We set the date for the wedding - 4 years from now

Byron Vale is TNT Magazine's Sports Editor. Each week he provides the Fanatics with the best antidotes from the sporting world. To read more from Byron pick up TNT Magazine every Monday throughout London or check out tntmagazine.com

It took 23 hours from the time we left Athens to the time my head hit my pillow, which can only explain the dream.

I'm in a church hall, or something of the sort, and a meeting is in progress. Everyone is sitting in a giant circle. As I get closer, the faces I recognise are the ones of my ex-girlfriends, who take turns bearing witness against the litany of sports-related horrors I have inflicted upon them. I woke up in the morning feeling more tired than when I went to bed.

I need a holiday, which is lucky because the Australian cricket team tour India next month.
I emailed everyone in the office to see if I was abnormal: the good news is I'm not, the bad news is that it hardly excuses my (or their) behaviour.

I told my long-term girlfriend that we only had a window to marry one summer out of every four because we couldn't marry on a Saturday during the football season and every even year there would be a World Cup, European Championships or Olympics plus, during the odd years, there'd be rugby World Cups. She didn't take me seriously at first, but then realised I wasn't kidding. Needless to say, we didn't get married and I'm now single. Add to that the fact I once told her I'd loved her for five years, but had loved Arsenal for 30.

After Australia had looked woeful in losing two of their first three games at the '99 Cricket World Cup, I told my girlfriend there was no reason why I couldn't make her dinner party - scheduled for the same night as the final. The record books tell the story of that particular World Cup.

I didn't go to the dinner party and was single not longer after.

I bought my girlfriend Chelsea tickets for her birthday telling her it was a "real London experience".

My girlfriend had booked opera tickets for the same Saturday night as the baseball playoffs between the Yankees and Red Soxs. I initially refused to go, but after tears (hers not mine) I agreed. She went all dressed up and I wore jeans and a T-shirt.

As soon as the opera was finished, I dragged her outside and, because I couldn't find a taxi, had to spring for a rickshaw to take us into Soho where the game was on TV. She was none too impressed and didn't even stay 'til the end of the game, although I had stayed to the end of the opera.

My brother and I once told a ghastly fib at one of our good mate's weddings. We went to the ceremony but, given he was a fairly religious guy, it was to be a dry ceremony about an hour's drive away. We told him we were both sick with colds and didn't want to spread our germs.

Then we nipped out the door, got in the car and drove straight to Eagle Farm racetrack in Brisbane, just in time to catch the Stradbroke Handicap. Although we told a pork pie in the house of the Lord, we both backed the winner and third place getter.

I doubt, however, I'll be getting past the Pearly Gates after that effort. n I told my girlfriend we were having a night in to watch an Academy Award-winning film, then brought home When We Were Kings, the documentary about Muhammad Ali v George Foreman. I watched it alone. But it did win an Oscar.