Being a Gunner not popular in my home

Regular readers of this column will know that my missus doesn’t have much time for sport. She will watch the odd major rugby match, but she finds football numbingly boring”, motor racing “coma inducing” and one of my favourites, women’s beach volleyball, “for perverted old men like you”.

I could never quite understand how she didn’t enjoy football, a game combining fitness, skill and tactical nous. I fully understand why it is often referred to as “the beautiful game” but the missus reckons Helen Keller must have come up with that description.

Last weekend it became apparent where her hatred – because that’s what it is – for football originated.

I settled in to watch Arsenal play Watford in the English Premier League. Just before kick-off I took a sip of my adult beverage and shouted at the TV: “Go Gunners!”

The missus, sitting on the other side of the lounge reading, looked up and said: “That’s it. That’s the reason why I hate football.”

Seeing the confusion on my face, she went on to explain that when she was married to her first husband, they were asked by his sister to housesit when she went away for a few days. They agreed and set off to the sister’s house with daughter Natasha, who was then two bricks and a tickey high, in tow.

All went well until bed-time that evening and as the couple and Natasha settled down for the night, in the main bedroom, all hell broke loose.

The owner’s Doberman obviously didn’t take kindly to the fact that two adult strangers, and a snot-nosed little girl, had taken over his owner’s bedroom and, worse, were sleeping in her bed.

Natasha, being an inquisitive little girl, had reached out to pat the dog. He turned on her, biting her in the head an inflicting a nasty wound.

The scars are still visible today, some 20 years later.

“Okay,” I said. “I get all that. But what has it got to do with football?”

“The bloody dog’s name was Gunner,” she said.

Many of the people at the organisation I worked for at the time I met the missus called me Gunner because of my love for Arsenal, but I had had no idea the name conjured up such nightmarish images for the missus.

It probably explains why she winced every time I tried to touch her in our courting days. And there I was thinking it was because she didn’t really fancy me.

So, it is now obvious the missus felt about that Doberman the way Barry Bateman feels about Julius Malema.

That I fully understand, but to take it out on not just a team or an individual but an entire sporting code … that’s taking it a bit far.