DAYS before his big fight with Sir Anthony Hopkins, Joe Calzaghe appeared to take time away from his preparations to film his audition video for The Apprentice.

"Defeat? I can't even spell the word," Joe proclaimed during a pre-fight interview.

A candid confession that a life in boxing has left him illiterate, perhaps?

More likely, it was the sort of trite expression of self-confidence that is often quickly followed by a former Tottenham Hotspur chairman shouting You're Fired' during a popular BBC television series.

The top boxers have to be admired for their words as much as their punches. Few people could utter so much drivel in such a short space of time and retain any sort of self-respect.

Bernard Hopkins has been around the block a few times and knows how to use words to maximum effect.

His assertion that he would 'never lose to a white boy' achieved the remarkable feat of being both deeply offensive and making him look extremely daft when he, in fact, lost.

The average football manager would never come out with such bravado. More's the pity.

If Rafa Benitez was fighting Hopkins next week, he'd tell us that, as always, he was focusing on training and sparring - possibly repeating it in case we missed it the first time - and remind us that he had the utmost respect for his opponent.

Calzaghe just said he wanted to 'smash' Hopkins.

Asked who he wanted to fight next, Calzaghe made it clear he fancied a crack at Roy Jones Jnr.

No doubt if Steve Coppell had been asked the same question, he would have simply responded: "I'm not bothered who I fight, they're all hard fights at this stage. Anyone at home would be nice."

In football, success is played down and questions about opponents are answered in such a way so as not to antagonise their adversary. The fear of looking stupid in defeat or quotes being pinned up on a rival's dressing room wall overwhelms.

Yet in boxing, each fighter proclaims himself to be 'the greatest' and says his next opponent is just waiting to be knocked out.

Sometimes even the boxer himself must know what he is saying is ludicrous but such outlandish statements are all part of what makes a big fight exciting.

Media training has a lot to answer for in football as players and managers so often call on a selection of stock cliches, leaving frustrated journalists scrabbling about for a bit of character and colour.

Fans, too, want to know what their heroes really think, not what their heroes think they ought to say.

Perhaps it is no surprise then that, while the popularity of the professional footballer continues to decline in the eyes of the public, the Calzaghes and Hattons of this world are revered more than ever.

* Mark Lewis-Francis out of the Olympics?

How will Great Britain ever recover from such a blow?

The 100 metres just will not be the same without Lewis-Francis crashing out in the semi finals.