World Cup accused of priority tickets for beauties

One media commentator believes that he has uncovered a new World Cup ticketing scandal: the preferential seating of professional models at matches.

"At the Trinidad & Tobago game, seated right across the aisle to me was just about the most fabulous woman I have ever seen. Blonde, wonderfully made up and wearing a little dress so tight that it was me who could hardly breathe. She appeared unaccompanied and unconcerned throughout the match," Danny Baker wrote in The Times (London). "Now I knew for sure. The clincher came when England eventually scored. Not a flicker from our girl. When John Terry had earlier hoofed it off the line to deny T&T the lead? Same reaction. I can’t say I was complaining, but what the hell was she doing there?"

His mind drifted back to the streets of Nuremberg streets five hours previously where he'd witnessed the desperate efforts of fans to purcxhase tickets for the game , even at outreageous prices.

"And yet, here in spiffy row H was Miss Universe filing her nails and stifling yawns between corners, though, to be fair, on the night, she was not alone in that. I have yet to see a single game that doesn’t feature at least a dozen similar fantastic creatures, separately hamming it up in their close-up. During the last Mexico match, a trio of them held hands, dancing wildly and still managing to look straight into camera! After 30 years in TV I can still barely find the lens from ten feet away. So are FIFA and the German TV authorities in cahoots cynically to pepper these games with ready-made images of advertiser-friendly, compliant professional football fans?"

The penny dropped for Baker when the beauty jumped out of her seat during a period of otherwise inaction.

"In those moments of startling fever she must have been getting her close-up shot on television. Quite how they were cueing her I don’t know, but I promise you one of her earrings did look suspiciously like a wire. Of course, the fact that TV directors regularly show us wonderful-looking women during internationals is well known to the point of cliché, but particularly in this tournament I have detected an element of perfection in the female fan as delivered by television that carries the whiff of central casting," he charged.