Wags will blow our World Cup chances

Ben Trovato: I can tell you right now that we are not going to win the cricket World Cup this year. Not because we're chokers or because Mark Boucher has been put out to stud or even because none of our players are able to mentally calculate a required run rate unless everything is in single digits, and even then it's touch and go.

We are going to lose because Cricket SA has decided to allow the players' wives and girlfriends to visit the team in the middle of the tournament. It has been described by officials as a "two-week window period". What is this - the rhythm method according to Gerald Majola? It's an unseemly shagathon and shouldn't be allowed.

Admittedly, rogering their Wags must be a lot more fun than playing cricket - assuming they manage to stay at the crease for longer than they usually do on the pitch, although I wouldn't put money on it.

So the deal is that for the first two weeks of the tournament, the team is expected to remain celibate. Then comes the two-week unbridled sexual feeding frenzy interspersed with a little light batting and fielding, followed by two weeks on a glucose drip.

My friend Ted says the Proteas should be allowed to have access to their Wags every night of the World Cup. He reckons that once the endorphins start flowing, the runs will follow. I told him this wouldn't work because cricketers have a specific kind of sex that normal people don't have. Theirs is nerve-jangling, stomach-churning stuff that makes the invasion of Normandy look like a walk on the beach. Imagine the state of older players like Jacques Kallis were they to be given carte blanche to engage in six straight weeks of coitus uninterruptus. He would have to be given a runner and placed under constant medical supervision. Graeme Smith, on the other hand, would be banned from receiving conjugal visits. His fingers are weak enough as it is.

I suspect, however, that the mating habits of cricketers are rather tame by international standards. For a start, most of the Wags seem to be models. And, from my experience, models are nowhere nearly as enthusiastic in the sack as, say, drop-dead fugly girls. The risk of causing disharmony to their meticulously orchestrated cosmetic symphony is way too high for anything more adventurous than activities of a strictly missionary nature. Sleeping with a model is one step away from necrophilia.

For married men, six weeks of quiet on the carnal front is nothing exceptional. We don't need window periods. We grit our teeth and bear it, like real men. Except we're not. So I don't see why our boys need to have women herded into their hotel right in the middle of cricketing's most important event.

Perhaps the coach wants to avoid a situation where, on day 35, he finds himself having to help his testosterone-soaked charges squeeze their giant, unrequited testicles into the old box before sending them out to bat on a decidedly sticky wicket.

It's all rather silly, really, when you consider that the tournament is being played in India, home of the Kama Sutra. A country where every second building is adorned with finely crafted lingams and yonis. These are the people who invented that Tantric malarkey where you have to resign from your job because the sex goes on for nine days at a stretch. India, home to 20 million prostitutes, most of whom will be hanging around the hotel lobby trying to find out if Herschelle Gibbs is there. And this thing about lower castes being untouchables? It's nonsense. They are infinitely touchable, often for as little as 200 rupees an hour.

It has just occurred to me that the real reason Cricket SA is keeping the Wags away from their men for most of the World Cup is because the players would be exhausted not from rumpy pumpy, but from being dragged around the Greater Kailash Market on their off days.

"C'mon, AB, five silk scarves plus a free Shiva for only a thousand! It's good for your karma."

"Hey, Faf, check! A special on Rolexes - buy one, get one free."

"Jacques, baby! Two litres of Ayurvedic cream that will keep my face looking like this for 75 years."

During the last soccer World Cup, Diego Maradona said he didn't mind Wags spending time with his players "as long as the women do all the work". I think the same should apply in this case. After all, someone has to make sure the jockstraps are washed and the wet towels are picked up.