All played out The end of my amateur football career brings with it a painful realisation

Here are the nights when the 10-minute walk to the tube station takes half an hour.

- Jonathan Liew

here are the nights when the 10-minute walk to the tube station takes half an hour. There are the crossbow bolts of knee pain at 3am. There are the evenings when you convince yourself the recycling doesn't actually need to be taken out tonight. We can wait a couple of days, squash it down a bit, crush that box flat. And secretly, it's because you can't handle the stairs.

There are the mornings when the bus is coming and the kids shout "Come on!" and start running, but you can't, you just can't, and you don't know how to tell them. There is the very particular indignity of the 39-year-old man crossing the road in socks because blisters and swellings have rendered his boots useless.

There are the fitness fads - hot yoga, reformer pilates, cold plunge - adopted at great expense and with the sole purpose of pushing back oblivion, of rendering the intolerable fleetingly tolerable.

But in the end there comes a point in the life of every middle-aged male sports columnist when they must succumb to the ravages of time and torpor, and write the column about their own amateur sporting retirement, usually in the form of a jocular letter to the England manager ("Dear Sven, with regrets, etc"). And with apologies, here is mine. To the fans (none). To the glory (also none). To football. It's been weird. It's been emotional. But it's also been coming for a while.