Cup coaches split on bringing wives or playing sex-aside soccer

FOR Diego Maradona’s Argentine squad, sex is fine as long as it is not 2am and accompanied by a bottle of bubbly.

It is one of football’s hottest debates; is sex a distraction or can a little bit of what players fancy help ease the strain and tension of World Cup competition?

The polemic resurfaced at the World Cup this week after media claims the pitchside presence of Sara Carbonero, the Spanish goalkeeper’s glamorous girlfriend, was being blamed for Spain’s shock 1-0 defeat by Switzerland.

All things in moderation is the motto in the Argentine camp, and their virtually guaranteed spot in the second round suggests the liberal line is paying off so far.

“Sex isn’t a problem. It’s only a problem if they’re doing it at two in the morning with a bottle of champagne on the go,” team doctor Donato Villani said before coach Maradona and company set off for South Africa.

During Argentina’s victorious 1986 World Cup campaign, coach Carlos Bilardo, a former gynaecologist, said sex was fine as long as “the woman does the hard work”.

Hosts South Africa have taken a similarly laid-back position, with the team coach giving a green light to conjugal visits. “We’re not in prison or a military camp,” Carlos Alberto Parreira said.

At the base of five-times champions Brazil, Dunga says the spirit is live and let live. “On their own, they can do what they like. Not everyone likes sex, or wine, but everyone has to do whatever they like,” he said last week.

Honduras coach Reinaldo Rueda has lamented that air tickets are too pricey for some of his players’ partners to join them, while a Swiss team spokesman said many wives were simply too busy to visit.

True to his stern image, England coach Fabio Capello is limiting contact between players and their famous wives and girlfriends, the WAGS. Capello will only let England’s players see their families one day a week, after matches.

“We’re going to South Africa to play, not for a holiday,” he has said.

Some pundits blamed the WAGs’ headline-grabbing antics at the last World Cup for the team’s lacklustre performance and the FA will not be footing the bill for them to go to the tournament, as it did in 2006.

The Spanish players are under similar instructions, but that was not enough to avert the controversy over keeper Iker Casillas’ girlfriend Carbonero, a reporter covering the tournament for Spanish television.

English media reports linked her presence to Wednesday’s upset against Switzerland, but commentators in Spain said it was absurd.

“Pinning the blame for Spain’s defeat on Sara Carbonero is as infantile as claiming that Robert Green’s inability to save the ball against the US was because he was distracted after his girlfriend dumped him,” columnist Marivi Fernandez Palacios wrote in El Mundo.