Most notable is the premature midlife crisis which faces every professional sportsman: "When I broke my leg and had my kneecap injuries," says Gazza, already in post-career denial, "people went around saying I was finished." Still, the perks are great: who but a millionaire footballer could afford the dress - 200 metres of pink tulle, 30,000 pearl and glass beads?The third age of trouble and strife, alas, comes to them all. With no kids and a career of her own as presenter of a Dutch TV show, who cares about his relentless schedule (they once met for a date in Montreal airport)? And when love is young (he still gives her roses), a girl can forgive even the crassest sporting machismo: "Ninety per cent of women players," Krajicek said recently, "are fat lazy pigs."After the warm-up, the ball is kicked into touch for the chosen (or foolish) few, as a fairytale bride. What lucky girls! Take new Wimbledon babe Daphne Deckers, filmed almost as much on centre court as her boyfriend, Richard Krajicek. And what a catch! He has all the attractions of the professional sportsman: youth (he's 24), physical prowess (6'5") and talent (Wimbledon champion '96).

Not as such." Here, alongside the compelling psychodrama of the British class system, another story was being enacted: the tale of the sporting wife. For the sporting wife is not a type - the bimbo football bird, the glamorous tennis groupie, the long-suffering cricket widow - but a time traveller, who starts as Jemima, romance-dazed newlywed fastbowled-over by the talent and glamour of the thinking woman's cricket crumpet, and ends, if she's lucky, as Kathy, weary survivor of her husband's bad backs, ballooning weight and dud seasons, stuck at home while hubby lives it up in the Caribbean.In fact, the sporting wife begins her journey pre-Jemima, as the girlfriend, as beautiful carefree Brooke Shields (Andre Agassi's current belle) or Dani Behr (linked with Ryan Giggs). Nobody in court tittered when she declared: "I wouldn't call myself a cricket fan. She looked as if she could have been on honeymoon, rather than fighting a bitter libel action brought by Ian Botham and Allan Lamb. On the judge's right, in a sober black suit and polka-dot shirt, was Kathy Botham, 41, married for 20 years to the Mad Max of English cricket. Chic, gamine, carefully made-up, she could not disguise the lines on her thin face, the tense, beady stare, the tight little smile. Snuggled up against her new husband, the cricketing sex god Imran Khan, she batted her eyelashes, twirled her hair, and smiled dreamily ecstatic smiles.