"If a player doesn't want to come to Sunderland. . .because his wife wants to go shopping in London, then it's a sad state of affairs, " said Keane, reasonably enough. Then he got a bit mesolithic. "It tells me the player is weak and his wife runs his life. The idea of women running the show concerns me and worries me."

This is where we were supposed to fly off the handle, except we didn't. Roy Keane's feelings about controlling wives are not all that combustible really (except in so far as Sunderland's reputation for good shopping is now in ashes). What did catch fire after Keane's outburst was a simmering, stinky vat of vitriol stored up against the young women who consort with footballers. You expect this resentment from the grunts . . . that small cohort of bitter men who believe not so much that there are 3.3 billion women in the world but that there is one shrieking, hysterical, neurotic, scheming woman repeated 3.3 billion times. It's no surprise they have clogged web boards with their 'back to the kitchen sink with them' efforts to subvert the political correctness they so loathe.

What is surprising, though, is how Keane's remarks have been a cue for nearly everyone, women included, to have a go at Wags. It's remarkable how detested they are. You find yourself suddenly, unexpectedly, feeling sorry for them.

Wags are the women feminism forgot, somehow. They have been brought up in the antediluvian belief that a pretty face and pleasing manners are the most important feminine assets.

They have not been taught the importance of getting an education (though later they will always refer to that eightweek course in eyebrow-waxing as "college"), or of reading beyond the fashion pages, or of learning to converse about matters unrelated to the particulars of their own lives.

I blame the parents, in other words. Too much time spent dressing your daughter in pretty frocks and painting her nails will never make a neurosurgeon out of her. And bearing in mind that girls with nothing going for them but their looks have to eat too, these women learn to entertain no greater ambition than to marry well.

They are throwbacks, that's all . . .19th-century foxes who dream of entering into an antiquated version of the marriage contract, where a lifetime's subsistence is provided in exchange for being obliging, not letting themselves go and never seeking to extend their dominion beyond the Ikea-furnished house and the gladiolus-filled garden.

They may talk breathlessly about love but they will do their conspicuous best not to fall for a plumber.

They're no different from those multiplying hordes of low-ranking British aristocrats, who do unskilled jobs until they marry a prince and spend the rest of their lives picking at sushi, skiing and posing for photographs, except that they are more vilified by the world at large.

The only earthly power they wield is when they get to put their foot down about where they will and will not live. In that sense, they're not that different either . . . to stretch a point almost to invisibility . . .from the Civil Servant Wives and Girlfriends (Cswags . . . if you're Polish, you can probably pronounce it) who refused to take the Parlon pound and move to Borris, or wherever is Ireland's answer to Sunderland.

Wags may be shallow, extravagant, even manipulative . . . but they're surely harmless. Bear in mind, too, they're married to . . . or doing their best to get married to . . . footballers. It isn't as if they're bringing their sinister influence to bear on the finest minds in Christendom. You may grow weary of their thin eyebrows and bee-stung lips pouting at you from the newsstands. But if you don't want them corrupting your adolescent daughters, you can always stop buying Hello! .