IT'S not that I don't understand sport. I mean, I don't – I really don't understand sport at all – it's more an intense apathy. I just don't care. The mechanics of it, the divisions of it, the trophies and trappings of it, none of it takes up any space in my brain.

I was in the Galapagos last week and found myself in a cafe showing the Rangers game. I was vaguely aware that the team had done well at something because we had put a big picture of one of the players looking delighted on the front page of the Glasgow Times.

I had managed to also accidentally absorb the knowledge that the lads were away to Seville.

I was focused, in the equatorial heat, on the eating of ice cream but found my gaze returning to the TV screen where a phenomenon others were calling "penalties" was happening.

"Is that Seville in the white?" I asked the chap at the table next to me. (Sometimes the teams wear different colours when they play away games so, for all I knew, Rangers was in white.)

"That's Frankfurt," the man replied. Frankfurt? Where in the blazes was Seville then? I didn't ask; I didn't think the question would earn me any points.

Somehow, though, in those brief few minutes where I watched the players line up, faces pained with concentration, the balls shooting at the net like an automatic umbrella in a sudden shower, I felt a tension in my chest.

I didn't know who I wanted to win. All of them, perhaps, so that no one would look sad afterwards, but I felt the tension of the crowd. Even through the television screen it was possible to feel the stress and pensiveness of the fans as their fine boys lined up to kick out at glory or defeat. It was defeat for Rangers, in the end.

The camera closed in on one young lad crying, a woman's arm around his shoulder, both gutted. I felt envious, not for the first time, of that wee guy and all the wee guys like him who grow up with A Team.

I have always had a deep envy of sports fans. On Wednesday night, it was the same again. I didn't watch any of Scotland vs Ukraine but I live near Hampden Park so it's hard to avoid the crowds and noise and the hot, anticipatory air the fans bring as they surge past on their way to the match.

Mid-afternoon I'd left Glasgow Sheriff Court and even then, hours before the game and away down by the Clyde, there were already Scotland supporters in their jerseys, milling about ready for the evening ahead. Win or lose, they get to be part of a communion of mass participatory feeling. Joy, excitement, pain, all of that. It's better than the dispassion of the lumpen sports non-fan.

I remember in hazy patches my first day at primary school in Scotland, having emigrated from Australia. I remember morning break and being surrounded by kits of children, bobbing their heads towards me to ask if I supported Rangers or Celtic. "Say Rangers, say Rangers," they chanted.

And then, "Are you a Proddy or a Catholic?" "Say Proddy, say Proddy".

There was also some brief enquiry as to whether I knew Scott or Charlene, which dates the scene. I trotted home at lunchtime to ask my mum what all of these words meant. Being an avid Neighbours fan, Scott and Charlene were like an aunt and uncle to me but Proddy, Catholic, Rangers and Celtic were all unknown.

Tell them you're Jewish, said my mother. Tell them you like rugby. She was determined to keep me out of all that. The message was that football was divisive and a thing to stay well away from. Trouble.

There is, of course, an extent to which that's true. There is an ugly side to fandom and a deeply childish side to it. You only need look at Twitter to see grown men behaving like truculent teenagers when they feel a slight has been made against them. But these are the worst.

So I grew up in a sport-free household and I never got in to it. That's not, I should say, because I was raised by a single mother.

My mother knows the game. My grandfather played amateur football and had talent. He also had three daughters so co-opted my mother, the eldest, to be a pseudo-son. She was taken to matches on a Saturday and expected to have views on what she saw. It's unfortunate this wasn't passed down the line but here we are.

So sport means nothing to me but I get such vicarious enjoyment from watching other people enjoy sport. At the smattering of football matches I've been to, it's never the action on the pitch.

It's the dedicated wearing of uniforms and the sporting of funny hats. It's face paint and knowing the chants. It's the dragging out in drookit rain and the loyalty in the face of certain loss.

I envy the ability to see, not just beauty, but meaning in the swoop of a ball. To see patterns and put them together in a way that makes sense. To watch men and women running up and down a field of play and have informed opinions on how they're doing what they do.

I imagine it to be a little like those who are comfortable around numbers. People who are naturally at ease with maths can never understand what it's like for those of us with a fear of numbers. Those who look at the pitch and think "We do not (currently) have the players to play that three-man defence without Tierney and Dykes/Adams is not a tandem that works" (I stole that from my friend Andy's Twitter feed) will never understand what it's like for those of us who see nothing but some grown men kicking a ball.

What a loss for us.

There are things for which the value is obvious and there are things for which the value takes a good bit of lyrical explanation.

The study of maths or medicine is in the former camp; sport is in the latter. Proponents will make robust and impassioned arguments about the benefits of exercise and physical activity. They will talk about time-keeping and self-respect. They will have a lot to say about the finer merits of team work.

Being a sports fan needs pure poetry to excuse it. It's a silly obsession for grown adults, tying their self-worth and identity to other adults playing games. But that simplistic take is to undermine the importance of community ties.

That's what it is, is community. Parent to child, neighbour to neighbour, a span of counties and countries. What a gift to be within that community, what a loss to us who are without.