Dot's Disorders • E - K
• The FOOTBALL WIDOW My mentor and partner, Doctor Fester completed his degree in Clinical Psychology, and put his counselling skills to good use by opening a special guidance service for couples encountering marital difficulties. The following is the transcript of a particularly distressing case that Fester has made available to us, in order to bring a little known, but nevertheless important social problem to the attention of a wider public. Dr Fester: Ah, hello. Please come in and sit down. Now what seems to be the problem? Wife: Oh Doctor, I hope you can help. My husband here has developed an unhealthy obsession with non-League football, especially this GM Vauxhall whatnot. Dr F: I see. And when did this begin? Wife: Well, it all started a couple of summers ago when we were discussing what we should do for our holidays that year. I asked him where he wanted to go and I thought his reply was 'How do you fancy a week in Boston?' 'Lovely', I thought and prepared myself for a nice break in the USA. What he'd actually said was 'How do you fancy Leek and Boston?' and we spent a week driving around all these grotty football grounds in Staffordshire and Lincolnshire! Dr F: Go on. Wife: And then he started raving on about this Vauxhall Conference all the time. Well, he's always been interested in cars and at first I thought he wanted to go to an exhibition that the manufacturer was putting on or something. I soon found out how wrong I was about that, however! Dr F: Anything else? Wife: I was cooking the dinner one Saturday and couldn't find a light for the gas stove. I asked him 'Where are the matches today?' and he replied 'Barrow, Bath, Colchester, Gateshead, Kidderminster, Macclesfield, Runcorn, Stafford, Telford, Wycombe and Yeovil!' Dr F: Hmm! A full programme, I see. Wife: Even our sex life has begun to suffer. The other day I was changing the sheets and I found a pile of glossy magazines under the mattress. Dr F: What, Men Only, Fiesta, stuff like that? Wife: No. Team Talk. It was like he was ashamed of them and was hiding them from me. Dr F: Well, they aren't very well written, you know! Wife: So anyway, what I did was to buy a pornographic book and I put it inside the cover of one of these magazines. Dr F: And what happened? Wife: Well, that night when we were making love, he started to whisper all sorts of strange things in my ear. Dr F: What sort of things? Wife: Stuff like 'Altrincham, Metropolitan Police, Baverstock, Vinny Jones!' Dr F: Strange. But perhaps we should let your husband explain what this means. Hubby: Well, I found this magazine in my football books and there was some article which said that lots of women get really turned on if their partner talks dirty to them while making love! So I thought I'd give it a go! Wife: Do you see what I mean, Doctor? I'm so glad I could talk to you. It's all been welling up inside of me for ages now! Hubby: Ah, Welling! I was there once. Bloody awful game though, if I remember. Nil-nil draw, loadsa offsi... (At this point the tape ends suddenly amid screaming and what appears to be the sound of furniture being knocked over). This was a very sad case. The wife was suffering from the paranoid delusion that her husband's perfectly normal and healthy interest in our national sport was of obsessive proportions. In fact, I considered his commitment a good deal more promising for his all-round personal development than his previous rather weird passion for cars. I recommended that the wife immediately started a course of aversion therapy beginning with mild exposure in the West Lancashire League and gradually building up to the full Conference treatment, with maybe the odd FA Cup tie against League opposition as a bonus if the treatment was particularly successful. Originally 'Dr Fester's Casebook: The Football Widow' in issue 008 - November 1991
• HALLIWELL's AFFLICTION This condition has nothing to do with football at all, it's just put in here on the request of the Online Ed to reassure him that his forgetfulness and terrible memory is not due to pre-senile dementia, or the early symptoms of Mad Cow Disease. This common failure of short term memory is named after a phenomenon which has often been noted while browsing through volumes such as Halliwell's Film Guide. The condition is best illustrated by way of an example. Let's say you're looking up 'Alien', and you see that one of the stars is Harry Dean Stanton. This reminds you that he was in 'Paris, Texas', but on the way to looking that up, your eye is caught by another, completely unrelated, entry. You pause to read this, but when you have finished, you have forgotten just what it was you originally intended to look up. This is closely related to the experience of going into the kitchen and then forgetting what is it you went in there for - Halliwell's Kitchen Affliction.
• HEATHCOTT's SYNDROME Heathcott's Syndrome was first identified by the distinguished American clinical psychologist Dr. Ward Tenn and is just one of the many remarkable breakthroughs which resulted from his classic study of college football between the years 1928-32. The condition is named after Heathcott Graham, who is generally regarded as being responsible for the near terminal decline of the Louisiana State University team following his appointment as coach after their dramatic success in the 1930 College Bowl. Graham was notorious for his interminable and some would say intolerable, presence on the touchline during even the most minor practice games. Just seconds after the kick off he would leap out of the dugout and start barking out incomprehensible instructions to his bewildered players. American football is renowned for the complexity of its plays and set pieces, but his meaningless tactical ravings baffled even the experts. Tenn noted that in time outs and at the end of a game, the perplexed expressions on the players' faces were more akin to their having just sat a particularly exhausting and unfair final accountancy exam than having contested a game of football. Inevitably, as his best players became disillusioned and left, results worsened, and the crowds became more hostile. In one famous incident, Graham left the touchline to go up into the stands where he dragged out one vociferous but bemused supporter with an invitation to come down to the dugout and see if he could do any better. Unfortunately for Graham, the fan accepted the challenge and in the remaining twenty minutes of play, LSU turned a 22-9 deficit into a 24-22 victory. It was the beginning of the end for Graham. However, the debate about this unfortunate condition rages to this day. Clinical opinion is divided over whether it is a specialised form of Tourette's syndrome, where the tics and shouted obscenities are completely involuntary, or an exaggerated case of Munchhausen's disease where the sufferer will consciously concoct ever more outlandish tales in order to draw attention to himself, although a particularly harrowing recent case study from English non-League football tends to favour the more deliberate and megalomaniac pathology of the latter interpretation. Issue 022 - May 1995
• INCONSISTENCY Not to be confused with incontinence, Murphy's or otherwise, inconsistency is more commonly attributed to small groups of people rather than individuals, and in that sense is a cousin of mass hysteria and wish fulfilment, whereby, once achieved, an outcome is constantly repeated until some instability in the group results in the opposite outcome occurring. Sports teams are particularly prone to this phenomena. For example, a popular non-League football team experienced the following sequence of results in the course of only four months: 15 October to 9 November - five straight league wins and only one goal conceded. 12 November to 21 December - six league games without a win or a goal. 28 December to 1 February - eight games without defeat, including seven victories. 5 February to 15 February - four games without a win. It's a sign of lack of control, of randomness exerting itself in the absence of any clear sense of direction. Such inconsistency drives people mad. And this is the problem. It is not the group suffering the inconsistency that goes mad. It is the group that is watching them. It can only be ended by a wholehearted commitment by everyone in the group to a set of common objectives. Issue 030 - April 1997
• INSTITUTIONAL PARANOIA Since the Hillsborough disaster, certain police forces have taken the view that any large crowd at a football match is a threat to public order. This fear is completely unfounded and has no evidence to support it. Nevertheless, to control this threat the police in Barrow believe it is necessary to make high profile games all-ticket, to segregate rival fans and to impose artificially low crowd limits. Such actions tend to create public order problems rather than solve them as fans feel frustrated that they cannot gain access to the part of the ground where they normally stand. I suggest that the police concentrate on what they're good at; catching speeding motorists. Leave football supporters alone. You don't harrass petty burglars or muggers. Why can't you leave football alone as well? Originally 'Paranoia Excessivus' in issue 034 - April 1998