“Who cares about the World Cup?” Nadine Gordimer, the South African novelist, said of the fiesta that begins on Friday in her (and my) native land. The Guardian, which relayed her comment from the Hay Festival, reported that “a thousand people in the audience roared their approval”.

I can see her point. If you do not care for football, a month of it is a lot to bear. But I would be surprised if Ms Gordimer, a Nobel Prize-winning story-teller, failed to see the World Cup's narrative potential.

All major sporting encounters are dramas, with sudden astonishments (Zola Budd colliding with Mary Decker at the 1984 Olympic Games), affecting vulnerabilities (Paul Gascoigne's 1990 World Cup tears) and heroes reduced to villainy (France's Zinedine Zidane headbutting Italy's Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final).