How France ’98 Is Playing in Publications Around the Globe
FRANCE
From Dimanche
About the Spain-Nigeria game, won by Nigeria, 3-2, in an upset:
“[Coach] Javier Clemente couldn’t say he didn’t see it coming. Everyone agreed about the quality of the team he selected and found the one same weakness: his goalkeeper. Andoni Zubizarreta is eminently respectable, but yesterday he made a mistake from which the team couldn’t recover.”
About the Jamaican team: “From reggae to rigor.
“The image of Jamaican football years ago was of Bob Marley and his buddies on the beach, between joints, between concerts. A cliche that wasn’t far from wrong.
“But that was before 1994, when Rene Simoes, a little Brazilian, was hired by the president of the federation. The samba following reggae? Not at all. Simoes isn’t the type to laugh about soccer. His credo? A discipline of iron, imposed from his arrival. And it works. For the first time, Jamaica qualified for the World Cup finals.”
“In four years, Simoes succeeded in transforming the mentality of the Reggae Boyz. Previously amateurs, they have become professionals.”
L’Equipe, the French sports daily
Instead of a World Cup story, its front page was dominated by a huge picture of Eric Tabarly, the French sailor who was lost at sea on Saturday.
About Fernand Sastre, the co-president of the French World Cup organizing committee, who died Saturday at age 64:
“More than the family of football, it is all of French sport that weeps today with the passing of one of the great managers in history.”
ARGENTINA
From Clarin newspaper, essay by Spanish novelist and commentator Manuel Vasquez Montalban:
“Ronaldo [the Brazilian star] is a myth created by the FIFA [International Football Federation] to make us believe in the religion of soccer. But there is no religion without God, and the title of God of soccer has been vacant since Diego Maradona self-destructed.”
HONG KONG
From the South China Morning Post:
About Yugoslavia, which was banned from the last World Cup tournament:
“World football was the real loser by our absence,” said Yugoslav Coach Slobodan Santrac. “It was a bit like the Olympics in Los Angeles when the Russians were not there--who knows what the results would have been if they had participated?”
SOUTH AFRICA
From the Sunday Times in Johannesburg:
“The pall of gloom that hung over the South Africans after Friday’s 3-0 “Mauling in Marseille” at the hands of France intensified yesterday with the news that Benni McCarthy was out of the vital Group C game against Denmark on Thursday--and possibly out of the tournament altogether.
“Nothing, it seemed, could more aptly have confirmed a suspicion that the soccer gods were mocking South Africa’s excessive hopes of World Cup glory than by striking down with an injury the highly talented player.”
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Correspondents Helene Elliott in France, Maggie Farley in Hong Kong, Sebastian Rotella in Buenos Aires, Dean Murphy in Johannesburg contributed to this report.
