Sport now kicking and screaming at soap opera pitch

Matches are being associated with prowess less suited to the field and more to glamour magazines

WAS BEING a sports fan always this strenuous? On Saturday, a gasping nation fell back exhausted as the final whistle blew at Twickenham, knowing that there was a queue for every defibrillator in the country.

Surely watching sport is meant to be relaxing. I don’t mean for the fanatics who spend their spare time getting “United” tattooed onto their nether regions, or watching the golf during daylight hours, but for (fairly) normal people. At the end of Saturday’s match against England, our collective nerves were tangled. It was fantastic, but also demanding.

Later in the evening we were duty-bound to watch all the sports bulletins to see how low down on the running order the British television stations had placed England’s defeat. The answer, unsurprisingly, was pretty damn low.

All of this was nicely satisfying. Presumably the rugby on Saturday provided us with normal sporting soap opera – John Hayes so modest, Tommy Bowe so fast, Brian O’Driscoll so resistant to the idea that he had been concussed.

But over in soccer land, sports soap opera has gone nuclear. Manchester City’s game against Chelsea was such a pointed event, with a subtext that roamed the ground like a fever, that no soap opera writer would have dared to suggest it as remotely plausible. Here we had private lives all over the park, as Chelsea went down, as they say, 4-2, to Manchester City.

This score was not unconnected in anybody's mind with the fact that the Chelsea and former England captain, John Terry, had had a passionate affair with the mother of Wayne Bridge's son. Put it another way, Chelsea had not been beaten at home for 37 games and Manchester City, according to the soccer scribes yesterday, had not scored at Chelsea for 10 years. Apparently, when Carlos Tevez scored one of his two goals for Manchester City he pointed at Wayne Bridge, as if to say "This one's for you." Carlos was just back from Argentina where he had attended the premature birth of his daughter. You think I picked up this information from Hello! Magazine? Not so, it formed part of the soccer correspondents' reporting of the match.

And what reporting it was. Not only did the cameras show Wayne Bridge of Manchester City refuse to shake the hand of his former friend and team-mate John Terry, this tiny moment was replayed in slow motion many times.

The Chelsea fans booed Wayne Bridge. On the pitch, the needle seems to have been evident straight away: "Enough venom to fuel a civil war", as David Walsh of the Sunday Timesput it.

"A defensive disaster," said Rob Draper of the Mail on Sunday, maintaining that John Terry's mistakes have led to five goals in the past four games. Wayne Bridge, once Terry's best friend, has refused to play for England in the World Cup because he won't share a dressing room with John Terry. Chelsea, they say, has been torn to shreds at home.

All of this is quite apart from another Chelsea player, Ashley Cole, and his separation from his lovely wife ,Cheryl, the sweetheart of several nations, not all of which are on the island of Great Britain. And it is quite apart from Tiger Woods and his love affair with the cocktail waitresses of the United States. Tiger is the sweetheart of golfers everywhere and, more particularly, of people within the golfing business. His private life has lost them an awful lot of money.

Sports stars and their sexual lives are providing more headlines than their playing ever has done. When I say sports stars I use the term advisedly because, before the scandals, who had heard of Wayne Bridge? Only the soccer fans knew who he was.

Ashley Cole hit the magazine mainstream because he was married to Cheryl, not because of his playing prowess at Chelsea. Ashley Cole also has the advantage of being very handsome, making him a happy choice for picture editors and, perhaps less happily, an enthusiastic sender of photographic self-portraits taken with his mobile phone. John Terry is not such a welcome sight – but luckily he arrived on the front pages trailing such a freight-load of scandal that in time we had the opportunity to tire of his photograph too.

Comedian and football fan Frank Skinner has said that he doesn’t care what John Terry has done so long as he plays well for England in South Africa. Soccer fans have been encouraged to follow Skinner’s example and concentrate on the football.

But in these circumstances that is, of course, impossible. The translation of emotion into soccer scores has been too direct. Perhaps this has always been what sport is for. It has always meant something else as well – although usually war or politics, as opposed to revenge for sexual humiliation. The extraordinary story of Nelson Mandela's support for the Springboks rugby team, currently being told in the film Invictus, is another example of sport as soap opera.

So was the story told in the very good sports documentary McBride's Invincibleswhich followed the rugby match on Saturday. The "invincibles" were trying to concentrate on the rugby, but found themselves being pounded into the ground by an insecure Springboks team instead.

Chelsea fans may be longing for the days when things were so simple.