The missus choose a good weekend to go away for a couple of hen dos – a huge emotional trauma struck me on Saturday.

The R word.

Not recession. Not redundancy. The worst possible R word. Relegation.

There are only two things you can do to overcome the heartbreak  associated with your team being demoted – mope and drink.

These are two things that are very hard to do when your better half is around. They just don’t understand, you see. “It’s only a game” or “There’s always next year” and “Well why don’t you do something else that won’t make you depressed?” are not the things any man wants to hear when the overpaid bunch of dinlos whose wages you pay cock-up monumentally and lose to teams from glamorous locales such as Doncaster.

I’ve heard it said numerous times that a bad result can ruin her weekend (and the weekend’s of my mates’ girlfriends) when the Saints fail to hit the arse of a cow with a banjo. The mood such miserable failures put us menfolk in is, well, not the greatest. But as all football fans will tell you, the lows only make you enjoy the highs even more. So surely, in a few years I can guarantee endless weekends of ecstasy pleasure not known by anyone since Venus herself.

I just hope the missus is patient…