IN the course of supporting your team, the football fan undergoes many frustrations and perhaps the greatest frustration known is the exquisite torture that is following your team on the radio.

Due to a long-standing commitment, your correspondent was unable to undertake the short trip to Gresty Road.

Instead, Saturday afternoon was spent pacing nervously up and down the kitchen, biting my nails down to the knuckles and every now and again muttering darkly to the transistor in the corner.

Any ideas I harboured that this might be an easy three points for the Clarets, are almost immediately blown out of the water as Kevin Street puts Crewe ahead within four minutes. The commentator is apoplectic with rage that the linesman failed to spot a deliberate handball.

Yours truly is non too plussed either, as my currently battered and bruised cat will testify.

And although Graham Branch restores parity, Crewe re-take the lead when the linesman decides that performing a comedy fall in the opposition box constitutes sufficient grounds for a penalty.

Crewe lead 2-1 and the cat shoots me a nervous look.

Minutes later Paul Cook takes it upon himself to show the linesman what a real penalty looks like by bringing Mark Rivers down with a challenge which, judging from the commentator's reaction, single-handedly redefines the word "cynical."

As the penalty hits the back of the net, the cat makes the eminently wise decision to leave the room. Quickly.

In the second half it sounds as though the Clarets attack with renewed vigour. And I begin to wonder if the ref has a penalty fetish as he awards the third of the day.

Knowing there will be another one along in a minute, Mullin passes his spotkick to Bankole and carries on. Meanwhile, the commentator's agitation transmits to me, and I realise I have worn a three foot deep furrow in the kitchen floor with my endless pacing.

Moments later my suspicions about the referee are confirmed. He just seems unable to resist the sight of that ball on the little white spot. Cookie scores and I spend the next 30 minutes yelling instructions to the players via my radio. Disturbingly, part of me believes it might actually make a difference.

It doesn't. And Crewe score the winner, the commentator suggesting it is roughly three miles offside. At the final whistle I promise myself two things -- firstly, never again to make long-standing commitments during the football season and secondly to go find a cat.