THOSE WHO despair at autobiographies by footballers whose sole achievement is passing puberty may find this hard to stomach: the story of ten seconds in the life of Marco Materazzi. It’s enough to make you writhe around on the ground feigning injury.

Still, at least it is an eventful ten seconds. Set in Berlin one hot summer’s evening, this is the tale of when a French genius with a short fuse met a wisecracking Italy defender and head was introduced to chest.

Three months on, Materazzi is adding ink to insult. Like Anne Robinson on The Weakest Link before him, the Inter Milan player proves that abuse can be a good career move with his book of revelation, What I Actually Told Zidane.

As if to add to the mystique of those events at the Olympic Stadium, when two men turned the World Cup final into a school playground, the book features 249 possible phrases Materazzi could have uttered to provoke Zinédine Zidane’s head-butt, from the playful (“Zidane, what are you doing? You haven’t lost yet and already you’ve ripped your hair out”) to the pensive: (“Since Foucault died, French philosophy has sucked”).

The tome does, as it promises, include the 33-year-old’s real words — or what he claims were his real words — an insult aimed at Zidane’s sister. She will presumably be even more offended now.

The Inter defender has already earned £25,000 from filming a Nike television advertisement where he fends off a tenpin bowling ball, an American footballer, a battering ram and a jeep using his chest. The book costs about £7 and proceeds from the mining of an incident that set a bad example to millions of children across the planet will go to . . . Unicef. Perhaps Materazzi can give Zidane a signed copy if the plan of Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, for them to meet and make up on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, ever comes off.

As for Zidane, what does he think? We can only guess. He has retreated from public life. With any luck, he has locked himself away to work on his own literary riposte: Why I Nutted Marco.

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