Rio hits right note over WAGS

12:42pm Friday 17th October 2008

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Ricky Hatton, boxing’s ultimate bon viveur, flew out to Las Vegas on Thursday.

He has no plans to hit the famous strip for the casinos. There will be strictly no beer or burgers for Manchester’s good-time guy.

Hatton is going to work. For the next five weeks his life will exist solely around the gym, where Floyd Mayweather’s old man will put him through his gruelling paces.

Outside distractions will be kept to an absolute minimum. That includes girlfriend Jennifer, whose contact with the Hitman will be restricted to long-distance phone calls.

It sounds harsh but that’s the way it’s always been in boxing. Before all the top fights, all the top fighters will take themselves out of normal life.

That way their 100 per cent focus is on the battle ahead. So that first bell will be the moment of release when weeks of pent-up frustration and tension can be released in action.

There is plenty of time to enjoy the rewards and party hard afterwards. And Hatton can certainly party.

But for now he is happy, if that’s the right word, to live the life of a monk.

Contrast that with England’s football team and the infamous WAG culture, when tournaments were treated as glorified family holidays.

At last, somebody has come out and said that it was a nonsense. As Rio Ferdinand rightly pointed out, the Baden-Baden free-for-all turned the World Cup 2006 campaign into a “circus”.

It’s not the biggest shock that the guy handed the captain’s armband should want to ingratiate himself with the boss by having a big pop at the previous regime. But it still needed saying.

Maybe, just maybe, England have woken up and started to smell the roses.