolve around watching the delirious scenes of the 1978 World Cup unfold in Argentina.

If someone casually mentions 1985, my mind automatically defaults to 1986 when the Cup happens to be in Mexico, and I was a tenth grade who in Liverpool.

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