ALL Premiership footballers should be ordered to write an essay as part of their contract negotiations. It would be entitled: "Cupidas Radix Malorum Est. Discuss."

Most of them would probably think it was Pele's real name, or the latest cocktail drunk by 17-year-old girls in fashionable London hotel bars. So perhaps it would be better to pin up the words in huge letters in their dressing room, offering the translation that money is the root of all evil.

Gareth Southgate could be in a minority of one in offering an enlightened discussion on this topic following his observation that he loves football but doesn't like the professional version.

The Middlesbrough defender can probably afford to offer such refreshingly contentious views now that his England career is apparently behind him, but if he truly believes what he says he should be offered an ambassadorial role within the game forthwith.

Professional football has stunk for some time, but now the stench is growing so foul it is poisoning far too many young minds. If people like Craig Bellamy and Rio Ferdinand are role models for our children, what hope have we of salvation? And the pathetic attempts to discipline them certainly don't help.

Bellamy was fined £750 - about an hour's wages - by Cardiff magistrates for his part in a fracas outside a nightclub, and the FA have been little better in handing out their paltry fines to Sol Campbell and West Ham's Rufus Brevett this week.

What is £20,000 to Campbell when he earns almost five times that in a week? These players have so much money they think they are above the law, which is why Ferdinand "forgot" to report for his drugs test and his England colleagues threatened to strike in his defence.

Ferdinand is not the sort of man I would want to marry my daughter, even if he paid for the wedding, but I do have a tiny shred of sympathy for him in this case. Perhaps he's so stupid that he did forget, and as long as that possibility exists the FA should not have named him when they did.

Firstly, it smacks of double standards at a time when the media are not allowed to name the players accused of gang rape, and secondly the timing is questionable with such an important match coming up tomorrow. You can argue that in matters of right and wrong, the Euro 2004 qualifier in Turkey is irrelevant and the FA have been brave in suspending Campbell from it at a time when they need to be seen to be clamping down.

But despite what some of us might think about the professional game, there are huge numbers of people for whom failure to qualify will be a disaster. It would probably provoke outbreaks of violence tomorrow night and large-scale absenteeism from work on Monday morning.

However, this would be sweetness and light compared with the public reaction to a strike. The players know this, which is why they have made themselves look even sillier than they are by issuing their pathetic threat.

Both sides are in the wrong and the result is a shambles, which we can only hope Goldenballs Beckham can resolve with a similar act of rescue to the one he conjured up against Greece two years ago.

THE Rio Ferdinand case yet again highlights the discrepancies around the world with regard to drug testing. He would certainly not have been named in the United States because there are numerous cases of their athletes winning medals at major championships after positive tests have been kept under wraps until further investigations have been carried out. Yet if Ferdinand were a track and field athlete in this country, without a better reason for not turning up than "I forgot" he would almost certainly be banned for two years.

On this subject, it is good to see that Olympic heptathlon gold medal winner Denise Lewis has ended her association with Dr Ekkart Arbeit, the coach who played a major part in East Germany's state-sponsored doping regime of the 70s and 80s. Arbeit spent 11 months working with Lewis before the World Championships in Paris, where she finished fifth.

WE can expect to see two Durham players in the England Test team against Bangladesh, with Paul Collingwood almost certain to join Stephen Harmison in the line-up now he has been awarded a central contract. But there would have been a third had Durham not seen fit to release Martin Saggers five years ago.

Having plucked him from Minor Counties cricket after he impressed playing for Norfolk in a NatWest Trophy match at Riverside, Durham played a huge part in setting him on the road which led this week to an England tour call-up.

It is Kent who have benefited in the meantime, and someone at Durham might be kicking himself. But they were not to know that Simon Brown would suddenly develop injury problems, Melvyn Betts and John Wood would defect and the progress of a couple of others would stagnate.