Listen to your body. At the beginning of the year, I was invited to play soccer in a writers' World Cup in Sweden. My body immediately counted the reasons this was not a good idea. In fact, my body was already constructing polite e-mails full of excuses. "Our playing days are strictly over," these messages explained. "You should have really gotten to us 10 years ago, or maybe 20, at least before we could list 'carrying children upstairs to bed' and 'trips to recycling center' as our principal aerobic exercise, but as it is I cannot see any way…"

There was another voice, though. This one was the voice of the true patriot. "There are goals to be scored!" it cried. "Medals to be won! Glory to be grasped!" The Nobel laureate Albert Camus, who had played as a goalkeeper in Algeria, once famously observed that everything he ever learned about morality, he learned from football. The true course was clear: England needed me.

Time was on our side, I told my body; the scribblers' World Cup was months away. I imagined myself once again in the full flight of my youth on the brilliant green grass of a crowded Swedish stadium, the three lions of England on my chest, hapless Germans and Italians in my wake. I studied my gut in a full-length mirror. I searched for a Wikipedia entry on Robert De Niro slimming down for Cape Fear. My standout season, the mirror forced me to concede, had been in 1985, when—40 pounds lighter, quickest to every ball, sharpest in every tackle—I had stylishly captained my Cambridge college side to a league title.

The fitness campaign was to involve a structured G.I. Joe diet, a dawn regime of squat thrusts. In February I went for a run, twisted an ankle, limped home. My wife and two daughters studied the swelling and whispered comments about a midlife crisis.

Come April, the program was, I had to admit, not going as well as I had hoped. Each week began with resolution. But each week seemed to contain a party at which it would be positively rude not to drink. In May my mother called to inform me that she had read in the local paper that a long-lost school friend had died suddenly at the local gym—a heart attack—"And he was always so much fitter than you…"

The week before the tournament, desperate measures were required. I fasted for two days. I attempted several hundred sit-ups before breakfast. I mainlined bananas and green tea and kicked a tennis ball feverishly against the wall of my study. I stretched. I watched Wayne Rooney. I dreamed.

At the appointed hour I arrived at the airport, heavy-legged, with my World Cup haircut—I had pondered a peroxided Beckhamesque buzz cut and finished up with a compromised mullet circa 1992. Had I not known my teammates from our few chaotic training matches, it would have been hard to guess their purpose. There is a celebrated terrace football chant in England that asks: "Who ate all the pies?" It is aimed at any player carrying a few extra ounces. In our case pie-eating might have appeared mandatory.