Tuesday Topic, with Christine Rutter

IT ISN'T only women who will be suffering from the impact of five weeks of televised football.

Soccer fever will be a drag for many men who have to share a living room with people who can't get enough of the game.

The World Cup in France will be the longest-ever competition to date, with teams from 32 countries vying for soccer's biggest crown.

It will be watched by the largest-ever worldwide television audience.

But the soccer mania will turn households upside down, disrupting meal times and bedtimes and leaving domestic chores neglected as family members are glued to the TV set.

Men not keen on viewing every World Cup match will find themselves with no option during the non-stop action from France.

Pauline Perkins and Margaret Maudsley are two soccer-mad women who are planning to drive their partners crazy with their enthusiasm for the competition.

Both are lifelong Blackburn Rovers fans and say that football is in their blood.

"My husband calls it my addiction," said Pauline, secretary of Rovers' Supporters' Club, who is on first name terms with some of the players. Pauline, of Pleckgate Road, Blackburn, admits she is more zealous about the game than her husband Ian, a former Accrington Stanley player.

"Since he gave up playing, he finds it hard to watch the games," she said. "He does get a bit fed up with me. I drive him mad.

"I love the game. I enjoy the buzz. He sometimes complains when I go to away matches and I'm unbearable if they lose. I blame everybody other than the players. My husband is sick of it."

Pauline has even rescheduled meetings of the supporters' club to fit around England games.

"I'm so excited about it. I've been known to get up at 6am to do the cleaning so I can watch a match. I can't imagine why people don't want to watch it.

"I don't think England will win. Gascoigne shouldn't have been dropped. He's magic on the pitch."

Pauline is so hooked on Rovers, she has ultimate confidence in her lucky routine on match days.

"People think I'm mad but if I change my routine my team will lose," declared Pauline, currently working as a temp.

She refuses to go to the matches without her lucky mints and always wears her three "charmed" football shirts, even though she claims to have nearly collapsed through heat exhaustion on some occasions. The formula becomes more bizarre when you learn she sets off at the same time and takes the same route to the ground, ensures she speaks to the same people and goes to the toilet just before the game.

"I always eat potato pie for home matches. I tried spaghetti bolognese and we won for a few weeks but I switched back."

She even takes a hotel room key from a holiday in Barbados to matches.

"My husband lost the key in the sea but it was found by some football fans. I knew it had to be lucky."

She is so edgy before matches that she even crashed her car on once occasion.

"I was really nervous and reversed my car into a BMW after buying my 'scoring mints.' It's amazing how many times Rovers have scored when I've been eating one."

Pauline has been a Rovers fan for 49 years since her father bought a match ticket for her when she was just six.

Margaret, 51, is going to watch every World Cup clash on TV and is already doing domestic tasks early.

"Everything will just grind to a halt when it is on. I don't do any housework. We eat take-aways. I'm really looking forward to it. I love it. There is a certain magic about it. It seems ages since the last World Cup," said Margaret, a Rovers fan since the age of 12, who asked her daughter to arrange her marriage in Mexico so as not to clash with the World Cup.

Margaret added: "My partner Stuart Birtwistle knows football will be on the box for five weeks. He will go to Rovers matches with me but he isn't really interested in football. I'm trying to break him in but he prefers his computer. "I talk to his workmates about football but Stuart is out of it. He can't understand my interest."

"My ex-husband never liked football. He had never been to a football match in his life. I just couldn't understand that Men never expect women to like football. It is always a shock."

Margaret admits she did feign illness to her former boss in order to travel to away matches.

Margaret, a domestic worker at Queen's Park Hospital, Blackburn, said: "I never missed a match.

"I got the players' autographs and embroidered a cushion with their names on which I gave to them."

Margaret admits she has routine sulks when her team loses and has cried on many occasions.

But this year she will be making the World Cup a family affair with parties and barbecues, sandwiched between matches, with her soccer-mad children Paul, Joanne and Jane.

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