No Shortage of Spice for Beckham
According to Fabrizio Ravanelli, there’s no league like the English Premier League.
Which is why England national team captain and Manchester United midfielder David Beckham should not give another thought to moving abroad, especially to Italy, Ravanelli told England’s Daily Mirror newspaper last week.
“Once, not so long ago, Italy was where the top footballers went to play,” the former Italian national team striker said. “Now, England is the only place to be.
“Why else would [Argentina’s] Juan Veron choose to move from Lazio to United [for $39.5 million]? Forget the money, you have to appear in the Premier League because it is the best domestic league in the world.
“Let me put it this way, if United were in [Italy’s] Serie A, they would win the title, no question. Take it from me, I know.”
And then there’s the matter of Beckingham Palace.
Beckham is half of England’s most famous celebrity couple, the other half is his wife Victoria, better known as Posh Spice of the Spice Girls.
Their home is a $4-million mansion in Hertfordshire. Like so many English stately homes, it’s now open for touring, but only by computer.
A click on the web site https://www.victoriabeckham.mu leads visitors on a tour of so-called Beckingham Palace, a name, Victoria Beckham told Reuters, that has nettled some Britons.
“It’s quite tongue in cheek and it makes me laugh,” she said, “but there’s a lot of cynical people that say, ‘Who does she think she is?’ I’m only having a joke.”
Giant Rip-off
CONCACAF, whose Giants Cup third-place game and final will be played at the Coliseum today starting at 1 p.m., is not the only organization being ripped off by teams refusing to bring their top players to games in the United States.
On Saturday night, Colombia was scheduled to play Liberia as part of a doubleheader at Giants Stadium in New Jersey. But did the Copa America champions bring their first team?
Not a chance.
Colombia’s roster included none of its World Cup players and only five of its Copa America players. Of those five, only one played in the final against Mexico and that player, Mauricio Molina, played only the last three minutes.
It’s time U.S. Soccer stopped sanctioning meaningless matches in this country. American fans deserve better.
Burning Desire
Spurs, the English club formally known as Tottenham Hotspur, found itself involved in a shirt controversy earlier this year when it did the unthinkable and sold England national team defender Sol Campbell to rival Arsenal.
Furious Spur fans by the thousands were left stuck with Campbell replica shirts which they were angry enough to discard or destroy. That prompted the soccer web site Football.365 to suggest an alternate course of action.
The web site suggested Spur fans to donate the jerseys to the local soccer team in Kerewan, Gambia, one of Africa’s poorest nations.
The team, Football.365 said, “would be delighted to be kitted out in Tottenham’s glorious kit, even if it bears the name of their arch defector.”
Bench Them All
In June, a championship match almost had to be abandoned in Belo Horizonte, Brazil for two reasons.
First, a crowd of 46,000 was kept waiting for almost a half-hour as the two teams argued over who should sit on which bench.
Then, because of the delay, the game almost had to be called because of darkness. Brazil’s energy shortage means no floodlit matches can be played.
A Face in the Crowd
There was a strange item last week in which Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that China plans to pack the stands at its next World Cup qualifier with people that resemble its players and coach.
The idea, presumably, is to show solidarity with the team.
But where in that vast land is it going to find anyone who looks like Bora Milutinovic?
China has never qualified for the World Cup. But under the guidance of the Serbian-born Milutinovic, a former Mexico, Costa Rica, U.S. and Nigeria coach, it has advanced to the final round of qualifying, where it will meet Oman, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan.
