Hindustan Times
No Booze & No Sex for the Three Lions
Raghav Sikka
Centuries have passed and we still come back to the same argument revolving around sexual intimacy and performance. What is your take on this issue? Can sex actually worsen an athlete’s performance or does a quickie from time to time help perform better? There is absolutely no doubt that if a person gets addicted to sex like Tiger Woods did, his/her career is bound to fall apart. On a different note, three-time world heavy weight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali openly announced that he maintained abstinence for at least one to two months prior to any big fight. Unfortunately, opinions vary when it comes to sex and sports.
In this World Cup, Fabio Capello and Chile’s team coach Marcelo Bielsa have installed surveillance cameras in rooms so that players and their WAGs (wives and girlfriends) can be monitored on regular intervals. Fabio and his follower think their new methods of frustrating players with no sex and limiting the number of hours they can spend with their partners can actually boost player’s performances. Shouldn’t it be the other way round? I thought players feel much more comfortable besides their partners and the WAGs were always there to give them the moral support and cuddle them off to their beauty sleep.
I pity the English footballers and their hot WAGs as life can get extremely complicated during big competitions, especially, when the coaches dictate them on how to behave off the field. I can understand if restrictions are made when players are boozing all night, hunting for random girls and then not sleeping enough, but such strict bans are a bit too bizarre for my understanding. The ban can act as a mental block aggravating players from within. Moreover, why would you want someone like John Terry who is used to sex on a daily basis, starving for it during the World Cup? It is not as if the man does not perform for Chelsea the whole year round. I think Capello has just gone too overboard with this matter and needs to rethink his strategies on how to get the best out of his players.
In contrary to these approaches, managers of Brazil and Argentina have been extremely liberal by allowing their players to go ahead an indulge on days that are off. As the Brazilian striker, Romario once stated, “Good strikers can only score goals when they have had good sex on the night before a match”. Well results speak for themselves and the two sides look completely confident to win the World Cup. In fact, I am predicating a Brazil-Argentina final game now.
Sex on the night or two before with your usual partner should not be a problem in my opinion. Then again, having sex one hour prior to the game is taking it over the edge as energy will be drained and performance will surely not be optimal. At the end of the day, like for every other human being and not just football players or athletes, it is all about balancing work with pleasure and keeping those goals in mind.
(20 votes, average: 4.7 out of 5)
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