Even Paul couldn’t have predicted this year in soccer
Any year in which an English-born octopus residing in a German aquarium correctly “forecasts” the outcome of eight World Cup games has to be a weird one.
Yet that’s exactly what the late, lamented Paul the Octopus did last summer, and the seer with suckers was merely one of the dozens of bizarre stories surrounding soccer in 2010. Here are a few of them:
We begin in Scotland because, well, the place is kilt-deep in snow, we deserve a laugh and the Scots can take a joke. They have to, considering the deplorable faux pas made recently by Scottish Premier League team Airdrie United.
The club decided to honor war veterans on Remembrance Day with a special cover on its match day program for a game against Livingstone. Because the game was being sponsored by Network Rail, club officials sought and found a World War II photograph of troops on a train.
The program was published and distributed and such phrases as “Lest We Forget” and “Supporting Our Heroes” accompanied the photograph on the cover.
Then came an immense outcry. It turns out the troops were Nazis. Amid profuse but perplexing apologies, the program’s embarrassed compilers said they thought they were Australians.
Still in Scotland, there were more apologies after Scottish fans booed and jeered the Liechtenstein national anthem before an international match.
Why? Simple. It seems, the anthem has the same tune as “God Save the Queen,” which is not quite as popular in Glasgow as it is in London.
Wait just a minute, sister
Eder Lider Marmol is a Paraguayan defender who plies his trade for Atlante in Mexico.
Because he makes a pretty good living doing so, he was not surprised to hear that his sister, Perla, had been kidnapped in Paraguay and that the kidnappers were demanding $38,000 for her release.
What did surprise him was how quickly they agreed to accept $5,000 instead. And what astonished him completely was that police later found out that Perla had faked her own abduction in order to extort money from her brother.
Once bitten, twice shy
Taking a bite out of Mike Tyson’s playbook, Uruguay and Ajax Amsterdam striker Luis Suarez — the player whose intentional hand ball on the goal line against Ghana kept Uruguay alive in the World Cup — was suspended for seven games after biting PSV Eindhoven midfielder Otman Bakkal on the shoulder during a Dutch league game.
Meanwhile, Uruguay’s coach, Oscar Tabarez, suffered a much more serious bite to his pocketbook when he returned from South Africa 2010 and discovered that a family maid and a couple of accomplices had relieved him of $500,000 over the course of two years
Just why it took Tabarez so long to realize that withdrawals of up to $1,000 a day were being made from his bank accounts is unclear. Perhaps it was because the maid successfully covered the crime by destroying bank statements when they arrived at the Tabarez home.
Why St. Pauli rules
The best seats in the German Bundesliga can be found at St. Pauli’s ground in Hamburg.
They feature individual beer pumps at each seat and the club has constructed a model railroad that delivers piping hot sausages from the club kitchens directly to the VIP seats.
It being Germany, the trains run every five minutes and on time.
Breathe less, monsieur
Allergies are common; almost everyone has them.
But if you’re a soccer player named Yoan Gouffran and you’re good enough to start for Bordeaux in the French league, there’s one thing above all that you don’t want to be allergic to: grass.
Sadly, Gouffran can’t go near the green stuff, and that rankles his coach, former French World Cup star Jean Tigana.
“Clearly, this is not ideal,” Tigana said with superb understatement.
Taking aim at critics
Goalkeeper Donaldo Morales, who plays for Motagua in Honduras and also for the Honduras national team, didn’t like something written about him by journalist Saul Carranza.
His solution was to take an air gun to practice. He fired the gun, hitting Carranza twice and also winging his own teammate, Jorge Claros, who was being interviewed by the reporter.
Fortunately, the injuries were less serious than the damage to Morales’ reputation.
No presidential pardon
In Bolivia, Evo Morales drove his knee into an opponent’s groin during a match. Violent, yes, but not particularly uncommon in the course of a hard-fought game.
The problem is, it was a charity event and Morales is the president of Bolivia.
Wait, it gets better. Morales escaped the referee’s wrath, and it was the luckless man writhing on the ground who was ejected.
The game is a little different in La Paz.
What, no extra time?
Finally, the Leeds Badgers defeated the Warwick Wolves, 425-354, at the University of Warwick in England in the longest soccer game ever played.
The charity match lasted 57 hours and obliterated the previous record of 42 hours five minutes.
Major League Soccer games don’t last that long; it sometimes just seems that way.
