In my youth, the sight of a thick neck and a big chest would drive me wild… so wild… that I would vow to one day claim a rugged meataxe for my very own!

Then alas, I discovered footballers! With their tree trunks arms and rippling bodies –  the very sight of these barbaric specimens had cast a spell over me so strong - that it came to last 6 years and transformed my once precious years of post-adolescent purity into a half dozen years of fretting over lugheads and cheap halternecks.

The dummy half…

the number of years a smart girl wastes chasing footballers.

You see, if you’re one for youthful indiscretion, and know what it’s like to have formed an embarrassing fixation to, say, a bad pair of jeans or an irksome ex, then you’ll undoubtedly share my cringe and pass the ill-fated baton of judgement to the next person.

The hooker…

The player who picks up the ball after it’s played by his team mate –

or a girl who acts as a substitute in its' place.

I guess my love of footballers dwindled as I grew older… and by my mid 40’s – I discovered that bar-hopping and bed-hopping was capped at 39.

Haha!

Just joking – it was days after my 24^th birthday when I discovered that Nathan Hindmarsh had a girlfriend – and Laurie Daly wore hair plugs.

So anyway, I was recently appalled to have heard on the news that a certain footballer, renown for spitting on girls in nightclubs and offering to pay others to wait in his bed for him while he exhausted any ‘better’ pick-up potential, was, yet again, in strife!

Surprise surprise… something to do with alcohol, fistycuffs and more dollars than sense.

But it got me thinking, with a media frenzy onside, whether he was, indeed, the belligerent anti-christ that he had so quickly been labelled.

Sure… there is no denying that this guy is a clown… but with youth, money and notoriety on his side – what else do we expect?

If embarrassing nightclub incidents, dirty nights-out with the boys and excessive drinking is behaviour acceptable amongst our esteemed members of parliaments:

Why is it considered less so for members of the sporting community?

I guess it’s a question that begs a response – the biggest difference being that a footballer will always get noticed, whether his home or away;

while a politician can simply put it on notice and wait for it to go away.

'Little in the middle but she got much back'

Nasty-K-G