Soccer: Players' wives take Cologne by storm

Girls Aloud singer Cheryl Tweedie, girlfriend of England's Ashley Cole, and Victoria Beckham, wife of England's David Beckham. Picture / Reuters

The England contingent which has displayed an extravagance so sorely missing on the pitch will roll into Cologne by train, coach and private jet tonight. The group is on the latest leg of a tour during which it has already consumed its way through the supplies of Germany's finest boutiques and restaurants.

If, in the finest winning tradition, England's WAGs (wives and girlfriends) stick to the usual pre-match routine, there will be Japanese-style private saunas and coaches festooned with booze, which will be all but drained dry.

Yet for all WAGs' attendant glamour, the first murmurs of discontent were sounded yesterday about the high jinks, including £270 champagne bills and strangulated renditions of We are the Champions, which have seen them plastered across the German papers.

Sir Bobby Robson and Paul Jewell added their names to the list of pundits who consider the sideshow to be an unwelcome distraction, while some German commentators made it clear that their amused tolerance is giving way to profound irritation.

"It's more like a hen night the way they behave - a military style celebration where everyone has to drink themselves under the table" said Markus Hesselmann, the author of the recently published Germany Through The Eyes of its Football rivals.

"English women seem to treat their bodies as something to gradually dismantle. The Germans in contrast want to preserve theirs."

Though more circumspect, the English pundits tend to agree.

The BBC's Alan Shearer pointedly observed that the players are in Germany "to play football" while Martin O'Neill observed that when the players were reunited with the WAGs after their match against Paraguay that they had not seen them "for all of 20 minutes."

Sir Bobby, who took England to the semi-finals at Italia '90, declared: "We're going to war. You can't fight a war worrying about your wife or child. For one month, kiss them goodbye."

'The Wives', as they are known in Germany, are being accommodated (at their own expense) at the spa resort of Baden-Baden, where Wayne Rooney's girlfriend Coleen McLoughlin, 20, led a delegation to Garibaldi's.

They drank and sang for five hours and ran up a £428 bar bill.

The town's boutique owners took pre-emptive action by ordering in extra stocks of new season Gucci, Prada and Dsquared.

But in a display of the growing distaste for the WAGs, the mass circulation newspaper Bild Zeitung took a swipe at their spending yesterday.

"How can you tell the difference between the species of English woman and the majority of German women?" it asked.

"In a mere 10 minutes they spend more cash on clothes than ours do in half a lifetime."It's a long way from 1966, when Tina Moore (wife of captain Bobby) led the England wives on two excursions; one to the Black and White Minstrel show, and the other to Golders Green shopping centre.

But WAG enthusiasts include pundit Alan Brazil, whose Scottish side was denied such access rights before the 1982 World Cup and recalls the profound pre-match boredom.

"It didn't help. We beat New Zealand, lost to Brazil, drew with Russia and got on the plane home," he said.

The FA declined to comment on the WAGs' affect on the players' performance.

"You'll have to ask Sven that," said a spokesman.

By contrast, only five of the Swedish players' wives will watch tonight's match because after an initial week paid for by the Swedish FA, they then had to fund themselves.

Most opted to fly home.

- INDEPENDENT