CORNER KICKS
1_There will be 61 international matches played worldwide today, most of them friendly games, a third of them World Cup qualifiers, all of them with an interesting side story or two.
Take, for instance, world champion Italy’s match on the road against Spain in Elche.
Once again, Italy Coach Roberto Donadoni has elected to leave 2006 World Cup winner Alessandro Del Piero off of his team, even though the 33-year-old striker continues to break record after record at Juventus. While helping the Turin side defeat Italian champion Inter Milan over the weekend, Del Piero tied the record of 552 appearances for Juventus set by 1982 World Cup winner Gaetano Scirea.
In 15 years with Juventus, Del Piero has scored a club-record 231 goals.
He and fellow forward David Trezeguet have scored 198 goals between them since being paired up front in 2000. That erased the mark established from 1957 to 1962 by the memorable strike partnership of Argentine-Italian Omar Sivori and Welshman John Charles. But Del Piero hasn’t been called on by Italy since September and his hopes for a Euro 2008 place are fading fast.
2_In Paris today, for a while at least, all eyes will be on David Beckham. If he steps on the field as expected at the Stade de France, he would earn his 100th cap for England.
But Beckham’s presence is being overshadowed by the absence of leading French players, ranging from Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira to Karim Benzema, Mathieu Valbuena and Bacary Sagna, all out because of injury.
That has left France Coach Raymond Domenech understandably frustrated, but exceptionally quotable. “I’m impatient to be at the training session and see how many players are in shorts and how many are in an ambulance,” Domenech said.
3_For those who missed it, the epic battle between the British Virgin Islands and the U.S. Virgin Islands on March 14 in Tortola ended scoreless . . . which seems sort of fitting.
4_Lost amid all the big-name teams that are playing today, there are a few other games with more than passing interest.
The U.S. takes on Poland (12:30 p.m., FSC) in Krakow, where Landon Donovan is set to make his 99th national team appearance. Mexico plays Ghana in London ( 1 p.m., Telemundo) in an early effort to come to grips with African teams ahead of 2010. The game might be Mexico Coach Hugo Sanchez’s swan song.
Top-ranked Argentina plays Egypt in Cairo (11 a.m., GolTV). Barbados is at home to Dominica, with the winner headed for the Home Depot Center and a June 15 World Cup qualifying clash with the U.S. The Portugal-Greece game in Dusseldorf, Germany, is a rematch of the Euro 2004 final won by the Greeks.
5_South Africa, host of the 2010 World Cup, will play Paraguay in Pretoria today and is likely to learn once again just how short of talent it really is.
The ongoing problems of the South Africa national team have led to considerable hand-wringing at the government level and that, in turn, has brought a fierce response from Coach Carlos Alberto Parreira, who led Brazil to its 1994 World Cup title.
“People are looking for shortcuts but there are none in football,” Parreira said recently after South Africa’s sports minister, Makhenkesi Stofile, suggested, bizarrely, that South Africa’s top 50 players be taken out of their clubs and put under government contract solely to prepare for 2010.
“I don’t interfere in politics because I know nothing about it,” Parreira said scathingly. He then quoted a Spanish saying: “It is one thing to talk about a bullfight and another thing to be in the arena facing the bull.”
Parreira, raking in $227,000 a month as South Africa’s coach, could well be facing the pink slip long before 2010 unless his team, ranked 71st in the world, escapes what another angry politician called “the quagmire of mediocrity.”
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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)
MLS SCHEDULE
Saturday
Toronto FC at Columbus
Real Salt Lake at Chicago
Houston at New England
(4:30 p.m., FSC, FSE)
D.C. United at Kansas City
Galaxy at Colorado
(6:30 p.m., FSC, FSE, HDNet)
Sunday
Chivas USA at FC Dallas
(noon, Prime, TeleFutura)
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