Max Davidson: Let's hear it for the passionate sporting wife

Mirka Federer watches her husband Roger Federer. Photo /Getty Images

Opinion

Wife of Sportsman Opens Her Mouth! Something Other Than a Platitude Comes Out!

It really shouldn't be headline news, not in 2014, but so faultlessly has Mirka Federer conducted herself in the five years she has been married to the sainted Roger that her - alleged - fall from grace at the weekend has sent shock waves through the sporting world.

She has hardly missed one of her husband's matches, she has borne him not one, but two sets of twins, which is frankly ridiculous, and she probably darns his socks, pays the gas bills and makes a mean risotto. If there a Swiss equivalent of a Stepford wife, she gets the part.

But on Saturday night, during the closing stages of a pulsating match at the O2, the hitherto blameless Mrs Federer appeared to lose the plot. In the semi-finals of the ATP World Tour Finals, her partisan support for her husband spilled over into, allegedly, crude heckling of his opponent, fellow Swiss star Stan Wawrinka.

Quite what she said is disputed, but it clearly got under Wawrinka's skin. He gesticulated furiously in her direction and later, according to reports, had a blazing row in private with Federer himself. As the two men are due to compete for their country in the final of the Davis Cup this weekend, it was the worst PR for Switzerland since Orson Welles's famous crack in The Third Man that all the country had ever produced was the cuckoo-clock.

Did Mrs Federer overstep the mark? Did she direct inappropriate personal comments at Wawrinka? Did she, as some have suggested, call him a cry baby? If she did, she owes him an apology, and if she does not make it, she is a fool. But if all she was guilty of, in the heat of the moment, was an excess of unladylike exuberance, then I, for one, am not going to censure her.

I was lucky enough to be at the match on Saturday myself. It was such a thrilling, full-blooded encounter that, at some point or another, all 17,000 spectators, men women and children, were guilty of unladylike exuberance. Unladylike be damned! Do we really expect players' wives to sit like mannequins through all the hullabaloo?

Raw passion, the kind that cannot be contained or regulated, is the life-blood of sport, and when sport elicits such passion from an unexpected source, it is doubly satisfying. No cheese soufflé Delia Smith ever baked gave the world half as much pleasure as her own Mirka Federer moment in 2005 - when she tottered on to the Carrow Road pitch at half time and urged Norwich City fans, 'Let's be 'avin' you!'

So let's have no more tut-tutting about Mrs Federer's supposed fall from grace. Compared with the unspeakable WAGS who routinely bring the England football team into disrepute, with their hideous tattoos and look-at-me shoes, she is a model of decorum: not an ornamental adjunct to her husband, but his most ardent, knowledgeable fan.

The role of a sporting wife is not always easy, whatever its superficial attractions. Imagine all those romantic suppers ruined because your husband has lost and is still spitting tacks about a dodgy umpiring decision. Roller-coaster emotions go with the territory. And not surprisingly, different wives handle those emotions in different ways.

Like politicians' wives, with whom they have a lot in common, sporting wives range from the docile to the quietly supportive to the fiercely partisan. Some are splendidly semi-detached: they turn up to watch their husbands play, but wear far-away expressions, as if they would rather be at Harvey Nichols. Victoria Beckham is the prototype, although Liz Hurley, Shane Warne's one-time squeeze, ran her close.

I have a friend called Vicki who has turned conjugal indifference on such occasions into an art-form. She once went to see her husband play cricket, but was so absorbed in her book, sitting on the boundary, that she missed his innings. Understandable if he had scored a duck. Unfortunately he had scored a century - for the first time in his life. Ouch.

But most wives and girlfriends do get more emotionally involved, and that emotion contributes to the sporting spectacle, particularly with an individual sport like tennis. One of the things that made Andy Murray's Wimbledon triumph in 2013 so unforgettable was the way the TV cameras kept homing in on the faces of his mother Judy and his girlfriend Kim Sears. What torture they went through - mirroring and magnifying the torture experienced by the millions watching - as the match ebbed and flowed.

Sears kept her composure that day better than Mirka Federer did on Saturday, but I have it on excellent authority that, during some matches at Wimbledon, her language has a vernacular crispness worthy of Andy Murray himself. One would expect no less.

In an image-conscious world, if sportsmen are role models, then their wives are also, to an extent, role models. In a depressing number of cases, role model seems to have become synonymous with fashion model, as millionaire alpha-male athletes pick physically well-endowed consorts. That ultimately patronising view of women reaches its apogee during the Ryder Cup, when the partners of the players are expected to act like the dolled-up cheer-leaders of an American college football team.

But which would you rather? A sporting wife who scrubbed up well, and looked good in Hello! magazine, or a sporting wife who gave the devoted, unqualified, full-throated support which follows inexorably from her marriage vows?

Luckily for the reputation of sport, more and more sporting wives seem to appreciate that distinction, turning themselves into an integral part of a winning team.

In the Twittersphere, it has become commonplace to see sportsmens' wives leap chivalrously to the defence of their other halves. Try trolling Wayne Rooney, and you will have Colleen to reckon with. 'You take his place then!' she tweeted back in the summer, as fans slammed Rooney for his lacklustre performances in the World Cup in Brazil. Some of her tweets were so fruity they failed the ladylike test by a country mile. But how heart-warming to see her mixing it in public with the Rooney-bashers.

Only last month, Kevin Pietersen's wife Jessica Taylor responded to criticism of her husband by Test Match Special's Jonathan Agnew so vigorously that 'Aggers' retired hurt and quit Twitter altogether. Taylor's defence of her actions was lapidary: 'As a wife and mother, I have every right to defend my family.' Bravo!

There are no hard-and-fast rules in sport. Rory McIlroy's golf has improved beyond recognition since he called off his engagement to Caroline Wozniacki. Off-the-field relationships can sometimes be a distraction. But just as the likes of Paula Radcliffe and Jessica Ennis have benefited from having exceptionally supportive husbands, so sportsmen with wives who back them through thick and thin are ahead of the game. You can bet their less fortunate opponents envy them.

I shall be looking forward to seeing Mrs Federer in the players' box at the Davis Cup this weekend and, if she loses her sang-froid or mutters the odd Swiss expletive, that will be all right by me. A Roger Federer married to a goody-two-shoes just wouldn't be same.