World Cup fills the gap despite football divas

THREE days to go before it all kicks off. Then a month of relentless football action on the telly, down the pub, on the big screens, in the news, everywhere.

We will squash on sofas, crowd into overheated venues standing up, watch it on our iPads, read about it, talk about it, bet on it, bunk off work for it, stay up late for it. We will go to great lengths to watch a bunch of millionaires kicking a ball around a series of large rectangular bits of grass in the southern hemisphere.

And not the most exemplary of millionaires either. When they are not biting each other (Suarez) or being dodgy around tax (Messi), they are writing autobiographies — admittedly not all by themselves — moaning about being insulted at pay offers of 55 grand a week (Ashley Cole). They have been known to set fireworks off in the bathroom (Balotelli), shoot students with air rifles (Cole again), assault taxi drivers (Jack Wilshire), assault random people in night clubs (most of them) and serially cheat on their partners (all of them with the possible exception of Gareth Bale — yet). As role models go, they are somewhere between an incontinent dog on your white wool rug and Attila the Hun.