On a rare foray into the world of talk radio, some years ago, I found myself in for the long haul as a guest on a Saturday morning sports breakfast show. It was 6.30am and the switchboard was definitely not, to segue effortlessly into phone-in parlance, lighting up. A footballer had made one of those daft statements about scoring a goal being better than sex. We had a little laugh about this and from the next room our engineer noted a hint of illumination on the box of tricks in front of him.

It was a chap, I'll call him Mike because, frankly, I've forgotten his name, and he was calling from bed. He had to whisper, he said, because his wife was asleep beside him. He began waxing lyrical about his afternoons watching Arsenal, the exquisite high and lows, the joy, the pain, the emotion, the passion; he found it very plausible that a goalscorer could be so involved in the moment that he would experience an ecstatic sensation in the penalty area that eluded him in the bedroom.

“Are you seriously suggesting,” asked the host, “that you would rather go and watch Arsenal than have sex with your missus?” Mike's voice dropped an octave to a confessional tone. “Listen, mate,” he said, darkly, “I'd rather go and watch Tottenham than have sex with my missus.” The fact that Tottenham are Arsenal's most hated rivals suggested Mike's marriage had issues that went far beyond a season ticket at Highbury. You see, I've heard this talk of three in a marriage, of football widows and husbands with the hots for Wayne Rooney, but I'm not really buying it. How to explain this? Well, there is a famous episode of Sex and the City - it inspired a self-help book and a film, actually - in which Carrie's boyfriend, Berger, is asked by her friend Miranda, to analyse the behaviour of a date, who declines an invitation up to her apartment, claiming an early business meeting. Berger's ungentle explanation is that “he's just not that into you”. “When a guy's really into you, he's coming upstairs, meeting or no meeting,” he adds.

It is much the same with football. “Jack, are the Villa really more important than our marriage? It's over,” wrote Jess, in banner letters, hung from a walkway over a dual carriageway in West Bromwich last week.

And the sad thing is, Jess, that every guy knows, deep down, it is not the Villa. It's you. Not you personally. The collective you. Your marriage, your relationship, your life together. He's just not that into you. If he was, and it was you versus Villa, he'd find a way of calling it a draw at least.

Hell, the season hadn't even begun when you dangled prospective divorce from the railings. If it had been this week, after the 4-1 win over Manchester City on Sunday, the Gabriel Agbonlahor hat-trick, looking quite tasty if they can keep Gareth Barry, there may have been an element of doubt. But no man throws it all away on pre-season. Jess, don't be sad.

If it wasn't the Villa, it would be golf, or third XI cricket, or any of the pastimes conveniently blamed whenever boy meets girl and later decides that he had more fun playing darts. You'll find someone else. Maybe a Birmingham City supporter. They're rubbish at the moment. You've got to fancy your chances there.
Martin Samuel

Better Half or second half? Six questions that must be answered

1. Do football fanatics need help?

That depends on how far the football addiction has gone. Only a minority of men reach the clinical stage. They know that they consume more football units than they should, but they are alert to the danger signs: a Sunday afternoon binge on Setanta, Sky Sports 1 and a Spanish chaser from La Liga leaves them feeling wretched. And they know that downing a Monday night Carling Cup tie between two League 2 sides is morally wrong.

Villa Jack, we have to infer, was a pretty heavy user, and probably spent the summer in a deep gloom contemplating the daily updates on the Gareth Barry transfer saga. (Jess: “So he's a football player who might go and play for a different team. What exactly is the matter with you?”)

Football can be an addiction and Professor Mark Griffiths, of Nottingham Trent University's School of Social Sciences, can prove it. Griffiths, an expert on gambling addiction, wrote to local newspapers throughout Britain looking for examples of extreme football behaviour. He found plenty, including the divorce of a Chelsea fan. That supporter spent the summer off-season watching Chelsea videos. Then he followed the team around Europe, spending about £20,000, and taking so many sickies from work that he was eventually dismissed. “His Chelsea addiction conflicted with every aspect of his life,” Griffiths says. I would have got more details, but the professor was rushing to pick up his children from football practice.

2. What physical and emotional symptoms should I look for?

My marriage nearly didn't happen because of football. Early in our relationship, my team, Liverpool, lost the league championship to Arsenal with the last kick of the season. Annie, my wife-to-be-but-nearly-wasn't, found me lying face down on the carpet unable to speak or move. I was beyond tears. “And yet you seemed calm when I said I was going away for three months,” she observed cooly. It was then that I evolved the Theory of Football Emotions. In a nutshell, it's this: emotions men display about football might seem like the real thing - shouting, imploring, crying, cursing and so on - but they're not: they are located in a quite separate, football region of the hypothalamus. The theory came in handy days before our wedding when my future aunt-in-law witnessed my behaviour during a Liverpool v Man United game. Liverpool won and I may have shouted, wept and bear-hugged her a few times. Afterwards, she took Annie aside and said: “I just think you ought to know, darling - I'm not sure Mark is the man he seems to be.” Unfortunately, my theory of Football Emotion turns out to be rubbish. Griffiths cites research from a colleague at Sheffield Hallam University, which shows that fans of losing teams actually present identical symptoms (albeit short-term) as sufferers from post-traumatic stress disorder. He has an example closer to home. In bed, watching his beloved Sunderland on television, his wife complained about the incredibly loud House music coming from a party in the street. It turned out to be Griffiths's heartbeat.

3. Why do men, who hardly say half a dozen words from one day to the next, suddenly act like Roman orators on match days?

According to the journal Science, men and women each use a vocabulary of around 15,000 words a day. The difference is that sufferers from Football Tongue will save their entire allowance for Five Live's 606 phone-in on Saturday evening - whether they appear on the show or not.

4. Football - it's just sublimated violence and aggression, isn't it?

This is only very rarely so. Non-supporters and women never understand this, but most football followers are like the more extreme kind of 19th-century aesthete. Look at the language - a “sublime pass”, a “lovely through ball”, a “stunning volley”. We are straining to glimpse beauty (this is The Beautiful Game, after all) in an ugly world as we watch the fair-haired boy-god Fernando Torres skip fawn-like around the earthbound mortals of the Sunderland defence.

5. Is football sublimated homo-eroticism?

See above.

6. So if we can't beat ‘em, should we join ‘em?

Griffiths speaks movingly about his perfectly football-adjusted family, where Mum and Dad spend every spare hour sharing their love of the game with their children, including a ten-year-old daughter, who is apparently one of the East Midlands' more promising young strikers. But the general rule is: don't try. Men get unsettled and unhappy when their womenfolk attempt to follow football. They will tend to exhibit symptoms similar to Just William when Violet Elizabeth Bott is trying to gatecrash a scrumping expedition. In the end, they want you to be like a good referee: firm, fair, but above all, consistent.
MARK JONES

Note to Jess: match over, or a replay?

Dear Jess,

Thousands of football widows around the country owe you their thanks. Not only have you highlighted their plight, but you have also given them a doomsday scenario with which to threaten their polyester-shirted husbands: if you watch too much Sky Sports News, listen to too much 5 Live, and spend too many Saturdays and Sundays in absentia then, pal, you too could find yourself dumped, via a luridly daubed banner on a footbridge.

But Jess, we have a question: did it work? Is Jack in a Travelodge, nursing his Panini albums? Is he rehabilitating himself for the sake of your marriage? Did he even get the message at all?

Please let us know by e-mailing features@thetimes.co.uk

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