It wasn’t the happiest of occasions – we were sitting in the pub watching South Africa get thrashed by Uruguay. My passport may be Irish, but having spent my formative years in SA I support Bafana Bafana (not to mention the Boks and the Proteas). As the crowds thinned out quickly after a disastrous game from the World Cup hosts I realised something: this was the first time I’d been in this particular establishment and had not gotten hit on by a random sports fan.

Hold on a moment before you call me vain. I’m not. I never believed that this had anything to do with my personal attractions. Rather, I had always assumed that it was because in sports bars men tend to outnumber women by about five to one, and for the most part, these men have been drinking beer and lots of it too. Under such circumstances a woman with boils, an eye patch and pungent body odour could probably take her pick.

Well, not this evening. The team hadn’t managed to score and neither had I. Not that I had been planning to, it was a week night after all.

I was pondering this when a friend directed me to a study conducted by the University of Utah. The boffins had posited that since committed fans tend to strongly identify with their team (“We won!”), spectators might experience a physiological reaction depending on the outcome of a game.

Turns out the boffins were correct. They found that male fans experience about a twenty percent increase in testosterone if their team wins and a similar decrease if their boyos lose.

That certainly was one explanation. Being a bar dedicated to the glories of the southern hemisphere, the Uruguay supporters left almost immediately; and having lost quite comprehensively, the South African fans had headed home with their vuvuzelas between their legs.

Probably more pertinent was the fact that I was in the pub with my brother and a friend, and seeing as they are both big and beardy and thus likely to scare off potential suitors, flirting conditions were hardly optimal.

Anyway, blah blah blah… what I want to know is:

1. If you are a woman, have you also noticed that sports bars can be a hotbed of sexual intrigue?
2. If you are a man, do you feel more in the mood for sex if your team has won?