CORNER KICKS
1 Landon Donovan is delighted that Honduran striker Carlos Pavon today will become the latest high-profile player to join the Galaxy when he is introduced at the Home Depot Center.
“I’m ecstatic about Pavon,” Donovan said Tuesday in Chicago, where the U.S. is preparing for its Gold Cup semifinal match against Canada at Soldier Field on Thursday.
Donovan is just as pleased about the recent additions of Portuguese defender Abel Xavier and American forward Edson Buddle.
“It’s going to make us more competitive in training,” he said. “Now all of a sudden we have competition for starting spots. Now there are 18 guys who are good enough to play. That helps massively. We’re going to get better, that’s for sure.”
2 DaMarcus Beasley, who had a disappointing World Cup in 2006, has bounced back well and the U.S. winger is playing like his old self again. “I finally got over all my injuries,” he said. “I had a lot of criticism last summer. A lot of it was on my shoulders and Landon’s. You learn from those type of things. You try to accept that.
“Now I feel 100% fit. My hamstring is not bothering me. My ankle problems are gone. I’m finally at a point where I can go out and play at the highest level I can.”
Scottish Premier League club Rangers has offered Dutch champion PSV Eindhoven $1.5 million for Beasley, but Beasley said no deal had been finalized.
3 World Cup-winning defender Roberto Carlos, whose tenure at Real Madrid saw him win seven major titles, Tuesday was greeted by thousands of fans in Istanbul when he officially joined reigning Turkish champion Fenerbahce on a two-year contract that will pay the Brazilian a reported $5.3 million a year, plus bonuses.
Considered one of the world’s great left backs, Roberto Carlos, 34, won the European Champions League three times and the Spanish league title four times while with Real Madrid.
4 FIFA President Joseph “Sepp” Blatter, on a visit to South Africa this week to assess preparations for the 2010 World Cup, announced that a world all-star team would play an African all-star team in Cape Town on July 18 in honor of the 89th birthday of Nelson Mandela.
Cape Town is building a 68,000-seat seafront stadium that will stage one of the World Cup semifinals in 2010.
5 The row between Trinidad and Tobago’s players and their national soccer federation over unpaid World Cup bonuses was ratcheted up Tuesday with the release by FC Dallas goalkeeper Shaka Hislop of a letter he had sent to Jack Warner, the president of CONCACAF and a FIFA vice president.
Hislop, the starting goalkeeper on Trinidad and Tobago’s 2006 World Cup team, blasted what he termed Warner’s “latest slanderous attack” on the players for sticking up for their rights and questioned Warner’s impartiality.
“You have continually proven yourself heavily biased and opinionated in this matter,” wrote Hislop, president of the Football Players Assn. of Trinidad and Tobago.
Fielding a young team, Trinidad and Tobago was eliminated in the first round of the Gold Cup.
