Women simply don’t understand sport’s importance

Liverpool manager Bill Shankly was once challenged with the story that for their wedding anniversary treat he had taken his wife to a Rochdale match. ‘Sheer nonsense,’ he replied. ‘It was her birthday. Would I have got married during the football season? And anyway it was Rochdale Reserves.’

Shankly may have taken it to extremes, but there is a man/woman thing over sport. Women simply cannot register its importance, not even the saintly Mrs Oakley. Having missed the last race at Sandown on Saturday to drive 90 minutes back to Oxfordshire in time to pick her up from the station, I thought I would be doing OK, brownie points-wise. I was rapidly proved wrong. We arrived home just in time for the second half of England v. France in Paris; for me, watching England rugby internationals comes somewhere between a druggie’s deep craving and a sacred duty. It was made very clear that it was my equally sacred duty to converse immediately and at length with Mrs O. on her doings in the capital. I was lucky that my whisky and water later didn’t come laced with battery acid, and I was only fully restored to favour after volunteering the next morning to clean the mud off her Nordic walking boots.

At Sandown my focus had been very much on my sporting woman of the moment, the in-form Herefordshire trainer Venetia Williams. Given her penchant for full-throated fast cars and the eternal elegance of her racecourse outfits, you might expect Venetia to specialise in producing the sleekest of speedsters on the Flat. Instead, she has an outstanding record in turning out tuned-to-the-minute hefty steeplechasers, especially those who seem to revel in the soft and heavy ground that has been the norm this season.