MLB’s umpiring crews aren’t alone when it comes to wildly blown calls on a huge stage. The Times’ Tony Cascarino can barely contain his scorn for France’s Thierry Henry, insisting the above incident — which catapulted Le Blues into 2010’s World Cup finals in South Africa — “has tarnished his reputation forever.”
What a tragic missed opportunity. What a chance to be a hero Henry had — not to his home country but to the whole game. Cheating in all its guises is slowly killing football and if Henry had held his hands up again and admitted to the referee that he had handled the ball and the goal should not stand, he would have earned the admiration of the entire sporting world.
But he didn’t. He knew that he had done wrong, but he put self-interest ahead of justice. He could have been a beacon of integrity; instead he shined shame on himself and on football.
Cheating in football is commonplace now because the authorities cheat us all by their spineless failure to punish the perpetrators. Will Sepp Blatter, the Fifa president, or Michel Platini, the Frenchman who is his Uefa counterpart, condemn Henry, or float the idea that the tie should be replayed? Of course not. They will turn a blind eye, and another piece of football’s credibility, another little part of its soul, will quietly die.
“That was certainly Plan A,” Ireland midfielder Keith Andrews said this morning, fiddling with his metallic-green 1970s overhead projector and trying to make the words: “Lose 1-0 at home” go away. “But we have moved on to Plan B now.” Which will come as a relief to anyone with any doubts that the Republic might actually end up at the World Cup next year. Although it has to be said the details of Plan B are still slightly sketchy. “If we win 1-0 over there, then obviously, it’s job done. It goes to extra-time and we would be happy with that,” Andrews explained, simultaneously sketching out the lyrics to his sombrero-clad, coconut-waggling We’re On Our Way To Extra Time In a World Cup Qualifying Play-Off hit song feat. Enya and the fat one from Westlife.
But still, there is some good news for Ireland: at least they’re not Scotland, for whom the international weekend provided another step forward in the SFA’s 18-month plan to agonisingly sack George Burley. Next up is a meeting this week at which George Burley may or may not be sacked, but only after much chin-stroking consideration of the words “three wins in 14 matches” plus expert evidence on whether this is (a) good, or (b) not very good. Still, it’s not all bad. As of today smouldering one-man walking cafeteria bust-up Graeme Souness has “ruled himself out” of the running for the non-vacant post.
“If [being agonisingly sacked by the SFA] was up for grabs, I wouldn’t be applying for it. My life is going in a different direction,” he explained, being very slowly dragged out of sight by a small forklift truck.
Suffice to say the following item from Sunday’s News Of The World takes just a bit of the shine off Chelsea’s 1-0 defeat of Manchester United. Is it fair to say Chelsea centre back / England international John Terry (above) might be the only prominent athlete who looks at Joba Chamberlain’s mom and feels just a bit jealous?
As he handed over three wraps of coke in the toilet of an Essex wine bar, Ted Terry trousered £40 profit and told us: “The stuff’s all right. I get off on it.”
Ted heaped SHAME on the England captain by fixing a secret drug deal – then asked an undercover News of the World investigator not to mention his famous son.
After selling three grams of cocaine to our man, who pretended to be buying for his wealthy boss, Ted insisted:
“This is just between me and you. DON’T tell him that I’m John Terry’s dad. I can’t have this going back, I’m not saying that they’ll say anything, but you never know.
“You CAN’T tell them I’m John Terry’s dad. I’ve just got them a load of gear.”
If you’re wondering what could possibly cause women’s collegiate soccer highlights to receive more airtime on the overnight “SportsCenter” than the MLS playofs, consider the unique approach of New Mexico defender Elizabeth Lambert, who might well become the female equivalent of LeGarrette Blount by noon Friday. You can add my voice to the chorus calling for a suspension —- preferably of the blind person employed by the Mountain West Conference to referee this match.
This isn’t quite as sensational a story as Alex Ferguson demanding Manchester United fans stop calling Arsene Wenger a pedophile, but that one’s a day old, so this update on the condition of Great Train Robber Ronnie Biggs, as culled from the TImes’ “Crime Central”, will have to do.
Ronnie’s son, Michael, took his dear old Dad out of his Barnet nursing home to watch the North London derby on the television last Saturday lunchtime.
Ronnie enjoyed the match so much that he would love to go and see an Arsenal game, something he hasn’t had the pleasure of doing since the early 1960s. Apparently he’s angling for a ticket for the next Arsenal v Chelsea clash.
Such good news to learn that one of Britain’s most famous old lags is making a good recovery from the pneumonia and MRSA which led Jack Straw to release him from prison on compassionate grounds in August.
Hull City A.F.C.’s embattled manager Phil Brown is said to face immediate dismissal if his side can’t defeat Burnley tomorrow, a circumstance that has When Saturday Comes Daily’s Chris Donkin recalling the scene outside KC Stadium shortly after the Tigers secured promotion in 2008. “In the big league everyone knows your team,” sighs Donkin, “and unfortunately that also means everyone knows when they lose 5-0, too.”
A ridiculous queue formed quickly outside the ground. Some of the new army of fans were seen wearing Liverpool and Manchester United shirts. One of the overnight queuers summed up the attitude of the glory supporters perfectly when asked by BBC Radio Humberside: “So, what are you looking forward to seeing next season?” He replied, with little thought: “I can’t wait to see Cristiano Ronaldo and Wayne Rooney in action.”
Seeing your club’s popularity grow should be a good thing. The problem is that the new fans have hopelessly unrealistic expectations. For most, City only entered their consciousness when Dean Windass powered home the winner in the play-off final against Bristol City, after a season where the team won far more games than they lost. As a result they expect the side to win every week and if they don’t the manager gets the blame and has to go.
Longer-term fans have better memories and you will hear few true supporters calling for Phil Brown’s head. Were it not for Brown the club would have certainly been relegated from the Championship in 2007. Then by the end of his first full season he’d rebuilt the team and achieved promotion to the top tier for the first time in the club’s history. Of course, when the inevitable happens and City’s tenure among the elite expires, these new fans are the ones most likely to not renew their tickets and go back to their armchairs to watch Man Utd rather than trek to watch a rainy Tuesday evening match against Blackpool.
A bit of uncivll disobedience early today at Pride Park, as QPR’s Akos Buzsaky’s penalty goal shut the door on Derby County. The R’s 4-2 victory marked the second time in the past week the visitors have scored 4 times, an vaults West London’s most dysfunctional richest club into the top 6 of the Championship.
How might a Bill Bellichick or Eric Mangini react if two of their charges were photographed looking as dignified as Spurs’ Peter Crouch and Jonathan Woodgate (above)? The Tottenham pair made headlines with their Saturday dance party antics after a 2-1 win at Portsmouth, resulting in the following sage words from boss Harry Redknapp, as supplied by the Guardian’s David Hytner :
Redknapp does not mind their having a few quiet drinks; what the manager cannot tolerate is their “rolling out of nightclubs at three in the morning”. He has spoken of the need for them, as “highly paid athletes”, to ensure they are always in “great condition”.
The players, who were with their wives and girlfriends, maintain that they did not drink to excess and are dismayed at the perception they are not allowed a night out. Redknapp has some sympathy, particularly for the goldfish-bowl existence in which they can be snapped constantly by members of the public on camera phones. Yet Redknapp feels the weekend’s episode only reinforces why his players should avoid late nights out at all costs.
Longtime CSTB readers will recall this is not the first time former QPR striker/Rodney Trotter lookalike Crouch has found himself the center of nightclub attention.
A late strike by substitute Mario Bolatti gave Argentina a 1-0 victory over 10-man Uruguay yesterday, punching the former’s ticket to the 2009 World Cup Finals in South Africa. Afterwards, the Guardian’s Marcela Mora y Araujo observed, “the Argentinian press has been more and more candid about its reservations…criticisms are dealt out more readily and severely, and the personal gets mixed up with the professional.” Never more so than in the case of shy, retiring Argentina manager Diego Maradona.
“You lot take it up the arse,” were Maradona’s words to the press immediately after the match. It was almost adding injury to the insult when he scanned the room and added, “if the ladies will pardon the expression”. Looking increasingly Botox-ridden, the angry yet victorious Argentina coach was somehow able to raise a nervous chuckle from those on the receiving end of the abuse.
He wanted to dedicate the triumph to the fans back home and especially those who bothered to cross into Uruguay, to his girls Dalma and Giannina, and to his squad, who worked like never before for the 1–0 result. “But certain people who have not supported me, and you know who you are, can keep sucking,” he added.
Grotesque and undignified, Maradona then grabbed his genitals with both hands, signalling some sort of manly insult to the TV cameras in the tunnel outside the dressing room.
“Is there anything Sven Goran-Eriksson won’t do for money?” asked Barry Glendenning, but I suspect the former England/Manchester City manager might draw the line at keeping it in his pants. For everything else, however, up to and including managing North Korea’s national team, Sven’s got his price, as the Guardian’s Matt Scott explains.
Peter Trembling, the Notts County executive chairman, is understood to have been involved in talks with intermediaries representing the Football Association of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Those negotiations were with a view to securing Goran-Eriksson (above, left), the Meadow Lane director of football’s services on loan.
The process is now advanced enough for Trembling and Eriksson to be travelling to Beijing later this week on an eight-day trip. The club chairman is also expected to discuss Chinese business investment opportunities in Qadbak, the British Virgin Islands-registered investment vehicle that owns County.
Although it would be a football fairytale for Eriksson and the players involved, the development would lead to inevitable criticism of Trembling’s willingness to interact with a country where human rights abuses are routine. There will also be questions about what fee Notts County’s owners, Qadbak, might be receiving from a nation that is beset by famine and which has test-fired intercontinental ballistic missiles and a nuclear bomb.
England’s campaign to host the 2018 World Cup came under attack last week from FIFA vice president Jack Warner, who claimed “nobody wants to see the England bid of 2005, 2004. They want to see something innovative, something creative.” The Independent’s Sam Wallace admits, “the English bid is not beyond criticism; it should welcome constructive criticism…but Warner is impossible to take seriously.” Reading between the lines, it would seem “creative” is a euphemism for someone (perhaps a member of the Warner family?) being properly compensated (”more and more, you look at some of the characters involved and wonder whether the whole charade will be worth it”_
The key criticism from Warner, in what was a pretty confusing attack on England’s 2018 bid, seemed to be that the Queen and David Beckham had not been shoved to the forefront to meet ExCo. These Fifa executives often appear to act as if they consider themselves royalty so it is no surprise that they expect to meet the real thing.
This is the power of Fifa and its ExCo. They operate beyond the boundaries of national governments because they have the power to suspend any national football association if they feel those associations are under threat of investigation or domestic political pressure. This gives them extraordinary global power.
Funnily enough, Warner has already met Beckham in June last year. That was when the England squad, at the end of a long season, were shipped out to Trinidad for a friendly to curry favour with Warner. Fabio Capello even made Beckham captain for the occasion. Before the match, Warner surpassed himself by having a row over the venue with his government and threatening to call the whole thing off.
Does doing those kind of favours even impress these people? Towards the end of England’s disastrous bid for the 2006 World Cup, the England team were sent to Malta in June 2000 to play a friendly to impress Malta’s then ExCo delegate Joseph Mifsud. He voted for Germany the following month.
Shazia Mirza, (above) writing in tomorrow’s Guardian, attended last Sunday’s Liverpool v. Chelsea tilt and marveled at the badwill on display, gushing, “I thought the abuse I get in comedy clubs was bad, but it’s nothing compared with this…all of a sudden I have a new respect for football players. They get personal and professional insults hurled in their faces while they’re working.” Yes, indeed someone does go to
Rafa Benitez’ job and tries to knock the Dirk (Kuyt) out of his mouth.
It’s all very civilised. Everyone sits quietly, listening to the Chelsea Brass Band on the sidelines; there’s no tear-gas, firecrackers or those hooligans dressed up as policemen beating up random people. An announcement is made just before kick-off. A man shouts, “Racism is not tolerated at Stamford Bridge.” Does he mean it’s OK everywhere else?
The Liverpool players run on to the pitch and a barrage of abuse begins, the like of which I’ve never seen before. The three men in front of me, who could have easily been my solicitor, accountant and gynaecologist, all dressed nicely in brown woolly cardigans and smart jeans, open their mouths and everything changes. They start shouting, “You murderers, you f*****g murderers, you kill your own fans.” I look around and everyone’s chanting the same thing. They’re murderers? That’s quite a statement. Do the police know about this?
Liverpool get the ball off Chelsea, then I hear men shouting, “F**k off, you thieving c***s”, followed by random abuse directed at Liverpool’s Spanish goalkeeper, José Reina: “You’ll never play for Spain – you’re rubbish, you fat Spanish waiter.” I thought he was a goalkeeper – why are they calling him a waiter? Five minutes later, they follow it up with, “You fat tart.”
(with apologies to Bill Parcells for the above headline)
Pretty recently, Toronto Blue Jays GM J.P. Ricciardi suggested he was at an economic disadvantage having to compete in the same division as New York and Boston. As of Monday morning, Ricciardi will have even fewer resources to draw upon, as he’s now been denied a desk, telephone and title, and the lamest duck in North America is now free to resume private life as Worcester, MA’s 2nd most famous sporting personality (Bill Simmons, sadly, being the first). Ricciardi’s task in the AL East couldn’t have been easy, but he’d have done well to reflect on the fate of former Newcastle manager Kevin Keegan, whose confusing 2nd tenure at St. James Park has now resulted in a £2 million payoff. Though Newcastle’s scoreless draw with Bristol City will receive some coverage in Sunday’s papers, the big story continues to be Keegan’s allegation Newcastle was reduced to scouting new signings via You Tube. In the words of the Guardian’s David Conn, yesterday’s verdict “has shone a blinding light on the farcical insides of Mike Ashley’s Newcastle United.”
On 30 August 2008, two days before the transfer window closed: “Dennis Wise telephoned Mr Keegan and told him that he had a great player for the club to sign, namely Ignacio González.”
Keegan found that even Google had no information to impart on González, so Wise told him some footage could be found on YouTube. Keegan looked. “He found that the clips were of poor quality and provided no proper basis for signing a player to a Premier League club,” the judgment states. “Moreover, no one at the club had ever seen [González] play.”
After that, the judgment records: “Notwithstanding that [Keegan] made it clear not only to Mr Wise but also to Mr Jimenez and to Mr Ashley that he very strongly objected to the signing of Mr González, the club proceeded with the deal. The club did so, according to its witnesses who gave evidence, because it was in the club’s commercial interests to do so. The ‘commercial interests’, according to the club, were that the signing of the player on loan would be a ‘favour’ to two influential South American agents who would look favourably on the club in the future.”
Keegan suggested to the panel that the transfer was “improper and irregular”, although the panel found that the club did not pay the agents, and it was not suggested it breached Premier League rules. Most importantly, however, it agreed that Keegan left because he believed, with justification, that his role as Newcastle’s manager had been fundamentally undermined with the González deal.
Prior to Manchester United’s 2-1 home defeat of Wolfsburg F.C. in the Champions League earlier today, paying customers at Old Trafford were greeted with programme notes from United manager Alex Ferguson (above), reassuring them they’d made a prudent investment. Portions of those notes were quoted and placed in proper context by the Guardian’s Fiver duo of Barry Glendenning and Rob Smythe, who helpfully characterize Fergie as “a traditionalist who has been in love with Europe’s premier club competition ever since he sneaked into Hampden for Real Madrid’s 7-3 win over Eintracht Frankfurt in 1960.”
“I do not agree the preliminaries are meaningless and simply a money-making exercise,” he said, as a group of hired heavies lifted his new 98-inch plasma on to the wall brackets in the Dave and Paramount Comedy Channel room of his humble 302-up, 302-down abode. “The group system is a league. All sports competitions have a starting point that includes the minnows, from the FA Cup to Wimbledon in tennis, or the Open in golf.
“You can’t start with the FA Cup final, or Wimbledon final and cut out the competitive build-up. When you put it like that, it is nonsense of course. But that has not prevented a spate of recent criticism and accusations of the game exploiting the fans,” he continued, pouring a bottle of Cristal down the sink because one of his team of butlers had served it at 3.141 degrees centigrade rather than the requested 3.142. None of Ferg’s comments, of course, explain why – if it’s not about money – the competitive build-up could not be the early rounds of an unseeded knockout.
Food and architecture critic Jonathan Meades’ recent BBC 4 series “Off Kilter” concluded with the narrator’s journey through what the Beeb describes as “towns only known from football coupons.” The Guardian’s Martin Kellner found the grim 3rd episode, “a stunning film, but one unlikely to be streamed on visitscotland.com.”
Where there was a choice between focusing on a row of wheelie bins in an urban wasteland or a troupe of bonnie tartan-clad Scottish lassies skipping through a field of bluebells, guess which Meades chose. In fact, the only tartan that appeared anywhere in the film illustrated a typical Meades diatribe against the 50 million Scots who live elsewhere, whom he called “lachrymose believers in this land of tartan shortbread, mail order cabers and bagpipe glens”. Their beef with the English he dismissed as “a 200-year-old PR stunt, the world’s longest-running exercise in victimhood”.
Over archive footage of fierce pit-head picketing Meades talked of “the human cost of efficiency, and adherence to the bottom line”, and “tens of thousands rationalised into involuntary idleness”. Fife, he said, was where we see “the social and environmental effects of the initially attritional and consequently violent coiffeur clash between the free-trading ideological helmet modelled by iron steel girder Margaret from Finchley and the smug warm-over worn by King Arthur of Stalindale, South Yorkshire”.
The programme was full of fine fancy writing like this – like Michael Moore with wit. Comparing Scotland’s part-time footballers with their counterparts in England’s top division, he characterised the Premier Leaguers as “a bespoke cast of gladiatorial yob-gods, wag-roasting Croesus kids, who once a week descend from their Parnassian blingsteads to run around for 90 golden minutes of bravura vanity”. I cannot remember when I have enjoyed a TV programme more but I doubt there will be much dancing in the streets of Raith.
The matter of El Hadji Diouf being accused of racially abusing an Everton ballboy was noted in this space a few days ago, and perhaps mindful of the difficulty in oppressing a cultural/economic majority, the Guardian’s Dara O’Brien writes, “bananas are pretty traceable. They tend to leave a trail of bananas. And there seem to have been precious few bananas lying round. But this doesn’t mean calling somebody “white boy” is a racist slur.”
For too long the fact that we’re roughly 90% of the population (2001 census) has disguised just how oppressed we whites really are. When he allegedly said “white boy”, well it just reminded me of all those other times people called me “white boy” just to put me down, just to make me, and the other 55 million white people in the UK, feel small.
No, of course not. If you’re white, you just don’t get a go at being the victim of racism. Did that ballboy go home and cry when he was called “white boy”? He didn’t. The phrase carries no power at all. What’s the insult? He might as well have said “Tall boy!”, or “You with the blue eyes!” for all the pain it was going to cause.
For people who complain that it’s unfair that white people can’t be slurred the way black people can, well, life’s just tough isn’t it?
“Perhaps ESPNBoston.com’s newest business partnership will not prove to be a colossal conflict of interest in the long run,” opines the Boston Globe’s Chad Finn. “But upon first glance, that’s precisely what it appears to be.”
ESPNBoston.com, which became the second of ESPN’s planned network of city-specific sites to launch Sept. 14, is using Kraft Sports Group as its local advertising sales agent for the site. SportsBusiness Daily was the first to report news of the partnership on Thursday.
Kraft Sports Group is a holding company founded by Patriots owner Robert Kraft (above, far left) in 1998, four years after he purchased the NFL franchise. Along with the Patriots, Kraft owns the Revolution of Major League Soccer as well as Gillette Stadium, the venue for both teams’ home games.
Given that a significant amount of ESPNBoston.com’s coverage is dedicated to the Patriots, and a smaller amount to the Revolution, the partnership is beginning on dubious journalistic ground.
ESPN’s general strategy with its localized websites is to launch in cities where it already owns and operates an ESPN Radio station, then have the station’s staff coordinate ad sales for the website. Such was the case when ESPN Chicago launched in April.
While the ESPN mother ship has not been reluctant to criticize the franchise – it was relentless in its reporting and speculating during the “SpyGate’’ controversy of 2007 – the situation bears monitoring to see whether ESPNBoston.com’s curious new bedfellow has an effect on its reporting of potentially unflattering Patriots news.
Though it’s a bit early days to accuse ESPNBoston of lacking integrity, Finn would be remiss not to raise the points above. He’s equally remiss, however, in failing to disclose (even if it’s old fuckin’ news) the Globe’s parent company, The New York Times, holds a minority stake in the Boston Red Sox. Though I can’t think of an example of the Globe covering anything up to curry favor with John Henry, Larry Lucchino or Tom Werner, a number of shots have been taken by Globe writers at former players who’ve ended up on ownership’s shit list for one reason or another. Heck, the team almost lost a General Manager a few years ago over what seemed like a victorious power play on the part of Lucchino, successfully (for a while, anyway) engineered with the help of the CHB.
Diouf alleged he had been the subject of racist abuse at Goodison in an interview given on Tuesday, claiming: “People threw bananas at me, and the referee told me he would report this to the police.” He also described as “nonsense” the allegation he made a racist remark to a ballboy.
The Blackburn forward made his complaint after the final whistle on Sunday and police, together with Everton stewards, immediately commenced a search of the playing surface where the alleged incident occurred plus the seating areas in the Lower Bullens Road Stand and Gwladys Street. No bananas were found in the search and no pictures have emerged that would support Diouf’s claims.
Of all the possible scenarios that might’ve resulted in Flavio Briatore divesting himself of interests in Queens Park Rangers, not once did I consider the likelihood that a Formula One ban would come to bear on the former Renault boss’ soccer interests. But no one should look a gift horse in the mouth, as the Daily Mail explains :
The disciplinary action, imposed on Briatore for instructing a driver to deliberately crash, appears to put him in direct violation of the League’s ‘fit and proper person test’.
The test stipulates that an owner, prospective owner or director of a club should not be ’subject to a ban from a sports governing body relating to the administration of their sport.’
A Football League spokesman said: ‘The Football League chairman, Lord Mawhinney, has today written to the FIA to request further details of its decision.
‘Thereafter, the League will consider its position on the matter.’
A penalty equalizer from Matt Taylor spared Bolton from a 1-0 loss to Stoke City yesterday, with a listless first half showing by Wanderers earning considerable groans from those in attendance at the Reebok Stadium. “It does not get through to me as I’ve had it two years,” insists Bolton manager Gary Megson, adding, however, “It does not help the players one bit.” VitalFootballCo begins packing Megson’s bags for him, opining, “after Sam Allardyce`s big-I-am routine and Sammy Lee`s spluttering, Megson`s interviews were welcomed initially. Now he bears the weary countenance of an undertaker, trying to explain why the hearse has gone missing.”
Megson didn`t just fall into the trap laid by the interviewer. He leapt into it, with both feet, and arms raised shouting ‘wahey!` as he went.
Not that it`s the first time he`s suffered from foot-in-mouth syndrome. The Ginger One described fans as ‘pathetic` at Blackburn in January and then had to clarify that his remarks were intended only for those who had barracked him. This was at odds with his earlier statement that he regarded criticism as ‘water off a duck`s back.` Tony Pulis doesn`t believe that.
As we said at the time, his services should have been dispensed with at the end of last season, with thanks for the work he`s done in stabilising the club. By then it was clear that the best Bolton could hope for under his tenure was to grub about just above the relegation places, playing a style of football that saps the will to live.
Following an unreserved goal celebration on the part of Vida defender Brayan Beckeles and midfielder Orlin Peralta, 101GreatGoals.com reported “with homophobia rife in football and the players’ reputations at stake, the pair have been forced to go on the record to deny that they actually sucked face with one another, arguing that the angle of the picture distorted the real image of the pair actually kissing on the cheek.” Seems a bit unneccesary to disavow a nice affectionate moment, particuarly as no one complains when the left side of the Yankee infield does it.
How powerful can one person be in a particular sport without being a commissioner or a franchise’s principal owner? WIth his handiwork all over multiple franchises, Larry Lucchino would be a baseball example, though he’s never been in the awkward position of say, representing the Yankees shortly before becoming part of Red Sox management. Departing Chelsea chief executive Peter Kenyon, however, is a rare case, having presided over the West London club’s commerical ambitions shortly after playing a high profile role in Manchester United’s transformation into a global brand. A day after Chelsea’s 1-0 defeat of Porto in the Champions League, Kenyon’s exit is a matter of reflection for the Independent’s Glenn Moore, who writes, “a salesman left Stamford Bridge yesterday, not a football man.”
By circumstance or choice he has been a regular in front of the cameras, and he has often made a fool of himself when doing so. There has been the annual assertion, only recently dropped in the face of continuing mountainous losses, that Chelsea would break even as a business by the end of this season. Then there was the boast that the Premier League winners would come from “a small group of one”, followed by the demand for two Champions League successes in six years. He has said he wants Chelsea “to own London” in terms of support and will “turn the world blue”. Only this month Kenyon insisted, “I think we can win everything,” thus putting Carlo Ancelotti on notice that a quadruple was expected.
Before all this, of course, he declared that joining Manchester United was a dream come true for a lifelong fan, a love which began when his electrician father took him to Wembley to watch United lift the European Cup in 1968. He was such a fan that he walked out on Old Trafford when Roman Abramovich called, precipitating that uncomfortable afternoon of abuse, sitting alongside his own teenage son.
Chelsea supporters’ initial distrust of “the Manc in a suit” has never dissipated, rising anew after the 2008 European Cup final when Kenyon – 40 years after cheering on United against Benfica in the final – led Chelsea up the steps in Moscow and allowed Michael Platini to hang a loser’s medal round his neck.
“It is easy in the cold light of day, when the adrenalin has died down,” insisted Manchester City manager Mark Hughes of Emmanuel Adebayor’s goal celebration (and face-kicking of former Arsenal teammate Robin Van Persie) on Saturday, ” to talk about what players should and shouldn’t do in that situation.” To which the Guardian’s John Ashdown replies, “it doesn’t take the cold light of day to realise that what players shouldn’t do if ‘that situation’ involves scoring a goal against a former club is charge 90 yards to celebrate in front of your opponents’ supporters.”
Once upon a time it was enough to do the Hulk Hogan thing (You know, where he’d twirl his hand round and cup it to his ear, and everyone would cheer, and you’d pretend to tear apart your little yellow ‘Hulkster’ vest and pump your little pythons and then Mrs Fiver would come in and tell you to switch that rubbish off and get ready for work). It was a subtle, almost jokey gesture – ‘Who’s booing now?’ – which would always lead to extra vitriol next time that player touched the ball. Now it seems ear-cupping just won’t do.
“It was silly to run up in front of the Arsenal fans, but these people have been insulting me all game,” was Adebayor’s excuse, but any player who drinks in the adulation of fans when playing for their team has to accept that those same fans will (usually, though not always) turn once he pulls on the shirt of another club, particularly if his departure was an acrimonious one. That said, those fans losing the run of themselves to the point of a steward being knocked unconscious by, what was in essence, a man sliding on his knees on some grass, are guilty of the biggest over-reaction since the 50ft woman went through puberty. Classless, crass and dense to the point of collapsing in on itself – after a week in the international wilderness, it’s good to have the Premier League back.
For the second time this week, the matter of crude chants aimed at Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger is in the news, with Amazon.com removing the CD “Fat Willy: Manchester United Chants” from their UK stock. From the Guardian’s Mike Stafford:
Complaints from United and Arsenal led to Amazon removing the album, but Will Robinson contended that the “Sit down you paedophile” chant is not defamatory.
“We would certainly keep it up there because there is nothing defamatory. That track you are talking about is not directed at anybody,” claimed Robinson, a music agent who represents acts such as Tony Christie and the Cheeky Girls.
When contacted by the Guardian today Robinson was unaware the CD had been withdrawn. “That is news to me,” he said. “We haven’t received one complaint. It has been selling well, it has been selling for quite some time, about a year.
“This is the first I’ve heard about it and I’m surprised and I will try and find out some more. But we will be doing all possible to keep the Fat Willy CD selling,” added the Manchester United fan, who is now working on a follow-up. “It has been on sale for a year and it has done well. We are making the second album now. It’s full steam ahead for Fat Willy.”
The Republic Of Mancunia’s Scott The Red wonders about the double standard, insisting the behavior of Arsenal fans towards former Gunner Ashley Cole “has been completely glossed over.”
Arsenal fans take their homophobic chants far and wide, singing them at home, singing them away, singing them in Europe, singing them on public transport. There were loads of Arsenal fans in Milan singing about Ashley Cole shagging men, Arsenal fans rising to their feet for the climatic ‘ten men went to bed, CUNTS’, the song is sung at Craven Cottage, and obviously at Stamford Bridge, the Emirates, they sing it on the night-bus home and on the tube. These just the first few examples I found on YouTube, so you’d imagine that in reality this is done on a much larger scale!
Still, their homophobic chants don’t get in the way of them taking the moral high ground in regards to United chants about Wenger being a paedophile.
Three defeats, including a 5-0 thumping by fellow newcomers Gold Coast United, were followed by a more encouraging 3-3 draw last Friday in Adelaide. Fowler is in honest, but lowly company – his more well-travelled team-mates include the Netherlands Antilles striker Dyron Daal, formerly of St Johnstone and Ross County, and Daniel McBreen, whose long list of former clubs also takes in the Saints, as well as Romania’s Universitatea Craiova.
Fewer than 9,000 saw the Fury’s opening game, a 3-2 defeat against Sydney at Dairy Farmers Stadium, and the figure dropped to a worrying 6,500 for the second home match against Melbourne. Feeble crowds have been a notable feature of the season so far, as has a modest influx of journeymen from the English lower divisions – among them Andy Todd (Perth), Lloyd Owusu (Adelaide) and the Wellington pair of Chris Greenacre, formerly of Tranmere, and Paul Ifill.
Greenacre has suggested the league’s profile is “getting bigger all the time” in Britain, though that will not last long if it keeps putting on games that draw barely 6,000 people to a 50,000-seat stadium, as Brisbane’s 1-0 win over Central Coast did at the weekend. If things do not improve after the rugby league and Australian rules seasons finish this month, the league may be urgently revisiting its plans for further expansion, which currently envisage a new team in Melbourne and possibly another in Sydney or Canberra.
“Unless you suffer from a selective deafness that could rival the selective myopia that Arsene Wenger (above) himself has long conquered,” writes the Guardian’s Martina Hyde, ” you will be aware that the chant reared its hideous head last Saturday at Old Trafford, during Arsenal’s loss to Manchester United.” Hyde doesn’t specify if the chant in question was “with a packet of sweets and a cheeky smile / Wenger is a fucking paedophile” (I’d heard that one aimed at Graham Rix several years ago) or “the Wenger bus is comin’ / and all the kids are runnin’ / from Arsenal to Manchester / he is a child molester”, but she’s understandably frustrated the Arsenal manager has tolerated such abuse for over a decade.
Needless to say, the FA declined to return repeated calls on the matter, presumably having far more important things to do than discuss the vile abuse of a manager over more than a decade. What were those urgent things? Well, I note they squeezed out a press release announcing Rafa Benítez had been charged with improper conduct for comments made after the Spurs game a couple of weeks ago. So we can only guess at the sabre-toothed nature of plans to combat this blight, that they are even now not really being arsed to come up with.
What then of the police, who have power vested in them by the 1991 Football Offences Act? Several Spurs fans who abused Sol Campbell at Portsmouth last September have been convicted this year, but Greater Manchester police have no record of any complaint being made by a member of the public on Saturday. Should they wish to act on their own initiative, they may care to start with the online vendors selling a downloadable version of the chant, presumably for people who don’t have enough scumbag friends to sing along with them.
Following ugly scenes during last night’s Carling Cup tie between West Ham and Milwall, Lions supporter Lance Bellers acknowledges to readers of When Saturday Comes Daily, “the wheeling out of Millwall’s stock list of misdemeanours has taken on comic proportions”, while asking those Millwall fans who aren’t looking for a fight, “it’s all so predictable and depressing that you really have to start asking yourself at exactly what point would you decide you’ve had enough and call it a day?”
This season has included the usual amount of those incidents that start to make you really wonder. For example: the eternal racism (”We’re glad we sold the nigger,” sung by a few and aimed at Chris Armstrong); the father leading his seven-year-old boy by the hand after the Youth Cup final at Arsenal and singing at the top of his voice, “North London is full of shit, shit and more shit”; and two stories from a friend, who told of having to run for his life after visiting the New Den and also of someone he knew suffering a double headbutt after the Forest game, even though he actually supports Ipswich.
So what exactly would it take to kick the football habit? Millwall’s severe lack of form at the beginning of this season certainly had me thinking hard. After all, without a half-decent side to follow, what else did I have to entice me there? Of course, the real answer is that I probably will never give up going altogether. Football still supplies sufficient excitement, uncertainty and comradeship to prevent me from really ending it all. Am I alone in this? I suspect not.
The “planned” scuffles, which involved more than 100 fans, appeared to have been caused by fans without tickets to the game, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said.
Reports suggested that some of the fans had been throwing missiles and bricks at one another and the violence between the two sets of fans was described as “serious” by BBC News.
It is thought some fans were ambushed by rival supporters outside the nearby Upton Park underground station via side roads. Officers have made at least two arrests, one for disorder and the second for breach of a banning order.
Police said the stabbing of a man, aged 44, in Priory Road close to the stadium, is connected to the fighting.
“It’s too warm to touch / A simulated rush / but how can you tell / When it’s fake blood?” asked Mission Of Burma’s Peter Prescott in 2006, blissfuly unaware that just a few years later, officials at England’s RFU would be asking the same question. Harlequins’ Tom Williams, coach Dean Richard and team physio Steven Brenner received bans of 4 months, 3 years and 2 years respectively for their role in a bogus-facial-injury scandal being that’s been dubbed “Bloodgate”. Careful not to openly gloat, the Guardian’s Paul Wilson opined, “as if rugby union commentators and their ilk have never, ever, in any way used Premier League football as convenient shorthand for Sodom and Gomorrah rolled into one and anything else that might be wrong with the world.”
Not even when Dean Richards admitted he knew the game was up when he saw Tom Williams (above) walking towards him with fake blood frothing from his mouth and “legs like Bruce Grobbelaar“ did it occur for a moment that rugby union’s raid on the make-up cupboard had anything to do with football. Grobbelaar did not actually cheat in the 1984 European Cup final, after all. He showed uncommon and unpremeditated inventiveness in taking gamesmanship (and showmanship) as far as it would go, and rather than assuming that Richards was implying footballers were also guilty of skulduggery on occasions it seemed far more likely he was expressing admiration for a sportsman who managed to gain a crucial advantage without breaking any rules.
Imperfect as footballers may be, they can at least con referees without resorting to smuggling extraneous substances on to the pitch. Please do not write in, that was a joke. Less amusing is watching the old double standard come into play, as rugby attempts to retreat into a boys will be boys and rules will be bent mentality. Footballers who dive or feign injury are never characterised as pranksters or chancers. They are notorious cheats. Conmen. Overpaid impostors who insult their audiences and their glorious heritage.
Aside from roundly mocking Sky’s Andy Gray for his inability to describe any event in the past tense (”there is a tribe in the Amazon called the Pirahã who live entirely in the present. They have no interest in the past, and there are no words in their language to describe it…I am wondering if Andy Gray is one of them”), the Guardian’s Martin Kellner surveyed ESPN’s first attempts at UK coverage of the Premier League and based on his measured critique, I am going to assume neither Golic nor Greenberg were guests in the commentary box.
Its pictures came from Sky cameras, and in the presentation, there was scarcely a whiff of innovation. This is extremely annoying for people like me, used to getting three snappy paragraphs out of an Andy Townsend Tactics’ Truck or some similar gimmick. Steven Berkoff (above) was about all there was to laugh at on ESPN, filmed on a stage somewhere, declaiming about the importance of football, in the style of Henry V on the eve of Agincourt, but without entirely losing sight of the Hovis advert. “This is who we are. This is what we are,” thundered the great actor. “This is bollocks,” was the unworthy response, I am afraid, from my sofa.
In its early days ESPN subsisted on obscure action from the outer suburbs of sport, allowing wags to create imaginary schedules featuring sports like Amish Rake Fighting and Australian Dick Wrestling, so now when the channel sees plausible sport, economically priced, it tends to make a play for it, and not worry too much about the programmes around it.
As it happened, ESPN lucked out in its first match with Everton standing back with the rest of us to admire Arsenal’s pretty football and six goals. Aside from the action, the show did not look very handsome, although one was distracted from the garish red and black set, and mirrored desk, by pundit Peter Reid’s patchy grey mutton-chop sideburns, which make him look either like a Dickens character or someone pitching to be the new face of Special Brew.
Reid also kept referring to Everton’s Fellaini as Fellini, possibly as a tribute to Bobby Robson rather than the late great Italian film director. And the channel’s list of forthcoming attractions, which included UFC, MLB, DTM, and AFL, lead you to wonder whether ESPN has a particular affinity with sports defined by initials.
Over a 17 year professional career (9 of ‘em at Queens Park Rangers), “there probably never was a player so wilfully irreverent, who cared so little for approval” than forward/midfielder Stanley Bowles writes the Guardian’s Kevin Mitchell, recalling the exploits of a Collyhurst native who “managed to infuriate nearly every manager from Brian Clough to Dave Sexton to Joe Mercer, every hard-tackling opponent from Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris to Johnny Giles.” Stan The Man claims not to miss football and expresses no interested in the contemporary game unless he’s got some action riding on a result, but in fairness, it’s hard to think of a modern player with nearly as much personality.
He delighted the rest of us – except maybe those fans at Roker Park who went berserk the day in 1973 that he and Tony Hazell knocked over the FA Cup Sunderland had won four days before and had placed with pride on a table by the pitch before their final league game, against QPR.
“We had a bet to see if we could hit the Cup,” Bowles recalls, adamant the story is not an urban myth, despite assertions by his manager of the time, Gordon Jago. “Tony kicked and he hit it. I kicked it and I hit it. We dented the bloody thing. We won 3-0. I scored two goals. It was the headlines on the News At Ten. At least they had a riot in Sunderland. They don’t get many of them.”
“Charlie George was with me at Forest,” Bowles remembers, “on loan from Southampton for about a month. Clough, he went to Charlie and said, ‘When I say play centre-forward laddie, you play centre-forward.’ Charlie turned to him and said, ‘Fuck off you northern tosser.’ That was on the Saturday. He was gone on the Monday. People did stand up to Clough, but not many.
“When I was there, it was like, what’s the fucking problem, from him. Fuck off. I was there a year. After five months he left me out. I never spoke to him ever again after that. I used to speak to his messengers. I liked Peter Taylor. He was a gambler, like me. We could relate. I used to sing in the dressing room, London Calling. I said. ‘I’m not going anywhere, except London.’ I know the Clash. Mick Jones is a friend of mine. I just kept singing it.”
Bowles’ most commonly recognized alma mater (and Jones’ favorite club) QPR were victimized earlier today by a late Rory Fallon equalizer, as the R’s drew at Plymouth Argyle, 1-1.
This hasn’t come completely out of the blue. The minute’s applause has long been the custom in Italy, although there it tends to start with silence and build to a peak level of applause from about halfway through. British observers had often commented that this seemed a warmer, more celebratory tribute. So applause began to creep in here, albeit not without resistance. Last Armistice Day some war veterans were upset that Scottish clubs were offered the choice between silence and applause to mark the occasion. Similarly, in January last year, Manchester United stood fast against urgings to honour the 50th anniversary of the Munich air crash with applause, rather than old-fashioned silence, during the derby match against Manchester City.
Which offers a hint as to why the applause-mongers have increasingly held sway. The fact is, football has often struggled to keep its mouth shut, its minutes of silence breached by partisan yelp or parade-raining obscenity. The minute was already being cut to 30 seconds. So clapping appears to offer a deeply English solution. Never mind all the warm, celebratory, vaguely Mediterranean stuff. The minute’s applause is also a way of avoiding not just an uncomfortable silence, but a minor social embarrassment too.
So why did City fall apart? Former Hartlepool captain Nelson surely can’t be that bad can he? Did we really sign a goalkeeper who is incapable of playing at this level, with no clue how to position himself?
The atrocious defending by so called ‘professionals’ let their manager down, let their team mates down but most importantly, kicked Norwich nation firmly in the nuts and then followed that up with a stomp to the face. We are all embarrassed, angry and deflated, a national joke. The emails came, the phone rang and the laughing at our expense will continue at least until Tuesday.
Newly acquired Sunderland striker Darren Bent was in a snit over a stalled transfer from Tottenham, and chose to take his gripes public with the pithy tweet, “seriously getting pissed off now. why can’t anything be simple. It’s so frustrating hanging round doing jack shit. Do I wanna go Hull City NO. Do I wanna go stoke NO do I wanna go sunderland YES so stop fucking around, levy.” “I suppose if (Spurs chairman) Daniel Levy were a little less sensitive,” mused the Guardian’s Marina Hyde, “he might declare Twitter fines a useful revenue-gathering scheme, seeing as he’s relieved Bent of 80 grand. Perhaps he’d claim it’s about respect (surely the most elastic concept in football).”
Most player’s tweets will be dross, naturally, but as Paul Calf once commented: “Inside every sack of shite, there’s a spark of gold. Now it might just be the wrapper off a Caramac, but it’s there.” As a Manchester City fan, Paul would have appreciated the salutation on Stephen Ireland’s Bebo page around the time of the multiple dead grandmothers saga. “Football is shit,” this ran, “why did I get stuck doin it!!!!!!!!!!!”
In the end, clubs micromanaging microblogging is little more than contempt for the supporters. If a player wishes to exhibit contempt for the same supporters with some brattish tweet or other, then that is a matter for him, and he will reap his reward in chants at the fans’ earliest convenience. But it shouldn’t be the club’s job to keep fans in the dark as to the true nature of their heroes/villains/underperforming strikers.
Nor is it particularly pointful to thunder that at any other workplace, the cheeky player would be sacked. Let’s move past this idea of top-flight football being analogous to anything else. You know the sort of thing – “if Bent were in the army, he’d be court-martialled for insubordination”. Look, if Bent were in the army, we might have done even worse in Iraq.
Following the near-collapse of Setanta, EPL Talk reports ESPN will begin showing two live Premier League matches per week (Saturdays, 7:45am EST, Mondays, 3pm EST) starting with August 15th’s Chelsea v. Hull City tilt.
Those two weekly timeslots were previously held by Setanta Sports who in the past had sub-licensed those games from Fox Soccer Channel. Despite Setanta losing the two timeslots to ESPN, Setanta US will continue showing the two 10am ET Saturday slots (one game on Setanta US, and the other on Setanta Xtra), as well as the early Sunday morning ET kickoffs and the Tuesday and Wednesday midweek Premier League matches. The games shown by Setanta will also be available on its broadband package at http://www.setanta-i.com.
There’s no word yet from Bristol about which combination of Alexi Lalas, Tommy Smyth, Janusz Michallik and/or Qadry Ismail will be calling the games, but rest assured once the team is unveiled, I’ll be complaining about it.
Longtime England manager Bobby Robson (shown above in 1987, with Gary Linekar on his right and Bryan Robson to his left) passed away earlier today following a long battle with cancer. Though best known for a tumultuous spell managing the England team, Robson achieved considerable success at Ipswich during a club career that included tenures at Fulham, Newcastle, Sporting Lisbon, PSV Eindhoven, Porto and Barcelona. The following excerpt from the Telegraph’s Friday morning obit picks up around the time of England’s 1990 World Cup campaign, 4 years after Robson’s side was victimized by Diego Maradona in Mexico.
Robson again found himself pilloried by the newspapers. Not only had England performed wretchedly in the 1988 European Championships, but details of an alleged love affair had also surfaced, and the FA had crassly announced that whatever happened in the World Cup, Robson would be replaced at its end. Normally a genial man, for much of the tournament Robson wore the air of a man under siege.
The side was once more handicapped by the absence of Bryan Robson, and by the inexperience of some players caused by the ban on English clubs entering European competition after the Heysel disaster; but the emergence of David Platt, and Robson’s acceptance of the players’ wish to employ a sweeper system, brought the team through to a semi-final meeting with Germany in Turin. It was the first time that England had reached this stage since 1966.
Yet again, in a match that was always bound to be close, luck went against Robson. The Germans scored with a freak deflection off Paul Parker, and though Lineker equalised magnificently, the outcome fell to be determined by penalties. Waddle ballooned his over the bar, and England were out. They subsequently lost the third-place match to Italy.
There were many observers who felt that, had the result in Turin gone the other way, Robson’s side might well have prevailed in the Final against Argentina. Instead, the nature of his defeat haunted Robson for years afterwards, and he could never speak about it in a manner that implied he had come to terms with it.
In the wake of a quartet of players being suspended after a match fixing scandal stemming from a 2008 League Two contest between Accrington Stanley and Bury, When Saturday Comes’ Alex Wolstenholme stresses such news “is unlikely to halt the growing popularity of betting on football and the firm acceptance of the gaming industry into the sport.”
Once hidden behind the closed doors and frosted windows of the high street, the betting industry is now an increasingly familiar part of the sporting world in general and football in particular. Club websites have a link to an official betting partner, while bookmakers have sponsored teams, competitions and whole leagues such as the Blue Square Premier. This summer, Nottingham Forest and Wolves became the latest clubs to announce such sponsorship deals, with Victor Chandler and Sportingbet respectively. Meanwhile, former professionals and football presenters, such as Jeff Stelling, Chris Kamara (above) and Carlton Palmer, adorn the shop windows of the big betting companies, appear in television adverts and write columns in the racing press.
Until 2000, the Football League’s “minimum trebles” rule prevented betting on individual English games unless they were live on television, the presence of the cameras deemed enough of a deterrent to potential match-fixers to allow singles to be placed on a live game. The abolishment of the rule, coupled with the end of the ten per cent betting tax, provided a massive boost to football betting. Today a huge range of English games, including non-League matches, can be bet on individually. An astonishing array of markets at home and abroad is now on offer at the betting shop, at the other end of the phone and online.
Slow news days are often enlivened by stories claiming that a particular manager is under pressure after a bookmaker announces they have slashed their odds or closed the book on him being sacked. Often it can take only a small amount of money to change the odds and yet the story can grow a life of its own as a reaction is sought to the “news”. The only thing that bookmakers won’t be offering odds on next season is the number of matches that will be subject to official investigation.
Liverpool captain Steven Gerrard has been cleared of affray charges stemming from an infamous dust-up over a DJ’s choice of records, causing the Guardian’s Barney Ronay to observer, “The nuts and bolts of life as a Premier League footballer have long been an object of popular fascination: the high-spec girlfriends, the trophy cars, the house with its two-tonne stone bath and plasma-screened broom cupboards.” In the aftermath of the hearings, however, “one of our most distant Premier League millionaires has been made to look, if not exactly very nice, then at least recognisably everyday.”
For a start The Lounge Inn, scene of Gerrard’s misadventures, sounds reassuringly terrible. Is it a lounge? Or an inn? One Southport website describes it as a hangout for “wannabe gangsters and Sunday-football hardmen” and photographs show a gloomy joint with beech-veneer cladding and UPVC double glazing. Gerrard entered the Lounge last December in search of some fairly standard all-male group revelry, which he found in the company of two Accrington Stanley footballers (one 18 years old), four other youngish men and – oddly, but entirely innocent in all this – the 58-year-old former Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish.
CCTV footage shows the group drinking bottles of beer on the dancefloor, singing football songs and downing those Jammy Donut shots, a grisly thing made with Baileys, raspberry liqueur and sugar syrup. Gerrard’s actions at this time have been described as “waving his arms in the air”, rather than the more charitable “dancing”, and throughout he remains crammed into a skin-tight powder-blue V-neck, despite the fact that it’s the wee hours and he’s in a crowded basement.
So far, so normal. In fact, even the climactic dust-up with the bar’s temporary DJ has an appealing mundanity. In Gerrard’s evidence, the exchange runs like a whiny late-night teenage altercation: “He basically said to me ‘I am not putting your music on’. It was quite aggressive, and I said ‘What’s the fucking problem, why can’t I put my music on?’” The identity of the exact song Gerrard was so infuriatingly refused has already been widely debated. Here’s what we know: his favourite artist is Phil Collins. He also likes “dance music”. The person he’d most like to meet is Britney Spears. The fact remains, we may never know the exact truth.
We can only presume this is how Bill Plaschke would’ve liked to see Manny Ramirez treated a few nights ago. The Guardian’s Marcus Christian on midfielder David Beckham’s return to the Home Depot Center after an extended spell on loan to AC Milan — who just happened to be the MLS Galaxy’s exhibition opponents last night.
The former England captain was held back by security staff, who also needed to restrain an angry fan who left his seat and rushed towards the footballer. The 34-year-old afterwards tried to explain what had happened by saying: “One of the guys was saying things that really wasn’t very nice. It was stepping over the line. I said ‘You need to calm down and come shake my hand’ and he jumped over.” Asked whether his intention was to do “a Cantona” and attack the fan, Beckham smiled and said: “No, of course not.”
The man was arrested by California State Dominguez Hills police for trespassing because he left the seating area, a Home Depot Center spokeswoman said. “I know there was some turmoil in the corner but I didn’t see it so I can’t comment,” Galaxy manager Bruce Arena said. “Obviously, there were some dissenters in the early going but I think he won over a lot of people by the end.”
A section of the crowd booed Beckham every time he touched the ball and held aloft signs reading “Go Home Fraud” and “23: Repent” in reference to his shirt number. Another read: “Hey Becks, Here Before You, Here after You, Here Despite You” while one stated: “Is evil something u are … or something u do?”
OK, the above headline is not an actual tweet from Brian Ching, but it would could’ve been after the Houston Dynamo forward was hit with a $500 fine for his critique of an MLS official via Twitter. From the Houston Chronicle’s Bernardo Fallas :
Ching made the “tweet” during the Dynamo’s loss at the Seattle Sounders on Saturday afternoon. The matched was marred by controversy after referee Mark Geiger upheld a questionable goal call in favor of the Sounders.
“Ref in seattle just cheated the dynamo,” Ching wrote. “What a joke. Not even close. Ref is a cheat.”
The goal by Freddy Montero, which appeared to be saved at the goal line with a flying kick by Dynamo defender Mike Chabala, tied the score at 1 in the first half.
The Sounders went on to defeat the shorthanded Dynamo 2-1.
Ching did not play in the match, nor was he present at Qwest Field. He was in Foxborough, Mass., following the match via video as he and the United States national team prepared to take on Haiti in Gold Cup competition.
How might the landscape of US professional or collegiate sports be affected if, instance, Nike or Majestic were to go belly up on the eve of a new season? OK, I’ve employed a bit of hyperbole with the above headline, but with the fate of Canterbury in flux, a number of European teams might well search for vintage shirts on eBay. From the Guardian’s Owen Gibson :
Rival sportswear firms have wasted no time in making overtures to the wide range of rugby, football and cricket clubs affected by the collapse of Canterbury Europe, plunged into administration on Monday with the loss of 72 jobs. All of its contracts were summarily cancelled. Portsmouth – currently in limbo as they await a new owner with no permanent manager, no new players and now no kit supplier – will be among those affected, along with the Scottish Rugby Union and Heineken Cup holders Leinster. All were in the first or second year of new deals running until 2012 and worth up to £1m a year. The affected clubs, also including London Wasps, Cardiff Blues and Yorkshire County Cricket Club, will be treated as unsecured creditors.
The SRU was forced to cancel the planned launch yesterday of an alternative Scotland kit, while Portsmouth are due to launch their new kit on Tuesday – and as of yesterday were still encouraging fans to pre-order on their website. The administrator, KPMG, will continue to run the business in administration with a skeleton staff and the company’s New Zealand operation is unaffected.
On 14 June 2002, a group that would have been bizarre by any showbiz standards, but was completely weird in the context of a Westcountry city, arrived at St James Park. First soul diva Patti Boulaye belted out a number. Then David Blaine, sans box, shuffled a few cards. Then the King of Pop falteringly took to the stage.
“Hello to you wonderful people of Exeter,” he said to much screaming, before going on to talk (in the loosest sense of the world) about helping children with Aids, eradicating malaria and then urging the crowd to hold hands and tell their neighbour how much they loved each other. This hasn’t yet caught on at home game
For good measure, Uri Geller invited Jackson onto the board of directors, an offer the King of Pop accepted, although he never made it to any meetings. It would have been nice to think, though, that the singer was sat in his Neverland ranch pouring over reports of sausage roll sales from the Big Bank catering shack.
Geller and John Russell didn’t stop there. Further announcements were made about a series of concerts at St James Park featuring some of the biggest names in pop. Russell is reported to have told one fan he would “get his arse out in the window of Burton’s” if Madonna didn’t end up playing the Park. Madge may not have joined Jacko in visiting Exeter, but the high street window of the men’s clothes shop has, thankfully, remained a nudity-free zone to this day.
Javier Florez, a midfielder for the Atletico Junior team of the Caribbean city if Barranquilla, ran from the scene of the shooting but soon turned himself in to authorities.
Witnesses told police Florez shot Israel Castillo with a handgun after the 27-year-old electrician called him a “maleta” — which in Colombian parlance describes a “lousy” player.
Atletico Junior lost the Apertura Championship final to a team called Once Caldas late last month.
Sir Charles particularly highlighted the “gratuitous inclusion of Mr Levi’s home address” in one of the programme articles, and in another, “the reference to [Mr Levi's] home telephone number being in the telephone book, which was in effect an invitation to Leeds fans to pester Mr Levi.”
Bates was ordered to pay Levi’s costs which, together with Bates’ own costs, are estimated to be approaching £1.5m. In his evidence last month, Bates told the court that despite receiving £17m from Roman Abramovich when the Russian oligarch bought Chelsea from him in 2003, Bates does not in fact have much cash. He said he was not in a position to put money into Leeds when the club was in financial difficulties, because: “People can be rich, but not cash rich – they have assets.” Sir Charles asked Bates if he was saying that was his position, and Bates replied: “Yes.”
Earlier today, noted global soccer expert Colin Cowherd mentioned the US v. Spain semi had yet to kick off, but “Spain’s already ahead, 4-0″.
Hopefully, ESPN’s midafternoon mouthpiece will in the future, restrict his commentary to subjects in which he has actual expertise. Not sure how he’ll fill more than 30 seconds a day with such content, but when in doubt, there’s always his boner for Courtney Love.
Last week, I linked to a story by the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Opdyke about Stephen Constantine, a British-born coach who specializes in turning around benighted national soccer programs in blighted nations. It didn’t occur to me that Opdyke’s piece might’ve been part of a WSJ series on soccer in the worst nations on earth, but the arrival today of an un-bylined piece in the Journal about soccer in Myanmar makes me wonder if it is. It’s a good idea for a series, either way.
The article, credited to “A WSJ Staff Reporter,” details the scene at a soccer game in Yangon, Myanmar. Myanmar is pretty far down there in both the UN Development and FIFA rankings. The article works very well as a vivid look at the persistence of this particular pastime even in flat-broke, super-repressive, ultra-nutty — that is: governed by totally unaccountable astrology-obsessed generals — nations, but the thing that’s most interesting to me in the story actually only barely gets mentioned. That’s the presence of international players in Burma’s league.
With salaries topping out at $1,000 a week, it wouldn’t seem worth it to play soccer in one of the saddest and most profoundly effed-up countries out there. Not to belabor the point, but this is a failed state so failed that it’s not even clear what its (now-discredited) ideology of choice is — there’s presumably something Marxist going on there, but the impression I got after reading George Packer’s terrific story on the country in last August’s New Yorker is that there isn’t really anything at all guiding or governing the military junta’s decisions besides an all-encompassing urge to repress and the aforementioned astrology obsession. The government buys arms from North Korea and helps other nations do the same; the generals let citizens die after last year’s typhoons because they didn’t want to admit NGOs or health organizations — it’s that awesomely awful a place. And yet the author mentions that there are Argentines and Cameroonians and Ivoirians playing in the league, and even interviews a few. At the risk of taking anything away from a very interesting piece that obviously took a lot of balls to research and write, I want to know about those guys. Even without that, though, it’s definitely worth a read. Here’s a taste:
As Myanmar’s economy sank under international sanctions and the military’s neglect, the country’s soccer prowess waned. By the 1990s, the national team was often a source of embarrassment, and in 2000, it abruptly withdrew from qualifying matches for the World Cup 2002 — a retreat for which it offered no explanation at the time. International soccer authorities then disqualified the team from the 2006 Cup as well.
As the national team fizzled, fans had to settle for amateur league games played by squads linked to government departments, with names such as “Central Supply and Transport Depot” and “Forestry.”
The new league aims to change that. In an email, Ko Soe Moe, a spokesman for the Myanmar Football Federation, said the league was created because “Myanmar football needs to change to professional to get more achievements in international competitions.” He also said the league wants “to “create entertainment for local fans.”
…Much of the action is slow, and daily downpours, common in Yangon this time of year, turn many games into mudfests. But there are also moments of drama and skill. “Football in this manner could only be seen before” in European leagues, said Soe Moe, a furniture salesman who attends matches.
David Roth wrote effusively last year of Thierry Henry’s clinical performance during an star-studded L.E.S friendly, and it just so happens Steve Nash and Claudio Reyna are hosting the charity event, “Showdown In Chinatown” once again tomorrow afternoon in Lower Manhattan’s Roosevelt Park.
Nash’s soccer credentials as a former Tottenham trialist have been mentioned in this space before, but for those unconvinced the two-time NBA MVP can go toe-to-toe with the world’s football greats…the above video won’t change your thinking.
(will the The Special One make the jump to the WWL? Better yet, when does Mario Rosenstock let loose on Bill Belichick?)
Earlier this month, Setanta’s failure to make a contracted payment to the SPL was described by this author as “the worst news to hit the football biz since the On Digital debacle.” Of course, that was before I imagined Trey Wingo hosting a Sunday soccer roundtable discussion. From the Daily Mail :
ESPN have secured a clean sweep of beleaguered Setanta’s Barclays Premier League TV packages for the next four seasons.
Sportsmail understands that the Disney-owned TV channel, who already broadcast two sports channels to the UK on the Sky platform, will be the owners of both Setanta’s packages for next season – a total of 46 games.
Sky have purchased the five other bundles for season 2010-11 and were not allowed to buy the sixth.
Setanta lost the right to broadcast the matches on Friday after failing to meet a deadline for a £10million payment to the Premier League
Setanta has around 1.2m subscribers, but this is below the 1.9m it needs to break even, and it is currently thought to be running at a loss of nearly £100m a year.
It suspended new subscriptions earlier this month, prompting fears over the future of the business, and also recently missed a £3million payment to the Scottish Premier League.
If you spend any time looking at the list of American basketball players doing their thing abroad — and there’s no reason why you should — you’re more or less guaranteed a couple of “oh wow” moments. As fans of teams or programs, the constant churn of personnel (that is, people) on and off of rosters enforces a serious foreshortening of our memories. Marquis Estill almost made the Philadelphia 76ers a few years ago, but he didn’t stop playing basketball after that didn’t work out (he’s in the United Arab Emirates); and this is true of the legions of Korleone Youngs and Matt Friejes and Rodney Whites and whoever else you might remember for your own reasons — their careers (that is, jobs) don’t expire with their 10-day contracts, they just get moved to China.
In contrast to the drudgery of our (my) day-to-day, the kind of travel and compromise required of people in pro sports doesn’t necessarily seem that bad. It’s just that, at all but the highest levels, there’s an extraordinary amount of travel-you-would-rather-not-do and ridiculous compromise required to make these already time-limited gigs sustainable. There is no perfect job, I’m saying. You already know this, and probably don’t need to be reminded. But Stephen Constantine’s life, as described by Jeff Opdyke in a story for the Wall Street Journal, is an interesting reminder of how extremely onerous pro-sport dues can be, especially for those with the least to lose.
Constantine is a coach who specializes in turning around national soccer programs, and has had great success in elevating ultra-moribund national teams in Malawi, India and Nepal into respectability. Constantine’s goal is a coaching gig in the United States or the UK, but this particular round of establishing himself means that the 46-year-old lives apart from his wife and daughters — who live in Cyprus (naturally) where he once coached (double-naturally) — and currently resides in… Sudan. Where he is trying to turn around a national soccer program in a country that has something of a genocide problem.
“I seem to get the really tough jobs others don’t want,” Mr. Constantine said while his team trained on a Tunisian beach. “People back in England say I’m dedicated and brave to take these coaching jobs, but I don’t see that. It sounds corny, but I feel privileged making my living doing what I love—building football teams.”
A key test for Sudan comes in a World Cup qualifier Saturday , when African powerhouse Ghana visits Khartoum. Few expect Sudan to slay a four-time African cup winner that qualified for the last World Cup and multiple Olympics and is stacked with athletes playing throughout Europe’s top leagues. Then again, Sudan has home turf. And in the last home qualifier in March, the Desert Hawks, with five players who had never played internationally, tied significantly higher-ranked Mali.
Even for Mr. Constantine, his new assignment is like no other. Sudan is blanketed by dire travel warnings that include threats of land mines and terrorist attacks. Just days after his arrival, the International Criminal Court indicted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. British Embassy personnel urged Mr. Constantine to skip his first match for safety concerns. He ignored the warning.
So, yeah, working on the payroll of a guy convicted by the ICC for crimes against humanity is probably tougher than a gig that involves having Wally Matthews agitating self-amusedly for your firing. But it’s a living, I guess. It’s worth reading the whole piece.
Sports Agency the Wasserman Media Group, while not quite as delusional as Darren Heitner, are awfully competitive when it comes to astonishing audacity on behalf of their clientele. Here’s an excerpt from a brochure they’re circulating while trying to drum up interest in former golden boy Michael Owen.
“Were it not for an unhappy spell at Real Madrid and two injury-scarred years at Newcastle, he would be spoken about in the same breath as Torres and Ronaldo and valued in the priceless figures that only match-winning goalscorers ever justify.”
Scoffs Who Ate All The Pies‘ Ollie Irish, “WMG produced the glossy brochure to help convince the likes of Everton, Aston Villa, West Ham and Man City – all of whom have expressed an interest in signing Owen – that Owen is actually a thoroughbred in the same class as Senor Torres and Senor C-Ron, and not, as some people suspect, a past-it crock.”
The headline in my RSS feed read “Ref Accepts Beatings To Serve Community”, and my first reaction was, “why is the Guardian’s Paul Doyle interested in Tim Donaghy? Alas, he’s actually writing about the obstacles faced by Ugandan soccer official Aziz Okware.
Ask Aziz Okware what it takes to make it as an referee in Uganda and his answer is instantaneous. “Above all you have to accept being beaten up,” he replies. “I have been beaten several times in matches. It starts when a player protests against a decision – he will usually only shout at you but some of the fans will get violent. High school games are the worst because if they think you’ve got something wrong they can throw stones at you.”
Why, then, does this 26-year-old officiate? “For three reasons,” he says. “Firstly because I love football. Secondly because I want to serve my community. And also because if I make it to the Super League I might be able to earn a career.” Aziz says he has all the qualifications to officiate in the top flight but is not considered for selection by the national federation because he cannot afford to pay the UGX87,000 (just over £24) registration fee. Every week he thus misses out on a potential UGX30,000 (£8.34p) match fee, instead having to make do with “little pieces” from local games and the UGX15,000 (£4.17p) per day he and the other officials are being paid at the Katine tournament.
When Tom Hicks (above) and George Gillet acquired Liverpool F.C. in August of 2007, “all their talk was of cherishing Liverpool’s heritage, of the Kop, name-checked repeatedly by Hicks in his Texan drawl, of a golden future to replicate the glorious past,” write the Guardian’s David Conn. The financial evidence to the contrary, however, puts the club’s ability to compete at an elite level squarely on the shoulders of Rafael Benitez’ ability to find (relative) bargains).
The accounts released on Thursday, covering the year to 31 July 2008 for Liverpool Football Club and Hicks’ and Gillett’s holding company, Kop Football – ultimately owned, naturally, in the low-tax US state of Delaware via the Cayman Islands – set this out in black and white. In part the figures, revealing a £42.6m loss made in a bumper year when the club turned over £164.2m, confirmed what we already knew. The North American pair borrowed the £185m to take over Liverpool and although they promised in those choreographed public appearances not to “do a Glazers”, they have loaded the responsibility for paying those debts on to the club itself.
With £313m already spent of a £350m loan facility with the Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia few believe the new stadium will be built anytime soon, since that, too, has to be financed with borrowed money, currently projected at about £400m.
While Chelsea have Abramovich reaching into his pockets again, and Manchester City were bought by an owner blessed with an outrageous fortune, Manchester United and Arsenal have major borrowings to service too. Liverpool may not fall too far behind just yet if Benítez can spend his budget wisely this summer and has luck with injuries next season.
It is, though, difficult to see where the club can get to under the current owners. Even if the £350m loan is continued there are questions over Hicks and Gillett’s ability or willingness to fund the club further themselves. Two and a half years since the arrival of these “good” Americans, the new stadium remains on the drawing board, and Liverpool are servicing huge debts, including the £185m cost of being taken over by the pair in the first place. It is difficult to see quite how it all fits in with that rose-tinted commitment, made at the beginning, to cherish the heritage of Liverpool FC.
Back in the mid-1990’s, I either associated the name Setanta with some a-ok Edwyn Collins records or nursing Saturday AM hangovers watching Premiership matches on satellite at Nevada Smith’s on 3rd Avenue in lower Manhattan. Over the following decade and a half, the company responsible for the latter has transformed soccer viewing habits in both North American and Great Britain for better or worse. On Monday, the following Guardian report from Ewan Murray might well be the worst news to hit the football biz since the On Digital debacle.
Fears intensified for the future of Setanta last night as it emerged it has defaulted on a payment to the Scottish Premier League. Sources north of the border have confirmed a routine payment to SPL clubs, thought to total about £3m, did not arrive as scheduled yesterday.
Neither the broadcaster nor the SPL would comment on the matter but it raises serious questions over the viability of Setanta’s commitment to Scottish football and the other parts of its rights portfolio. Following a meeting in London, one source has revealed an email was sent to staff in Glasgow confirming the payment had not been made and that no comment was to be given under any circumstances to the media.
Setanta has been thrown into turmoil following its failure to retain half of the 46 English Premier League games it will screen live until the end of next season. From 2010-11 it will show only 23 English top-flight matches a season. It has recently made payments as scheduled to the Football Association, with whom it has a deal for FA Cup and England matches, but is actively fresh seeking investment.
A meeting between SPL clubs and Setanta early last month sought to secure a way forward as the broadcaster sought to renegotiate the terms of its wide-ranging sports coverage. The options suggested at that time were understood to be a cut of as much as £30m from the extended contract or a shortening of the deal by two years. No formal agreement has been reached, however, with news of the missed payment sure to prompt concern over whether Setanta can service the SPL at all.
