Cast of Characters Turns the Year Into a Real Kick

As the old year slips away, exit stage left, laughing....

First stop: Bochum in Germany, where the home team is valiantly trying to hold on to a 1-0 lead over Frankfurt with 20 minutes to play. Easier said than done.

It seems Frankfurt’s Sven Guenther, No. 2 in your program, is causing Bochum all sorts of problems, so Bochum Coach Peter Neuruer decides to send Brazilian midfielder Edu to shore up the defense.

Edu’s instructions are to shadow Guenther, but no one can tell him that. Edu does not speak German. No one at Bochum speaks Portuguese. The solution? Write No. 2 on a piece of paper and thrust it in Edu’s face. The light blinks on.

And as quickly blinks off again.

Because just as Edu enters the game, Frankfurt Coach Willi Reimann makes a substitution, sending No. 8 Stefan Lexa to replace -- you guessed it -- No. 2 Guenther. For the next several minutes, Edu wanders all over the field seeking the player he is supposed to be marking.

Furious shouts and gesticulations from the Bochum bench prove useless. Edu, 22, can’t understand the message, and after nine bewildering minutes he is yanked from the match.

“We had to act,” Neuruer said. “We didn’t have time for a language course.”

Incidents such as these made for some lively soccer in 2003, and they were not in short supply.

Leading Questions

Take, for instance, the case of Welshman Jamie Mardon, a Manchester United fan who found himself with a ticket to the English Charity Shield match at the beginning of the season. What Mardon also somehow “found” were a microphone and a set of headphones.

Armed with these, he strolled onto the field after the match at Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium and sought out his favorite player, Manchester United’s Welsh winger Ryan Giggs, and asked him a few questions.

It was not until Giggs “noticed the loose cable trailing from the mike and realized something was not quite right” that Mardon’s stint as a broadcaster interviewer came to an abrupt end. His day in court came later.

Midnight Madness

Javier Irureta, the 55-year-old coach of Deportivo La Coruna in Spain, was unimpressed by Barcelona’s tactic of scheduling a league match against Sevilla to kick off at 12:05 a.m.

“How are you going to expect your wife to believe that you are off to see the football at midnight?” he said. “She is just going to think you are cheating on her.”

April High Jinks

Irureta was born April 1, and soccer teams around the globe are not immune to pranks being played on that date.

This year, for example, there were several news agencies that fell for the story that Rangers of Scotland had signed promising Turkish striker Yardis Alpolfo -- until it was realized that the letters in his name could be rearranged to spell April Fools Day.

In Japan, one newspaper circulated rumors that David Beckham supposedly was furious that Manchester United Coach Alex Ferguson had scorned the singing ability of Beckham’s wife Victoria, a former Spice Girl.

The newspaper quoted Beckham’s Japanese agent, Shigatsu Baka, as saying the angry English midfielder would soon be joining a J-League team.

Trouble is, Shigatsu Baka is Japanese for April Fool.

Slippery Characters

The media circus that ensued in Spain when Beckham eventually joined Real Madrid was scathingly described as “a chimps’ tea party” by Uli Hoeness, Bayern Munich’s general manager.

Maybe so, but in Brazil, one disgruntled fan took the monkey business a step further.

A Corinthians supporter known as Roberto tied himself to a tree outside the club’s stadium and refused to leave until the starting lineup was altered to his satisfaction.

He sustained himself solely on bananas, tossing the skins at the club’s front door.

Just Plain Batty

This was also the year that Beckham’s mother-in-law revealed that the England captain has, or once had, a fear of birds.

Former England star Paul Gascoigne might have developed a similar fear of flying creatures.

He said that during his short stint with Gansu Tianma in the Chinese league he had eaten something odd.

“When they served it to me, I thought it was chicken,” Gascoigne said.

Turns out it was bat.

Red Cards All Around

When Como Calcio was relegated from Italy’s Serie A, Enrico Preziosi, the club’s president, blamed season-long bad officiating for its drop.

His response? As president of a toy company, he produced a game called “Catch the Ref,” in which players chase a referee and try to hit him with a hammer.

The Italian soccer federation was not amused and Preziosi stopped producing the game.

In Norway, referee Per Arne Brataas admitted that officials don’t always see things the right way. He said he was a good example.

Brataas, 52, was well known for his leniency, but it didn’t stem from having a kind heart. Brataas is dyslexic and despised the paperwork that followed the sanctioning of players.

“I was reluctant to give red cards,” he said. “I didn’t give yellow cards, either, so then I avoided having to write the reports.”

The Pain in Spain

Argentine international defender Juan Pablo Sorin bailed out of a Barcelona training session early one day, complaining of muscle pain in his right leg.

Unfortunately for Sorin, television cameras found him later that night dancing up a storm during a concert by the Argentine heavy metal band Bersuit.

The apologies were understandably profuse.

Animal Crackers

When Denmark beat Romania, 5-2, in a European Championship qualifying match, it so angered some farmers in the Romanian village of Rosia Montana that they immediately canceled their order for 10 Danish cows.

One of the early casualties in Leeds United’s battle against bankruptcy in England were the 11 tropical fish in the club’s blue, yellow and white colors that used to adorn the executive’s boardroom.

Animals coming in, not going out, was the problem during an Austrian Cup match between SPG Wattens/Wacker and SV Salzburg, which was held up for 20 minutes while six security men tried to collar a piglet that had escaped from a nearby butcher and found its way into the stadium and onto the playing field.

Moving Violations

Portsmouth Coach Harry Redknapp was left red-faced when a stadium announcer in England asked the owner of an illegally parked luxury vehicle to move it. It was Redknapp’s car.

In France, Montpellier Coach Gerard Bernardet, 45, lived up to his pledge to cycle the 400 kilometers (248 miles) to Lourdes to celebrate his team’s survival in the first division.

The journey took three days and, said Bernardet after the first day, “the hardest part was the 10 kilometers [6.2 miles] right after lunch.”

In England, Bristol City fan Jer Boon quit his job as a consultant and pledged to ride his bike to each of the team’s road games in order to raise money for breast cancer research -- 11,000 kilometers (6,820 miles) in all.

Next month, that will mean an 800-kilometer (496-mile) “round trip to Hartlepool to watch 90 minutes of rubbish second-division football,” said Boon.

Oh, well, it’s all for a good cause.

The Naked Truth

Finally, it was in the Carpathian mountains that the players for financially struggling fourth division FC Carpati Sinaia of Romania brought their plight to the public eye.

Boy, did they ever.

They posed naked for a team picture to highlight their club’s plight -- but with strategically placed soccer balls, of course.

It might make a nice calendar for 2005, but next year is sure to produce its own weird stories. At least, we hope so.