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Gazza
Football blamed for violence again!
Chinese to Invade Korea
More Lira than Sense

All this stemmed from the frightening prospect that Gary Neville is England's most capped current player and the possibility that if Beckham was unable to captain the side it could be Neville who assumed the armband. Indeed an unsettling thought. Such are the dilemmas that occur in a Kentish Town cafe when one should really be working. A few minutes later we had moved on to Gazza. Had I seen his recent interviews? did he not seem a good deal more sane and focussed than before? Was he not in good physical shape? Could he not fill that space on the left of midfield? He's strong, holds the ball up well and can always find that killer pass to free Owen. And then the full story began to unfold.

After a run of form in the Premiership Gazza forces his inclusion in the England squad, despite reservations about his previous behaviour Sven is unable to ignore the fact that he's back to his best. Beckham is injured in a brutal semi-final with Argentina. After scoring a late winner he is removed from the game by his nemesis Simeone. By now the nation is going crazy and there is only one man who can lead England in the final- Gazza.

France are tough opposition but five minutes from time Gazza cuts in from the left, lifts the ball casually over a static Thuram and volleys it past a flabbergasted Barthez at the near post. Gazza lifts the cup donning a pair of plastic comedy breasts, tears streaming down his face and dripping off the pert moulded nipples.

Football gets the blame again!

Only four months to go and, as if by order, stories of violence in and around football are filling the pages of UK newspapers.

Firstly there have been the cases of players involved in assault, affray and other disorder charges. The Bowyer/Woodgate incident concentrated the media on the behaviour of players off the pitch. The racial overtones of an attack on an Asian student undoubtedly made the story a tad more juicy for the media and generated so much attention that the trial had to be suspended due to the possibility of jury bias. Fortunately for the players concerned they were acquitted of serious charges relating to to incident, but Bowyer's arrogance at initially refusing to accept punishment by his club can have done him no favours. He was, after all, arrested as a younger man after racially abusing and assaulting a MacDonalds' employee, and added to a poor disciplinary record on the pitch his thuggish behaviour has rightly kept him out of the England set-up. A waste of a very talented player.

Now John Terry has managed to exclude himself from the England camp. This season he has been one of the outstanding defenders in the premier league, forming an almost unbeatable partnership with young William Gallas. A drunken brawl with a nightclub bouncer has seen this most promising career put on hold and again the papers are screaming about rich primadonnas who think they can throw their weight around with no regard for the law. Not only that, but the misbehaviour of players is being linked with a recent rise in hooliganism by fans.

Cardiff have long had a reputation for the aggression amongst their support so it could not have surprised many observers when missiles were thrown and a pitch invasion took place after their cup win over Leeds. Since then, coins and bottles have been chucked onto the pitch at White Hart Lane, Stamford Bridge and Millwall's imfamous Dell.

However, in reality how serious is the disorder that apparently grips our game?

There are nearly a thousand young men playing in our Premier league at any one time. I'm sure that if you observed a similar sized cross-section of 17-35 year old men from any town in the UK you would find a considerable number of drug users, fighters, heavy drinkers. In fact levels of criminality in the general population are far higher than amongst our footballers. Our players are, in general, actually setting a very good example.

On a similar note we find that there is actually not an enormous amount of violence at, or around football grounds. I don't get to as many games as I'd like to but it's a long time since I've actully witnessed anything that could be described as football hooliganism, whereas I'd be hard pressed to remember a saturday night when I haven't seen people beating the shit out of each other outside the Carlton Suite (Bobby Charlton) in Liskeard.

Perhaps it's about time that the media started to have a good look at the huge potential football has to provide a positive force at every level of society. In fact, rather than causing violence itself, football is actually tainted by the violence of society in general and in fact is a remarkably constructive force on an individual, local, national and even international level.

September 11th was a Saturday. I remember that because in Montpellier we played every saturday at 4pm. Shocked by the days events Sir Alex Fullerson and I made a mangerial decision to go ahead as usual. A couple of the American lads who normally turned up phoned to say that they weren't up for it, but we took our motley crew down to the Pierre Rouge to take on a bunch of Arab lads from the poorer side of town. The game was, as ever with them, hard and very competitive, at times filthy and brutal. I cynically chopped one of their strikers in the box and got away with it, whilst our pacy Lebanese import Samir was battered and bleeding from tackles at the other end. After 90 minutes we emerged with the utmost respect for one other and loved each other like brothers. And there was nothing Bush or Bin Laden could do to stop us.

Chinese to Invade Korea.

FIFA's announcement that China would be able to play all their first-round games in Korea was the first time that special rules governing the location of matches due to economic, cultural or political considerations had been brought into use. The worry was that Chinese fans would not be able to afford to travel to Japan to support their team.

Obviously the problem was not one of travel, but one of economics. For the majority of Chinese it is actually cheaper to reach Japan than South Korea, on the ferries that cross the Yellow Sea in increasing numbers since China's relative political thaw. The major obstacle is the prohibitive cost of food, travel and accomodation within Japan, particularly in relation to the inadequate average wage of Chinese supporters.

Whilst I have every sympathy with them, surely this is a general problem of holding the World Cup in one of the most expensive countries on earth. I, for one, don't have the ready cash to make the journey. Some brief calculations suggest that my annual income is greater than the average of at least 20 of the participating nations, so I surmise that a similar situation applies to them as well. More statistical manipulation indicates that merely buying a return ticket to Tokyo from Douala would cost your average Cameroon supporter 18 months hard graft. If he/she was hungry on arrival, 2 days work would buy a cheese sandwich. A plastic hole in a wall to sleep in for one night would weigh in at a week's wages. A month's work would just about cover a match ticket in the first round. The rise of Africa has been one of world football's most exciting developments over the last dozen years. It's a crying shame that they won't be able to thrill us off the pitch as well as on it. So why is China getting preferential treatment?

Surely there must be some political manouevering in this decision. Is it mere coincidence that world power China has the competition stacked in its favour, whilst no-one ever gave a second thought to the billions of other supporters who have been denied to chance to see their idols in the flesh? It's not as if the Chinese won't be able to sell their quota of tickets. Despite the gap in incomes between China and Japan I'm sure 50,000 of China's 1.3 billion population could afford the trip to Japan. I suspect rather less than that number will make it from Cameroon. I appreciate that the 50,000 Chinese who could afford the trip would be at the top end of the income scale in their country, but I don't anticipate that moving their matches to slightly cheaper (but still by Chinese terms very expensive) Korea will encourage a movement of the proletariat comparable to the Long March.

The fact is that politics and sport are inextricably linked. This is not always a bad thing. One of the highlights of France 1998 was the tense Iran/USA tie, and the England/Germany rivalry is one of the greatest in football history. It's a shame, however, when politicians seek to gain advantage for one team over the others in a tournament. Admittedly the Chinese haven't got a cat in hell's chance of winning the cup and are unlikely even to qualify from group C, so reactions to FIFA's decision have been muted. I'm sure that if there had been an attempt to give preferential treatment to one of football's greater powers I would be joined by a more vociferous chorus of protest.

Maybe I should just stop moaning and apply to FIFA for 5 grand so that I can afford to go and watch England play. Or maybe I'll just have to settle for the victory parade through London when they come home with the cup.

Chester

More Lira Than Sense.

This year there are definitely two main things everybody should learn:

1) The well-constructed teams almost never are the ones that were built with hundreds of millions of dollars.(Juventus this year spent about 200 million dollars). The whole Chievo first team's salaries (at the moment Chievo is ranked first in the league), including managers, trainers and others, are less than the salary of Francesco Totti.

I'm actually a Roma fan, and consequently I consider Totti the best italian player, maybe one of the best in the world but, the question now is: is this really necessary? Or could a cheaper way to win can be found?

The major source of income for football teams are the TV rights. But Pay-per-view TV is collapsing in Italy because of the huge sums paid to teams and because of the falling audience. This last thing happens because of the overwhelming amount of football on offer in Italy and also because italians are not used to pay for TV. Some teams (Roma and Lazio for now) have announced they will apply a salary cap (about 75 millions EUR per year)for the first team players. This means that these two teams will not suffer bankruptcy so easily but also that if this rule will not apply to all teams, Roma and Lazio will have to reduce the number of players and consequently be less competitive to all the fronts.

2) ALMOST nobody is indispensible.
Back to Juventus. They bought this year:
- Buffon (maybe the best keeper today): 50 million dollars.
- Nedved (one of the best midfielders in the world): 40 million dollars.
- Salas (a great, profilic striker): 30 million dollars.
- Thuram (a great defender): 35 million dollars.

They only sold Zidane for 75 million dollars to Real Madrid. They claimed to have great business sense selling a 30 year old player at such a high price, and now? They are 7 points behind the mighty Chievo, because nobody provides the assists for their attackers. They spent 85 million dollars buying defenders while they had the best defence last year. Now Salas is also injured for 1 year and they have to buy another attacker. This is a stupid way to waste money.

Lazio. This team is present at the italian stock exchange. This year they "recognised" their balance was a bit, how can I say, "not wealthy", and they decided to sell somebody:
-Nedved
-Salas
-Veron
They made a great market boom buying Mendieta for 42 million dollars. Mendieta is now recognised as a mistake, they have nobody to create. (Veron has left).

Their defence, in spite of Nesta, was failing, and they bought Stam for 25 million dollars (a 30 year old defender). Stam's health condition was not clear but he started playing well for 1 month and now he has been found positive to doping, and is out for at least 1 year.

Now they are out of the champions league, they declared they have too many players, and they can't find buyers because lazio players' salaries are too high for everybody.

Do I have to say more about the way the football is going today?

Shivan 17/11/01