The Cynical Challenge

World Poetry Day

2011-03-21T18:56:00.000Z

I offered them to ITV.com but they weren't interested. I called up Sepp Blatter to see if he fancied using them on his FIFA election campaign literature - to no avail. Here are three football-themed haikus to mark 21 March. No doubt these will come back to haunt me in later life.

Upton Park, 3.42pm

Parker, still Parker.

Brilliant play. He looks for

Carlton Cole...offside.

An ESPN commentator's nightmare

Krylya Sovetov,

Anzhi, Luch-Energiya:

Unpronounceable.

Romelu

It's rather a coup

To write a rhyming haiku

For R. Lukaku.

Photoblog: Giants vs Eagles, New Meadowlands

2011-01-06T23:54:00.002Z

Back in September, knowing I was visiting New York over Christmas, I decided to investigate whether there would be any sport worth watching while I was there. It turned out that NFL side the New York Giants would be playing the Philadelphia Eagles at New Meadowlands Stadium, New Jersey, about half an hour away from Manhattan.

I'd heard this game was something of a local derby, Meadowlands being about 100 miles or so from Philadelphia - which by American standards is a stone's throw. At the time, though, I didn't quite anticipate how important the game would prove.

Both teams went into the match with identical 9-4 win-loss records, knowing that the winner would most likely clinch the NFC East Divisional title and guaranteed passage into the play-offs. Or, to put it another way, not only would the victor get one over their local rivals, but they'd give them a kick in the balls just in time for post-season too.

The game didn't disappoint. Far from it.

The Giants came out of the blocks fast and took a 24-3 lead at the half and the home fans were delighted. The Eagles fans sitting around us were enduring a torrent of light-hearted but relentless piss-taking.

Mid-way through the fourth quarter the Giants led 31-10, and fans of both sides started to head for the exits - as seems to be the way in America. Those who did - particularly Eagles fans - would miss one of the most spectacular finishes in NFL history. The Eagles picked up four unanswered touchdowns, including a punt return from DeSean Jackson with no time left on the clock, to win the game 38-31, sparking wild celebrations on the field and in the locker-room.

Such was the momentousness of the occasion that the game has even been given its own place in NFL lore with a nickname - "The Miracle at the New Meadowlands". It even has its own wikipedia page.

Here are some photos of the day:

Another subtext to this game involved Eagles quarterback Michael Vick. Playing for Atlanta Falcons back in 2007, Vick was suspended after admitting involvement in an illegal dog-fighting ring. He was jailed in December of that year for 23 months, but was offered a route back into the NFL by the Eagles.

Despite his status as a hate figure for opposing sides, Vick's form has been simply magnificent. Beginning the 2010 season as third-choice quarterback, he displaced Donovan McNabb and Kevin Kolb to become number one.

That still hasn't satisfied many, and on the morning of the Giants game the New York Times ran an advert by an organisation for the human treatment of animals, citing Vick's crime in criticising a competing charity which has stated that Vick could now own a pet dog.

Vick was a strong candidate for NFL Most Valuable Player this season, though that award looks like going to New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. However, Vick remains a controversial character.

New Meadowlands Stadium. Opened 2010. Cost $1.6bn. Capacity 82,566. Breathtaking.

"I can see my house from here."

It was a pretty cold day in New Jersey, only a little above freezing. Still - two sweaters, warm gloves...and shorts?! Go figure.

The Giants offense huddle. The interesting thing to the uninitiated is that at this point in the game the video screens tend to flash up a message which reads "Quiet! Offense at Work". This is where watching live American football runs rather counter-intuitively to the instincts of an Englishman.

At times like this those used to watching football (by which I naturally mean soccer) would be building the atmosphere. But American football fans recognise that their team need to be able to communicate effectively on the field, and so when the home side are on the attack the atmosphere remains fairly placid.

On the other hand, when the home side are in defense - particularly on a clutch play such as third down and short - the atmosphere builds to a deafening crescendo. It can be electric.

Kosher hotdogs on sale in the stadium. You know you're in New York when...

The ubiquitous pretzel. $3 apiece.

Why are you people leaving? It's 31-10 with eight minutes to go, there's still a chance of a comeback!

Miracles can happen.

A Russian World Cup in 2018: Some premature Q&As

2010-12-02T20:37:00.001Z

Much as it seems as though the ink has only just dried on the FIFA ExCom ballot papers, and the tears have dried on the faces of many England fans (okay, sorry for the melodrama), it's time to come to terms with the fact that in less than eight years many football fans will be heading to Russia to watch World Cup 2018.

So what should we expect from a World Cup in Russia? Eight years is a long time in Russia - a place that barely 20 years ago was operating a state economic monopoly and where chewing gum was something of a novelty - so there's every chance we'll look back on this article in 2018 and laugh.

But here's my attempt to answer a few of the pressing questions about what it might be like to attend a World Cup in Russia.

Russia - sounds cold. Better pack the thermals, there's going to be snow all over the place, right?

Wrong. Temperatures on St Petersburg, the most northerly host city, regularly tip 30 degrees C in June and July. In fact, it'll be pretty sweltering around the cities during the tournament. Moscow's underground is a bit of an unpleasant place to be in mid-summer. But it'll be fantastic on the Black Sea coast resort of Sochi. Bring a beach towel.

Well that all sounds lovely - but Russia's also massive. How am I going to get around?

The Russia bid team sensibly decided not to stretch the tournament across the country's entire expanse. In fact, the host cities cover just three of Russia's nine time zones. Ekaterinburg is the easternmost host city, Kaliningrad the westernmost, and a flight between the two generally takes just over three hours - the same as a flight from London to Moscow.

The chances of someone having to make that flight, however, are slim - the host cities have been separated out into regional clusters, with the implicit assumption that a team's World Cup group matches will all be staged within a single cluster. So the issue for most fans will be travelling around a single cluster.

In this respect Russia still has a long way to go. Internal flights are cheap and convenient, but I'm not sure enough flights are yet available to transport large numbers of fans. Similarly train travel is fairly convenient - though the duration of many journeys can be a shock to many Western Europeans. A trip train between, say, Saransk and Kazan (two of the nearest neighbours in the Central Cluster) is eight to nine hours.

And then there is travel by road. Such is the parlous state of many of the intercity highways in Russia that I have personally rarely used them. One thing is certain - Russia plans to build plenty of new roads before 2018. Work has recently begun, for example, to improve the M-4 highway which runs from Moscow down to the Black Sea, the first time Russia has ever attempted to build a motorway as a single unit, rather than improving it piecemeal. Work is also planned for the M-5, linking Moscow with the Ural city of Chelyabinsk - and at nearly 2000km long they'd better get cracking.

I've heard Russia's full of mafia and a dangerous place. Should I worry about going?

My first comment is this: let's not pretend Russia is all sweetness and light. Bad things can happen. But, and I'm furiously knocking on wood as I say this, nothing bad has ever happened to me as a tourist (those italics being an important caveat) in Russia. Like every place you visit, you need to observe some of the ground rules and you'll be fine. The standard exhortions to keep your valuables safely hidden away, to avoid dark, nasty-looking streets and to not walk around with your head up your arse obviously apply.

In addition, in my experience in Russia you have more to fear from the police than you do from the mysterious "mafia" of whom I've hardly ever seen hide or hair. Many of Russia's police (or militsiya as they're known) make money on the side from shaking down unsuspecting tourists, foreigners or defenceless Russians. The good (though slightly unnerving) news is that I suspect by 2018 they will be under strict instructions from the government to cut down on this kind of activity - or else.

What are Russians like generally? Aren't they a bit unwelcoming?

Far be it for me to turn this Q&A article into an advert for Russia, Russians are generally a lovely bunch to be around. The older generation can often be a little reticent - a legacy, I suspect, from the years of Communist rule. Scratch away at the surface, however, and you'll find them to be among the most hospitable people in Europe, if not the world.

The younger generation, particularly in Moscow and St Petersburg, are drifting towards Western social mores. They are very often elegant, eloquent - in English as well as their native language - and make for excellent conversation- and drinking-partners...Plus they know a hell of a lot about English football, so you won't be short of conversation topics.

What about the racism?

Ah, now that's an issue Russia certainly needs to grapple with. Until I saw this rather suspicious-looking photograph posted on Zenit St Petersburg's official website, I had never seen a black person in the stands at a football match in Russia. I'm still not convinced that's not just a nifty bit of photoshopping. It's true, Russia is not necessarily the most welcoming place for black people.

I'd say that's a consequence not of pure malevolence, but of ignorance. For so many years Russians have had very little contact with black people, which by no means excuses racism in the country's stadiums, but at least explains it. And, as Marc Bennetts points out in a nice piece for Sabotage Times, the 2018 World Cup could prove the "short, sharp shock" needed to drive racism out of Russian football.

That's the optimistic way of looking at things. It's also the lazy way of looking at it. I'm not black, so I won't have to put that to the test. What I would say is this - in Russia in the year 2010 I wouldn't want to walk the streets alone as a black man. That is enough to convince me that this could be one of the major problems lying in wait eight years from now.

We're not singing any more

2010-11-29T14:05:00.000Z

Last week I penned some thoughts on the decline of English terrace culture for the superb whoateallthepies.tv. Here it is in full:

“You’re not singing any more.” It’s the classic football catcall, the terrace version of cuckolding. The message, effectively, is as follows: We’ve silenced you, and as a result you are collectively shamed. Your silence suggests you are weak. You are impotent. Your wife is almost certainly cheating on you.

When you boil it down, so much about English fan culture revolves around the verbal jousting between sets of supporters. There are countless versions of “you’re not singing any more” – think “you’re supposed to be at home”, or even the sound of hushing – all of which reflect a mockery of the quiet, passive football fan. Which is strange, because having spent time touring stadiums around Europe over the last few years, I would argue that English fans are now fairly low down the pecking (shouting?) order.

Though our continental chums often laud us as the example to follow, mostly citing the high-watermark of the 1980s as a time when English fans outshouted all-comers, these days it’s across the Channel where you get a proper match-day atmosphere.

In my experience, for real colour and vibrancy on the terraces, England’s top flight is no match for many European leagues. Some of the things I’ve witnessed in stadiums across the continent – Rapid Bucharest fans loudly rejoicing as they set off smoke bombs, Spartak Moscow fans unfurling banners 300ft wide – simply take your breath away.

And the difference isn’t just visible, it’s audible too. To put it another way: we’re not singing any more.

I accept that not all readers will welcome such a statement. Some will dispute the truth of the initial hypothesis. Others will say that, while many clubs do suffer from this problem, their own club’s fans are the loudest/most colourful/hardest this side of the Urals/the Channel/the Pennines. To those I say: travel abroad and see/hear it for yourself. Or, failing that, dig out some YoutTube clips of Lech Poznan v Manchester City or Young Boys v Spurs from this season’s European competition. Even England’s best-supported clubs have some way to go to beat that.

Others will try to shoot me down by second-guessing my line of argumentation. To those I say: you’re right, I do think that the combined forces of the Premier League and the Taylor Report have killed the atmosphere in England’s top-flight stadiums – hackneyed though this argument undoubtedly is.

But I’m not calling for a return to the good-old bad-old-days of the ’80s. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have survived on the terraces a generation ago. Nor am I connecting the word ‘atmosphere’ with the word ‘violence’ – the German Bundesliga is no less civilised than the Premier League, and yet their fan culture is very much alive and kicking.

What I would argue is that the combined advent of the Premier League and the Taylor Report forced English football into a trade-off. From 1992 the safety and security of fans were made paramount; at the same time, business-oriented football clubs sought to break into previously untapped markets for new fans: women, children, the middle classes, aka the prawn sandwich nibblers who Roy Keane once berated. You can’t argue with the logic, nor dismiss its benefits.

But along with the knives and the bottles, the flares and the banners also became contraband in English stadiums; the raucous terraces became seated and serene; and those who traditionally sung the loudest, young working-class males, found their collective voice diluted by others who were there for a nice day out.

Moreover, with its market-oriented approach, the Premier League has turned many fans into passive consumers, spending their money with the expectation that entertainment wille be provided. Singing (i.e. approval) is now conditional on the quality of the football being played.

And so over the last 20 years the volume has been turned down, and colour has slowly turned to monochrome. I find this a lamentable situation. If I wanted to sit and watch a game in silence I can do that at home for a fraction of the price of a match ticket.

Is there a solution? I have a feeling re-introducing terraces might be part of it, but coming from the post-Hillsborough generation means I am less appreciative of the problems which standing areas can cause.

Whatever the answer, identifying the problem is a small step on the way towards solving it. And I for one am convinced: it’s all gone quiet over here.

A small appeal

2010-11-19T16:27:00.000Z

Some readers may know that I'm a fairly regular guest on the twofootedtackle podcast. In fact, can I urge you to listen to this week's podcast, featuring myself and French football connoisseur Chris Oakley - which includes subjects as disparate as the problem(s) with English football, Jay DeMerit's next destination and cake. Lots of cake.

Anyway, in the run-up to Christmas, twofootedtackle.com editor Chris and podcast host Gary are championing a very good cause which I want to lend my weight to. They are hoping to raise £1,000 for Cardiac Risk in the Young (CRY).

CRY was launched in 1995 by Alison Cox MBE to raise awareness of conditions that can lead to sudden cardiac death and sudden death syndrome in apparently fit and healthy young people. As you can imagine, these are conditions that affect young sportspeople and many footballers have sadly lost their lives due to heart conditions that instinct tells us healthy people shouldn’t develop.

This is a gentle prod to readers of The Cynical Challenge to a) download the latest TFT podcast and b) go to www.justgiving.com/twofootedtackle and donate whatever you might be able to afford to a worthy cause.

Zenit fans stand alongside their Serb "brothers"

2010-10-21T16:40:00.000+01:00

A butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo and a storm rises in California. Or perhaps that should be: a Serbian man dons a balaclava in Genoa, and four Hajduk Split supporters are beaten up in St Petersburg.

Eastern European politics is an immensely complex arena. Events in Russia this week have provided a nice illustration of this point. Hajduk Split fans have travelled to St Petersburg for a Europa League group match against Zenit St Petersburg.

On Wednesday evening there was a stand-off at the Hotel Dostoevsky, where many of the Hajduk fans were staying. Some fifty men wearing balaclavas entered the building and began to attack the supporters with chairs. Four sustained head injuries and were hospitalised.

St Petersburg governor Valentina Matvienko - who has been considered for some time as a natural successor to the Presidency of the Russian Federation - described the attackers as hooligans and vowed to prosecute those responsible.

In response, one Zenit fan contacted newspaper Sovetsky Sport to give his side of events. Essentially, this was much more than football-related violence - this was a defence of Orthodox Slavs (in Serbia as well as Russia) from their "enemies" in largely Catholic Croatia.

The connections between Serbia and Russia run deep. Russia's attempt to defend Serbian independence from the Habsburgs precipitated World War I. Russia's refusal to acknowledge the independence of Kosovo stems to a large degree from sympathy with the Serbs.

Now, if the statement of one Zenit fan is anything to go by at least, this political alignment has found new expression in the footballing arena. One thing's for sure - there will be fireworks at Zenit's Petrovsky Stadium on Thursday night.

The Zenit fan's statement in full:

Let's not evaluate what happened as typical hooliganism. Rather, it is a pre-emptive strike. These Hajduk fans are far from angels, they belong to one of the most serious "firms" in Eastern Europe - Torsida 57. The majority of those 300 fans who have flown to St Petersburg are by no means rich tourists, who have come to support their team and witness the beauty of St Petersburg. They are pretty tough guys who won't back down from a fight.

You don't know what Croatian fans did in Athens during their match with AEK? They came to Greece in even greater numbers - around a thousand people. And, armed with belts, they attacked the Greek police, and ejected them from the stands. Basically, the fight in "Hotel Dostoevsky" is no surprise - what happened could have been predicted in advance. And the Croats were ready for what happened.

As always the reasons are political. Serbs are our brothers, Croats - for well-known reasons - hate them. Given that we are friends with Serbian fans, Croats consider us enemies too. Also, we have our own reasons for being antagonistic towards them. Go on the internet and have a look how their Ultras talk about our churches, our religion. The bad language in these statements are typical. By the way, if you go to a match in Split, I advise you not to speak in Russian or carry scarves or flags which give you away as a Russian. That would be dangerous.

On the bodies of those injured Croatian fans we took away two banners, one of which reads "Torsida Biograd". I hardly need to explain what it means to take away a trophy - a scarf or a banner - from a group of opponents...Now on Croatian websites fans write that they "spit on this banner". Last year they lost one of them, but they just made a new one. But it's doubtful that they'll resolve the situation so simply...

There will be a continuation, though I'm not sure exactly what. I think the Croatian fans will show themselves for what they are. I can't even suggest what exactly we should be expecting. But they will definitely actively "light the touchpaper" in the away end. It's definitely possible that there will be some kind of abuse or provocation from the away end.

European Football Special: Podcast Episode 2

2010-10-14T10:10:00.002+01:00

Question: Name a podcast which crams into an hour subjects as disparate as the history of the Russian city of Samara (1917-91), the buying policy of Stade Rennais, the sporting allegiances of Mainz's Lewis Holtby and the origins of the Serbian ultra-nationalist three-finger salute.

Answer: The European Football Special - featuring in no particular order Chris Nee, Jonathan Fadugba, Graham Sibley, Chris Oakley, Terry Duffelen and myself. Episode 2 is out...now. NOW.

Click here for the MP3 or subscribe in iTunes, or here to subscribe (RSS) in another player

Vladimir Abramov: The most provocative football interview ever?

2010-10-07T13:58:00.001+01:00

Clicking through the Russian press as I always do on a morning, my eyes were drawn to a headline on the site sports.ru: "In Russia they really don't like black people". It concerned an interview given by Russian football agent Vladimir Abramov in which he talks about a range of subjects, from his profession to his clients, and also dwells on the subject of black players in Russia.

It's an interview that seriously makes the mind boggle in its crassness.

People in the UK are these days no strangers to Russia's racism problem, now that Peter Odemwingie and the infamous banana banner have become headline news. I must admit I'm a little cynical about the treatment of the subject in the British press, keen as they are to recoup ground after nearly destroying England's bid for the 2018 World Cup with the sting on Lord Triesman.

But the Abramov interview really does cut through the crap and delivers, on a silver platter no less, examples of the kinds of attitudes which I fear are rather prevalent in Russia. Below are the relevant excerpts - health warning included: readers may be consumed with rage.

Q: Is what happened with the career of Peter Odemwingie a shame for Russian football? He earned a lot of money here over three years but played badly. As soon a he leaves for England he pulled himself together and became Premier League player of the month.

Abramov: Peter is a very professional and responsible guy. Everything was easy with Peter. In contrast to other Nigerians. They are very insolent, headstrong, black nationalism is evident in them. When there are more than three Nigerians watch out: they aren't afraid of anyone. Korea has also shed tears over them. In Korea there were never drug dealers, nothing like that. They started to invite athletes, Nigerian agents appeared, drugs appeared in the city centre streets and at the end of it all - AIDS.

...Peter Odemwingie is a very well educated and englightened guy, he speaks three languages, including Russian like you and I. Ask him a question - he answers. The guy speaks openly about what's happening in our country and we don't like it. The guy says: in Russia they don't like black people. It's clear we really don't like black people! No, we say we are white and fluffy. But we are not! Besides, one coach brought him [Odemwingie] and then others came - they changed the coach three times. By the way, what position did he play under Yury Pavlovich [Semin - Lokomotiv Moscow coach]?

On the wing.

Hmmm. And in England where does he play? Centre-forward.

You've said that many footballers prefer not to have anything to do with dark-skinned players. Is that because they discredit themselves?

No, wrong. Black people sometimes behave in a more orderly fashion than whites. The thing is that from my point of view, the Russian people are not happy to see a black-skinned footballer doing his national dance after scoring a goal, and so they abuse him with all sorts of unpleasant words. And Odemwingie says: they draw a banana that hurts our feelings. Does it happen? It happens. Our authorities say: we must punish the clubs. Wrong. Punish for what? Let's punish our people for drinking and smoking. Let's put people everywhere with sticks who, when they see a guy with a cigarette, they smack him on the head. What, is he going to stop smoking? Dark-skinned people - they're good, normal people, but we aren't ready for that yet. If our authorities see that our people are ready to accept black footballers like they do in Europe, I will be more cautious about this issue. But you shouldn't bring into your team more than one dark-skinned footballer. When there's more of them they behave more aggressively and alienate themselves. If you bring in a dark-skinned person, watch how the public react to it.

Jerry-Christian Tchouissé [a Cameroonian who played in Russia for nearly a decade] spoke of the reasons which prevented him from playing for Russia in an interview with Sports.ru. Do you believe that 10 years on Welliton could be called up?

I don't. We have a lot of idiots in our country. And I believe that there are intelligent people who would allow a footballer for our national team to be black - like they did in Poland, for example. We have a great country. When does a country become "great"? More than anything, when it has a big population. We have 150 million inhabitants. If we had 150,000 like somewhere like the Faroe Islands, then there would be a problem and we would have to invite black players. We have a lot of different nationalities. Why do we have to take Welliton? He wouldn't have ever played for us if Brazil had called him up. He would have turned his nose up at us, he wouldn't have needed our country, wouldn't have loved it. And he wouldn't have a reason to love it. He will only play for our country for money. Why do we need that? Yes, in the world there's a tendency to call up foreigners to national teams. But a great nation doesn't do these sort of things. Great nations have enough of their own.

Is France not a great nation?

The French are not a great nation. There are only 20-30 million French. Young people and their girlfriends prefer to live in expectation that when their grandparents die they will inherit their flats, sell them for a few million and continue to do nothing. They don't study, they don't want to work. In France they don't even have people to pick grapes! One Frenchman who I respect a lot came to visit me. When I talked with him he lowered his eyes - he's ashamed. Of the French national team, in which black players play. How did you like the situation, where last year the French came to play in Lithuania and saw the banner "Welcome to Europe?" (laughs). They wrote correctly: here come the French team, who have no relationship whatsoever to Europe.

I fear many would consider that racism.

Once again: I lived for five years in Africa. I am very respectful towards black people. Among them are very good people who I have made friends with and remain so. They are clever, orderly people. In America among black people there are very interesting people...but our country isn't ready. We don't understand it. We have 90% of our population who have never been outside Russia.

You consider yourself an offensive expert. You're not afraid to tell the truth.

If telling the truth means being offensive, that's the way it is.

How do you live by this idea?

For me one of the greatest pleasures in life, and which I consider to be the most important achievements of democracy, is the ability to say what you think. When I say what I don't think I have become an animal. I don't like to say stupid things. If I'm talking rubbish, I apologise.

And when was the last time you apologised?

Never.

I wonder if Abramov thinks it might be time to apologise now...

European Football Special: Podcast Episode 1

2010-09-16T11:06:00.001+01:00

Ever seen the film The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen? Or more recently The Expendables? They're the stories of what happens when you bring many talented people together - basically lots of explosions. But it's also highly enjoyable stuff.

Well, the European Football Special is a new podcast whose philosophy is much the same. It's a monthly, hour-long trawl through all things European football.

I'll be yapping away about Russian football as usual. Alongside me is Bundesliga Wunderkind Terry Duffelen, Italian football aficionado Chris Nee, French football expert extraordinaire Chris Oakley and El Niño Jonathan Fadugba talking about La Liga.

It's all hosted by the superb Graham Sibley and, though I'm biased, it's an hour of your time well spent.

Click here for the MP3 or subscribe in iTunes, or here to subscribe (RSS) in another player.

Russian winter season: Luch-Energiya fans speak out

2010-09-15T17:39:00.000+01:00

Following the announcement on Monday that Russia's three professional football leagues would be changing to a winter season from 2012, fans of Luch-Energiya Vladivostok have written to President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin desperately asking them to intervene and overrule the decision.

The letter sums up most Russian fans' attitude to the proposal to change Russia's footballing calendar better than I ever could - so I've translated and published the letter below:

"At the meeting of the RFU there has been – and we do not fear to use this word – a monstrous event: the murder of Russian football. Yes, murder no less, and the murderer is none other than the President of the RFU, who is well known to you, Mr. Fursenko. The decision to change the format of the country’s championship over to a “autumn-spring” format is the act in question.

As you know, in this period the Siberian and Far Eastern regions suffer low temperatures and regular snowfall. Naturally, playing football in such conditions is impossible – and not just playing, but watching it in stadiums. This will obviously contribute to the draining of fans away from the game, and the decreasing in popularity of the country’s number one sport. At the moment not one of Russia’s clubs has the infrastructure which allows football to be played in this period, especially not the clubs from the lower divisions who eke out a meagre existence.

It seems that Fursenko has absolutely no interest in how football academies will function, nor that the numbers of fans will decrease in droves. And, by the same token, small clubs won’t receive any support from regional governments, since there is little point in spending money if people don’t go [to the stadiums]. Not one regional government budget can include the construction of a covered sports complex capable of holding 20-40,000 people, nor is the federal budget flexible enough, given that such things cost around $500 million.

Dmitry Anatolevich, Vladimir Vladimirovich! [Here the fans are using Medvedev and Putin's first name and patronymic, a polite form of address in Russia - J.A.] We beg you to intervene in this situation. We understand perfectly well that FIFA is opposed to the intervention of government organs in the work of national football federations, but this is an extreme case, we could lose our football! Please answer the national call and help to save football in Russia!"

A collection of Russian goings-on

2010-09-15T11:55:00.000+01:00

It's been a bit quiet on The Cynical Challenge for a few weeks, but there has been plenty going on, particularly in the world of Russian football. I can't possibly tie all the threads together into a single seamless article, so instead let me direct you to a few choice items which should bring you bang up to date.

The Russian national team suffered a shock defeat in their first home Euro 2012 calendar, losing 1-0 to Slovakia at Cherkizovo. The team's struggles to break down the Slovak defence were all the more poignant given a debate which is troubling Russian football fans over whether to grant Brazilian-born Spartak striker Welliton a call-up to the national side. If poor results continue Dick Advocaat may be giving him the call soon.

The Russian league has been rocked by a match-fixing scandal which continues to run and run. A government task-force is looking into cases involving matches between Amkar and Rostov, and Volga and SKA-Energiya, in which evidence provided by bookmakers suggests foul play. Depressingly, most regular watchers of Russian football aren't even surprised.

Russia has also finally unveiled plans to switch to an autumn-spring season calendar from 2012. It's largely a gesture aimed at the country's biggest clubs, helping them to improve their record in European competition. But it does come at the expense of the vast majority of smaller teams who now have to come up with a way of hosting matches in Russia's frosty mid-winter.

And, with that story in mind, in a glorious piece of timing Rubin Kazan lost their opening Champions League group match away to FC Copenhagen this week. Read my profile of the team and have a laugh at my wildly optimistic prediction.

From our man in China: Beijing v Barcelona

2010-08-20T15:18:00.001+01:00

A friend of mine Ally is out in Beijing at the moment, and managed to get along to watch the local side Beijing Guoan play a friendly against Barcelona, boasting the likes of Leo Messi and Zlatan Ibrahimovic but mainly their reserve players.

The generally pedestrian match ended 3-0 but wasn't without incident in the stands. I'll let Ally pick up the story:

Being a pre-season friendly the atmosphere was pretty relaxed on the whole, with lots of people cheering a bit for both sides. We were however sat a few blocks from the Barcelona fan club, which was mainly local Chinese but did appear to include a few Catalonians who had come out to Asia for the tour. Part way through the second half they started a chant and lots of the crowd joined in.

Some nearby Beijing fans - unhappy that lots of Chinese people were cheering for the visitors rather than their local club - decided to respond by filling in the gaps shouting xiabi xiabi, which roughly translated means f***ing c**t.

However some of the Catalans - presumably thinking the Beijingers were showing support for their (not playing) midfielder Xavi - stood up and started to applaud them! Obviously some of the local Barcelona fans told them what it meant though because they quickly sat back down again!!

No such luck though for the match reporter on the official Barca website. He or she reported afterwards that "a number of fans started chanting Barca Barca, to which others replied Madrid Madrid." Either their local translator was embarrassed by the chanting and lied to the reporter about what the home fans were singing, or he/she just thought they'd take the opportunity to call Real f***ing c**ts...

Proof, if ever we needed it, that football (and the associated tribalism) transcends barriers of race, language and politics...

Photoblog: Derby day in Bucharest

2010-08-17T00:24:00.000+01:00

A weekend in Bucharest - hardly the most romantic of holidays, you might think.

Well that depends on your priorities. For me a trip away necessitates a change of scenery, and there's no greater antidote to the sterility of orderliness in the UK (respect for rules, queueing, attentiveness to other people's private space) than spending a few days in the relative anarchy of Eastern Europe. I was looking for a place to spend a couple of days getting away from London, and Bucharest seemed like just the ticket.

So Romania it was - a place where manhole covers are removed, seemingly at random, with the holes left unmarked so that if you happen to not be watching where you're walking, you could find yourself falling 40 feet down to an untimely and unglamorous death in Bucharest's sewer system.

Romania - where the despotic Communist-era leader Nicolae Ceauşescu knocked down 30,000 homes in central Bucharest in order to build for himself a palace. Now used as the country's parliament, it is the second largest building in the world after the Pentagon.

But enough of the tour-guide - the main reason for Bucharest as my destination of choice was the football. This weekend was the occasion of the city's second derby between Dinamo and Rapid (Steaua are the best-supported of Romania's football clubs and so their game with Dinamo is considered the bigger derby match).

In the event the game was a classic. Away side Rapid, spurred on by some of the most committed fans I've seen, raced into a 2-0 lead at half time, only for Dinamo to score three times after the break and record a breathtaking comeback win, 3-2. Winger Gabriel Torje was the hero for Dinamo, scoring a brilliant winner which wouldn't disgrace the English Premier League.

I went along with a camera, and a mobile telephone with the police on speed dial, to capture events.

In an article in 2009 Dinamo Stadium was named by The Times as one of the ten best stadiums in the world. One assumes that a predilection for "Communist-chic" was the guiding principle behind such a decision, and it's fair to say that the arena didn't disappoint. A series of characteristic neo-classical statues in Olympian poses man the grounds around the entrances, while the obligatory running track and floodlight pylons, as well as the concrete tower blocks, lent the whole place a distinctly nostalgic air. It's a stadium that never lets you forget where you are.

And here is Dinamo Stadium in all it's glory, as the players warm up.

Overlooking the stadium stands Spitalul Clinic de Urgenta Floreasca - a hospital. During the game patients wearing green smocks and medical workers wearing blue stood out on the balconies to watch. I particularly like the man on the left of the top balcony with a plaster cast on his arm.

These were among the most heavy-duty crowd control units I have ever seen at a football match. Many people - in fact, almost every Romanian - I spoke to prior to the game warned me of the potential dangers of attending the Dinamo-Rapid derby but I didn't take them too seriously until I saw these riot police. In the event, it was among the Rapid fans where the worst trouble occurred...

Just minutes into the game Rapid fans set off a series of smoke bombs from the away end.

The match was halted for a couple of minutes while the smoke cleared. Cue a baton charge from the riot police in the away end.

The scoreboard end in Dinamo Stadium is known semi-formally as the "Peluza [Stand] Cătălin Hîldan" after a former Dinamo player who died on the pitch in a friendly in 2000. The banner dedicated to Hîldan decorates the end behind the goal.

Meanwhile the Rapid fans responded with their own banner - "We wear the cherry-red shirt with pride". Indeed, throughout the game the fans taunted one another by unfurling successive banners. In this photo "Galerie pula" is directed at the fans in the Cătălin Hîldan Stand (known as the Galerie) - let's just say "pula" translates as a particularly nasty word and leave it at that.

Another of the themes for the night's banners was Dinamo's recent disastrous result in Europe. Leading Hajduk Split 3-1 from the first leg of their Europa League third round qualifier, Dinamo - amid whispers of match-fixing - contrived to concede three goals without reply in Split to lose the tie and crash out of the competition. Rapid's fans held up banners reading "Hvala Hajduk" (Thanks Hajduk, in Croatian), and one euphemistically asking whether Dinamo had played "with a handicap". In the above photo Dinamo's fans respond - "Honour cannot be bought, symbols cannot be sold" reads the lower one, while another on display throughout the game spoke of the club as having "a clear conscience".

At full time the Dinamo players celebrated their fine comeback with the Cătălin Hîldan Stand. Those who watch football on the continent will be familiar with the sight of a running track soaked wet by hosepipes, but for those who have never seen this before, it's so that flares and firecrackers which find their way onto the running track from the stands are extinguished.

3-2 indeed.

David Beckham - A Post-Postscript

2010-08-12T00:47:00.002+01:00

Fabio Capello's "new" England beat Hungary 2-1 at Wembley in their first friendly after the World Cup debacle. But perhaps the majority of headlines will concern Capello's pre-match revelation that he does not intend to pick David Beckham again.

Apart from the rather bizarre delivery of this message - "The end for David?" asked ITV's Gabriel Clarke, to which Capello replied: "Thanks" - the England coach was clear that Beckham's age would prevent him from playing a meaningful role on the field for his country. Capello did indicate after the match that Beckham could be called up for a final hurrah in front of the Wembley crowd, but the likelihood is this would be a purely symbolic gesture, an unusual international 'testimonial'.

And so, after 115 caps and 17 goals, the curtain falls on Beckham's England career.

We've been here before of course. When Steve McClaren dropped Beckham in August 2006, many in the media penned the obituaries on Beckham's then 94-cap international record. That he returned to play 21 more times for his country is testament not just to the man's abilities but also to his resolve. In a week in which Paul Robinson and Wes Brown both retired from international football, Beckham's refusal to do so for four years ago suggests a man with great self-confidence and undiminished desire to play.

Which is why, even as Beckham hits his 36th year, The Cynical Challenge risks making a mistake by running a postscript - perhaps more appropriately a post-postscript after the round of eulogies in 2006 - at this juncture.

But the truth is that, as with others from the 2010 World Cup squad (David James in particular), the time has come where we accept that picking the most talented and highly-rated players is over. I've argued elsewhere that after the so-called Golden Generation must come an appreciation that lazy shoe-horning great players into a tactical system which may not suit them no longer cuts the mustard. This is a watershed, and Beckham is one of the casualties.

So what of Beckham's England career?

His supporters will point to the high points - a superb first goal for England against Colombia in France 98, his magnificent last-minute free-kick against Greece in 2002, his penalty against Argentina that same year to banish the demons of his sending off four years earlier.

Likewise his detractors will cite the failures - the aforementioned petulant red card for kicking out at Diego Simeone, the missed penalties against France in Euro 2004, the sense that his role on the England's right and his preference for the long ball limited the team's creativity.

Both arguments have their merits. But those who watch football with a keen tactical eye see a man who relied too heavily on a "killer pass", and who, despite his well-known prowess with the dead ball, did not score or assist often enough.

Yet Beckham will be missed - and it will be those who watch England only casually who will miss him the most. For Beckham was one of those players who was rated more highly by the non-football-watching public than by devotees, a little like Pele, as struck me in a superbly-argued piece by Brian Phillips on The Run of Play this week.

Some might argue that this isn't important, that being loved by a legion of non-football fans is not the primary role of a football player.

Except that in a period such as the current one, in which England's players have fallen from their lofty perch and no longer command the esteem of the English public, Beckham was a shining light - a man who remains respected in both his on- and off-field guises, and who inspires those who watch him.

Both in their private lives and their performances on the pitch, England players have disappointed their fans this year. Beckham is himself no saint, but he has not made the same mistakes in his private life as, say, John Terry or Steven Gerrard, nor has he alienated fans by his on-field performances as Wayne Rooney has. He is still loved to an unfathomable degree, as will no doubt be shown should he be granted a last appearance at Wembley in an England shirt.

How unfortunate then that, as Beckham in all likelihood exits the international scene, England needs someone like him more than ever to restore public faith in the team.

Europa League Qualifiers - Ties to watch

2010-08-03T17:40:00.000+01:00

Some of us like to use our summer holidays to travel abroad, lay on a beach and forget all about what's going on in the world.

On the other hand, many, including myself, prefer to sit at home and watch the European qualifying rounds. You can always tell which ones we are - pasty white skin, bloodshot eyes (from the late finishes to games in Iceland or Madeira) and able to distinguish FC Honka from FK Spartak Zlatibor Voda in an instant.

For those who revel in obscurity - or perhaps more kindly, for those who love all kinds of football, warts and all - the early rounds of European competition are a godsend. In the middle of the summer break, when hardly any football of consequence is being played, dozens of fascinating ties suddenly fall into our laps.

Moreover, watching games from the far-flung reaches of Europe reveals much about the political and social make-up of the continent.

During last week's tie between Liverpool and FK Rabotnicki in Skopje, for instance, there were many viewers who couldn't understand why the home crowd booed every touch of Liverpool defender Sotirios Kyrgiakos, until it was pointed out the long history of animosity between Macedonians and Greeks.

There was the strange sensation of watching a Champions League qualifier, billed as a big game by many, played in an almost empty stadium. Unirea Urziceni took on Zenit St Petersburg in a drab 0-0 draw, with only 7,000 in attendance at Bucharest's 28,000 capacity Steaua Stadium. The reason? Urziceni is 60km away from Bucharest and has a population of around 17,000.

There was also the unusual spectacle of a European tie on a weekday kicking off at 1pm British time, as Sibir vs Apollon took place in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, six time zones ahead of London. I for one would love to see Sibir progress through the Europa League - the 10,000km round trip from the UK would make it a daunting place to go for, say, Manchester City's feted millionaires.

On Thursday, when the third qualifying round of the Europa League resumes, there a few ties worth keeping an eye on. This week I've picked a few out for ITV.com in an article which you can read here.

And for those of you with one eye on Liverpool's return leg against FK Rabotnicki, which they lead 2-0 on aggregate, here's 10 trivial things I meticulously researched about the Macedonians.

The biggest sport you've never seen?

2010-07-20T10:52:00.001+01:00

Sometimes during the advert breaks for Sky Sports News - the only channel which is consistently on in the Appell house - I see adverts for British Elite League speedway. I say "I see" in its most casual sense. The eyes point in the direction of the screen, but the brain is far, far away.

Speedway makes about as much sense to me, an ignorant football-watcher, as the ramblings of Mike Parry on Talksport - and, to be honest, up to now I've been only slightly more likely to buy tickets to a speedway match as I have been to tune into Parry's show.

Essentially, speedway is motorcycle racing round an oval dirt track, made of crushed shale or brick, on single-geared bikes with no brakes. The riders slide round the corners to maintain speed, before powering through the straights at speeds of up to 70mph. All that seems to separate the audience from being hit by dust, exhaust fumes and (in the case of an accident) a flying motorbike is a low wire fence.

But it's not something I grew up watching, nor is it something I've ever been compelled to get acquainted with. And I don't feel like I'm alone here.

I don't know anyone who has been to watch live speedway. I don't know anyone who regularly watches speedway on TV. I don't recall ever having had a conversation about speedway in my life which didn't end with everybody shrugging.

However, by a series of strange events I found myself this week in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire, wandering around a speedway track. Hoddesdon, a town of just over 20,000, is home to British Premier League team Rye House Rockets. Their home is Rye House Stadium, situated between a Kart track and a large pub.

As it was a weekday there was no racing, but as I sat in the seats overlooking the track I got a feel for the place.

The barriers didn't inspire much confidence

The field of dreams

Are you sitting comfortably?

Though I may not have fallen in love with Rye House, at least it prompted me to do some research. And it turns out speedway is quietly becoming one of Europe's growth sports.

Britain has three national speedway leagues, the biggest of which is the Elite League. Average attendances number in the hundreds rather than the thousands, but the Elite League benefits from money invested by Sky for broadcast rights. Further down the tree, though, and it seems speedway clubs in Britain generally live a hand-to-mouth existence, kept afloat by a hardcore of die-hard fans.

But, perhaps surprisingly, the country where speedway is seriously thriving is Poland. In 2009 the average attendance in Poland's Ekstraliga was more than 10,000, the highest for any sport in the country, outstripping even football. And Poland's love affair with speedway goes back to the socialist period. In 1973, 1976 and 1979 the World Speedway Finals held in Chorzow attracted crowds of up to 100,000.

There are well-established speedway leagues in Scandinavia, and relatively young ones in Italy, Central Europe, Russia and Ukraine - the latter of which founded only last year. The Russian Championship has a team from Vladivostok, meaning league participation in speedway stretches from Europe's westernmost extremity to its easternmost. And with plenty of riders hailing from Australia and New Zealand, the sport can be considered truly global.

So while it may not be my thing, or yours for that matter, it works for plenty of others. Those Sky adverts don't seem so strange any more.

International Retirement: Virtue or Vanity?

2010-07-15T22:53:00.000+01:00

And so, less than a month after England's ignominious exit from the World Cup, the queue for Fabio Capello's next squad to face Hungary on 8th August just got smaller.

Much-maligned Aston Villa striker Emile Heskey has announced that he no longer wished to be considered for England selection. He will no doubt soon be joined by other underperformers from Capello's World Cup 23 - Jamie Carragher looks likely to retire for the second time, and it's easy to understand that the likes of John Terry and Frank Lampard might not want to face the wrath of the Wembley crowd, both against the Hungarians and beyond.

Retirement is one of sport's great virtuous gestures. Germany goalkeeper Oliver Khan was fortunate enough to be able to retire in emotionally-charged circumstances, having helped his side to third place at their home World Cup in 2006. Those such as Carles Puyol in 2010 or Laurent Blanc and Didier Deschamps in 2000, who retire after international triumph, likewise do so with public blessing. More unhappily, speaking personally, Dean Ashton's retirement at 26 was a genuinely upsetting moment.

Then there are the pragmatists - most notably Paul Scholes - who prematurely retire from international football, it is said, to help lengthen their club careers. Whether we believe this reason or not, there is at least a certain dignity to that decision, flying, as it did, in the face of overwhelming public calls for him to stay.

But back to Heskey. First, his decision renders void the dull debate over his role in the England team. As it happens, though, I've always considered Heskey to have worked hard, and often effectively, under immense pressure from the media and a large number of vocal detractors among England's supporters.

But - and this is far more important - it gives Heskey the chance to end his international career on his own terms. At 32 years of age Heskey is no spring chicken, but there's no reason to rule him out of the campaign to qualify for Euro 2012 on the grounds of age. Instead, he has stepped down from the international scene before being given the opportunity - or perhaps more accurately, being denied it.

If you are an angry England fan, stop and think: is this a serious bone of contention?

To be dropped is the one and only punishment available to international managers. At club level a player can be fined, transfer-listed, sold or sent to train with the youth team. At international level the public announcement of a squad, and the revelation of those who have been dropped from it, is the one statement of disapproval available.

Hence, in jumping before he was pushed, Heskey has hidden the stick to beat him with.

You might think this is an unfair way of depicting Heskey's actions. That may well be because you're sympathetic to Heskey. So substitute the name Heskey for Anelka. Or maybe for John Terry. It sticks in the throat doesn't it?

In examples such as these there is no heroism, no self-sacrifice about premature retirement. It is a self-serving gesture, an attempt to forestall attempts to come to terms with failure at international level. And it allows the player in question to avoid facing up to their own failures, and to avoid the feelings of rejection associated with being publicly dropped by their international manager.

As much as one can understand Heskey's decision, it gives him an easy route out of the debacle of England's South Africa campaign. And after the disappointment of this summer, it is of no solace to England fans that the players responsible could similarly avoid judgement. Heskey may be the first, but it would be a surprise if he were the last.

After the World Cup party - time for the pundit clean-up

2010-07-11T23:53:00.000+01:00

The World Cup has concluded, but a bitter taste remains - some of the television coverage of the tournament has been downright shocking. Guest blogger Ewan Roberts pours scorn on TV punditry teams, and suggests that the Twitterverse, rather than terrestrial TV, might be the place to go for intelligent football coverage.

What do vuvuzelas, Louie Spence and getting your member caught in your flies all have in common? All are significantly less painful and annoying than the World Cup coverage.

Football is a game of opinions. Watching a game of football is like reading a novel or watching a film: they are all open to interpretation. Ideally, coverage should be like a York Notes for football, offering in-depth analysis that would make even tactics blogger Zonal Marking purr. Instead, the World Cup coverage provided by BBC and ITV is the equivalent of having the finer nuances of The Brothers Karamazov explained by Miss South Carolina. I feel as though I’ve spent the last month being bludgeoned to death by clubs made out of tired clichés, chicken wire and human faeces.

The anchors of both stations are largely inoffensive, though Adrian Chiles’ pre USA versus England anti-America tirade was a miscalculation to say the least. It is not even the multitude of errors (most notably ITV HD opting to cut to an advertisement as Steven Gerrard opened the scoring against the USA) that riles me. Rather, it is the complete lack of intelligent discussion from the “expert” pundits.

Alan Shearer, despite his authoratorial receding hairline, is less insightful than a cephalopod mollusc – although Paul the psychic octopus has been particularly acute with his recent predictions. Shearer is as intelligent as his goal scoring celebration was creative and when commenting on Pele’s assertion that an African team would win the World Cup before 2000, he muttered: “I think it’s going to be longer”. Really, Alan? Are you sure?

Shearer presumably graduated from the same school of “stating the obvious” as Andy Townsend (who shares the same facial features as a bull terrier), with both offering pearls of wisdom that have included: “This is a game neither side will want to lose” and “A goal now will change the game”. Shearer’s use of droll, outdated clichés, and his lack of tactical knowledge, makes his four point haul (and subsequent relegation) as manager of Newcastle seem an achievement in retrospect, rather than the failure one might have originally considered it.

All the pundits suffer from a lack of relevant information regarding “lesser nations”. Lee Dixon, while talking about Slovakia, remarked: “We don’t know a lot about them.” Rather than do research, he was “given” the name of Slovakia captain and Napoli star Marek Hamsik, which he merely mentioned in isolation with no elaboration. The majority of the pundits’ knowledge pool is criminally limited to the Premier League, and the odd Champions League encounter (but only if an English team is involved).

What can be done to solve these deficiencies? Perhaps it’s time the BBC/ITV followed the example of the brilliant Guardian Football Weekly podcasts and employed intelligent journalists with encyclopaedic knowledge of specific leagues (from Germany’s Raphael Honigstein to La Liga aficionado Sid Lowe). The World Cup coverage has been far too Premier League (and England) centric.

However, both ITV and the BBC have tendencies to only employ ex-professional footballers, a recruitment plan that is evidently flawed. Are former footballers more suited to discussing and analysing matches than journalists? According to Zonal Marking: “In theory they're more qualified, they can offer insights from personal experience, which is valuable and something mere journalists will never be able to do. But equally, they must be knowledgeable on the teams and players they're talking about, and they must be able to express views with some level of insight.”

Are Shearer, Hansen et al better equipped to discuss the Italian national team than, for example, the Guardian’s Paulo Bandini? Certainly not. Sadly, the BBC’s decision to shun James Richardson when replacing Chiles suggests a move towards greater journalist representation is still some way off.

Equally frustrating has been the lack of gusto on show. Mark Lawrenson has about as much enthusiasm for football as I have for joining an orgy organised by the entire England football team, while Edgar Davids wears a pained expression that suggests he’s spent the afternoon being seen to by Ron Jeremy and Peter North. His contribution solely consists of scowling at Chiles as he slumps in his chair.

Alan Hansen is the greatest culprit when it comes to sucking the life out of a match. He reminds me of Michael Douglas in Falling Down, except rather than embarking on a killing rampage provoked by a general dissatisfaction with life, he simply simmers and makes banal and morose comments. His melancholy and dour nature has an almost lobotomising effect.

This lack of zest is particularly frustrating for Zonal Marking: “[the pundits have] so often sat down at half-time and said a game was boring for 15 minutes. Make it interesting, then.” Mesut Özil’s recent criticism of the England squad’s complaints of boredom could equally be levied upon the jaded punditry panel: “If you find the greatest tournament on earth boring, then you probably shouldn't be there.”

The supporting cast and commentators aren’t much better. Clive Tyldesley’s spits out pop culture references with such regularity one could be forgiven for thinking he is sponsored by Heat Magazine. While Marcel “I love Ghana so much I shunned them and played for France instead” Desailly’s celebrations are about as entertaining as chlamydia. Emmanuel Adebayor talks with such rapidity I briefly thought I had hit fast-forward on my remote, and he was left red-faced when his mobile phone rang live on air.

There is also a worrying lack of ability to pronounce players names correctly (from Kagisho Dikgacoi to Xavi), though we were at least spared the misfortune of David Pleat, who is still trying to get his tongue around “Pascal Chimbonda”.

A large portion of ITV’s coverage rests on the (rather broad) shoulders of James Corden, whose World Cup Live show is about as much fun as accidentally clicking a link to online pornography at work. Watching Corden is a bit like being tied down to a chair as Michael Madsen dowses you in petrol and cuts your ear off to the sound of Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle With You”. Only the soundtrack is Corden’s high pitched and irritating laugh, and you’re pleading with Madsen to take the other ear too.

Amongst this myriad of clueless pundits there are (all too few) shining lights. Successful managers Roy Hodgson and Jürgen Klinsmann have offered not only an advanced knowledge of non-Premier League players, but keen tactical observations that are unparalleled by their peers. Clarence Seedorf is a pleasant, eloquent addition, while Danny Baker was a bundle of energetic vigour in his all too brief appearance.

Hopefully the outpouring of rage and criticism aimed at misers Townsend, Shearer & co. will prompt a much needed punditry purge.

Money and match-fixing - the Russian football season continues

2010-07-07T12:10:00.001+01:00

What football match are you watching this weekend? I bet its the World Cup final isn't it?

Well The Cynical Challenge is delighted to reveal that, for the first time in weeks, you can warm up for the international football on offer with a healthy dose of the Russian Premier League.

After its summer hiatus Russia's top flight is back, with Thursday's game between Spartak Nalchik and Terek Grozny kicking off the second half of the country's football season, which runs between March and November. And while the battle (on second thoughts that's probably the wrong word) between the two sides from the North Caucasus may not whet the appetite, it's a pleasure to have the Russian Premier League back on the agenda.

Whether you're a regular Russia-watcher, or if you're just looking for some football to watch in the yawning chasm between the end of the World Cup and the start of the English Premier League, it's worth updating yourself on what's been going on during the summer break.

Dinamo on the move

First up is Dinamo Moscow, who have been making waves. The club revealed details last month of the redevelopment of Dinamo Stadium. It used to be my favourite stadium in Moscow - a roofless, concrete dustbowl full of Soviet-era charm, set in the grounds of a tree-lined park - but it was admittedly decrepit. With the help of $1.5 billion of investment from backers VTB Bank they are set to transform Dinamo Stadium into what has been described as a 45,000-seater "glass egg", to open in 2018.

They have also been among the most active in the transfer market this summer. They picked up Serbian defender Marko Lomic from Partizan Belgrade last week, but the real headline-grabber was the free transfer signing of Germany international striker Kevin Kuranyi from Schalke.

Many fear that Kuranyi will go the way of other big-name signings from outside Russia - Maxi Lopez, Maniche, Fernando Cavenaghi - who struggle to adapt to Russia's impenetrable language and cultural specificities. However, Kuranyi is different - a true citizen of the world. Though he doesn't speak Russian, the German has a bit of a pedigree for languages - born in Brazil to a Hungarian-German father and a Panamanian mother, he speaks German and Portuguese fluently, and can understand Hungarian, Spanish and English. In addition, Kuranyi's wife is Croatian and has been able to help the striker due to the similarities between Croat and Russian.

I tipped Dinamo at the start of the season for a shot at the Premier League title, which was starting to look a little embarrassing as they slumped 13 points behind leaders Zenit before the summer break, and parted with promising manager Andrey Kobelev. But with cash to burn in the transfer market, an able manager in Miodrag Bozovic and a top-class strike partnership in Kuranyi and former Liverpool player Andriy Voronin they look much better prepared for the second half of the season.

CSKA a selling club?

Over at CSKA, meanwhile, transfer rumours are rife. Having brought in Manchester United's Zoran Tosic at the start of the summer, the club looked to be building for the title run-in - they currently lie second in the table. But the performances of their players at the World Cup have started tongues wagging, and they may find it difficult to keep some of their big foreign signings.

Serb Milos Krasic has already made clear his intention to move to Juventus. He effectively bid farewell to CSKA fans in May, with the intention of moving on after the World Cup. Despite wrangling over the size of the transfer fee, Juventus are likely to get their man sooner rather than later.

Chile's Mark Gonzalez has also done much to enhance his reputation after a good World Cup in which he was Man of the Match against Switzerland. His stock had fallen after a disappointing spell at Liverpool, but his first months at CSKA have been impressive and he may well earn himself a move back to one of Europe's big leagues.

But top of everyone's shopping list is CSKA's Japanese playmaker/forward Keisuke Honda. Signed in January from Dutch club Venlo for €6m, Honda has been a revelation for fans and headline-writers alike, putting in some scintillating performances for both club and country. There are already suggestions that he may be a target for AC Milan, though his agent recently cast doubt on the link, suggesting the rossoneri don't have the cash. Still, Honda is a wanted man.

Match-fixing rears its head

Aside from transfer speculation, in recent days a rather less happy tale has been doing the rounds in recent days - one which may impact Russia's hopes of hosting the 2018 World Cup. On Tuesday FK Khimki, a Russian First Division Club from the northern suburbs of Moscow, approached the league administrator to report an approach to one of their players to throw their game against FK Volgar-Gazprom that evening. A football agent named Sergey Panov had allegedly leaned on a Khimki player to influence the outcome of the game - an allegation Panov denies.

The match went ahead and finished 1-1, with little evidence of match-fixing or interference. It was revealed after the game that Khimki goalkeeper Roman Berezovsky had himself asked teammate Aleksandr Tarkhanov to introduce him to Panov, who is Tarkhanov's representative. The pair met, and the match-fixing scandal subsequently ensued.

This is not the first time Roman Berezovsky has been embroiled in controversy. Last April the player received an anonymous phone call before a home match with FK Rostov, ordering him to throw the match or risk the consequences. The game ended 1-0 to Rostov, though there is no suggestion that Berezovsky underperformed (see the video of the winning goal yourself).

But these kind of rumours continue to dog Russian football, to the great detriment of the country's bid to host World Cup 2018. Indeed, speaking after the game, Tarkhanov also revealed that this wasn't the first time Khimki had been approached.

"Before a game in Saransk we were approached," he said. "There were whispers. The lads started warming up and began asking whether we would actually lose the game on purpose, and whether in exchange the opposition would allow us to win the return game.

"In Nizhny Novgorod it was the same situation. They say to us - we'll give you this game and then later you'll return the three points."

It should be emphasised that at this stage the allegations have yet to be proven. But at the risk of sounding like Lord Triesman, one wonders just how many of these types of arrangements are being struck across the Russian leagues.

Big money and allegations of match-fixing - just another season in Russian football eh?

England's World Cup Exit and the Myth of "Quality"

2010-06-28T12:09:00.000+01:00

In the wake of the 4-1 battering by Germany which brutally ended England's World Cup campaign, fans and the media alike are currently going through what might be termed the Five Stages of Football Grief.

First is the denial. This kicked in about 30 seconds after Frank Lampard's 'phantom goal' was missed by the match officials in Bloemfontein. "This can't be happening, we should be level!" we all shouted. This was surely denying the fact that had Germany taken all their chances, England would have been dead and buried and Lampard's shot would have been an irrelevance.

Second comes anger. Most of us are actually still there. Fingers are being pointed, voices are being raised. Former England midfielder Chris Waddle was magnificent on BBC Radio 5 Live yesterday, practically foaming at the mouth at the final whistle.

The stages left to go are bargaining (probably concerning negotiating down Fabio Capello's inevitable £12m pay-off for the last two years of his contract), depression (for at least the next two years) and, eventually, acceptance - i.e. that England are not a team with a God-given right to reach the finals of major tournaments.

The thing about this World Cup exit is that it feels like a game-changer. In previous tournaments in my lifetime - France 1998, Euro 2004 spring to mind particularly - the England team have gone down in a blaze of glory, or at least have been able to blame others (match officials, winking Portuguese wingers) for defeat.

Now there is nowhere left to go. It has become obvious to all that systemic failings within the England team - perhaps even within English football - have contributed to the abject performances in South Africa. This is football grief at its most raw.

Everybody with a stake in English football is today pouring over the evidence in a bid to isolate the causes and suggest remedies. One of the most often-cited points is that England lack strength in depth, that going down to grass-roots level England does not have the coaching expertise to produce "quality" players.

It is a point that rankles (and not just because "quality" is a noun, not an adjective).

England's youth squads have been on an upward curve - the Under-21s reached the European Championship final last year, and the Under-17s went one better earlier this year, winning the trophy. With all the money sloshing around the Premier League, more and more potential players are being taken into professional academies and provided with access to coaching of the highest standard.

No, it's not that England don't produce "quality" - it's that we fail to recognise the "qualities" that make a top-class footballer. Intelligence, technique and discipline - in my view the hallmark of a good footballer - seem to have been thrown out of the window at the expense of pace, trickery (which are luxuries) and that truly nebulous term "spirit".

This last is epitomised by John Terry's performances in the last fortnight. If there is one thing Terry can't be criticised for it's his spirit, however grudgingly: one has to accept that the Chelsea captain wears his heart on his sleeve. He cares deeply. However, when England have had their backs to the wall, Terry has not provided the calming influence, nor the intelligence needed.

His desire to put his body on the line for England's cause masks errors. The now infamous attempt to block a Slovenian shot with his head during England's final group game is a prime example. Preventing the opposition from having a shot is far more important than throwing yourself haphazardly in the way of them. And Terry has lacked positional discipline, exposed so cruelly when he meandered upfield for a Lampard free kick with Germany leading 2-1, only for the Germans to counter, taking advantage of Terry's absence, to put the game beyond England.

Picking Terry out is unfair though. Some players apart - Milner and Barry would probably qualify for this in my book, though this is open to debate - every England player has suffered from similar tendencies in South Africa: and this, despite their apparent "world class" status.

If we learn one thing from the World Cup so far, it is that teams with an apparently limited supply of "quality" in playing staff can achieve more than the sum of their parts through intelligence, technique and discipline. New Zealand, Slovenia, Japan, perhaps even Uruguay, do not boast the talent pool which their World Cup performances would suggest. Instead, they have relied on good preparation, appropriate squad selections, some fine coaching and a few fine individuals - many of whom would fly below the radar in England.

The England's Under-21 team which lost to their German counterparts last year included the likes of Mark Noble, Fabrice Muamba, Lee Cattermole and Michael Mancienne. Yet none of these players would get a look-in for the World Cup. I seriously doubt that's because they are not "quality" players - more, it's because they don't fit the current paradigm of what a successful international player supposedly constitutes.

That needs to change. England have a wider talent pool than people give them credit for. Not only that, but as this tournament has proved, sometimes selecting the best individuals produces inferior performances than selecting the best "team" - by which I mean eleven players who co-operate and understand each other the best.

It's time for us to re-assess what makes a good England international. Is it purely about selecting the best eleven individuals and throwing them together? Or is it about finding players with the "qualities" to work together at international level? I think the evidence of Sunday's match against Germany suggests the latter route might be one worth taking in the next few years.

Boateng v Boateng - A sign of things to come

2010-06-22T10:47:00.000+01:00

On Wednesday evening Germany play Ghana in World Cup Group D. It's quite possible that in this country the match will rather slip beneath the radar, dependant on the result of England's game against Slovenia earlier in the day. But there will be plenty of people around the world tuning in to watch the intriguing story of the Boateng brothers played out on the field.

Jerome Boateng of Germany may end up facing off against his half brother Kevin-Prince, who despite being born in Berlin has opted to play for Ghana in this World Cup. This is the first time that such close family members have appeared on opposite sides in a major international football tournament. The Cynical Challenge welcomes guest blogger Ewan Roberts, who argues that they will not be the last.

'The Germans are at it again', cried ITV commentator Peter Drury as Cacau added a fourth goal and Germany cruised past Australia in their World Cup opener last week. Funnily enough, Cacau is as German as Drury – although I have it on good authority that Drury looks rather dashing in lederhosen. Born and bred in Brazil, Cacau only became eligible for Germany last year through citizenship, at the age of 27.

Three of Germany’s four goals were scored by players who were eligible for other nations - Cacau (Brazil), Lucas Podolski (Poland) and Miroslav Klose (Poland) - while their star player, Mesut Özil, chose to represent Germany instead of Turkey. Additionally, Mario Gomez (Spain), Marko Marin (Bosnia), Andreas Beck (Russia), Sami Khedira (Tunisia), Piotr Trochowski (Poland), Serdar Tasci (Turkey), Jerome Boateng (Ghana) and Dennis Aogo (Nigeria) could have opted to play for a nation other than Germany. Nearly half Germany’s squad have foreign roots. In fact, Poland and Turkey are better represented than the former East Germany, whose sole flag bearer is Tony Kroos.

Welcome to the 21^st Century of football – an age of cultural diversity and national mobility, or success hungry mercenaries?

Certainly the German squad is an accurate reflection of an increasingly diverse country. Cacau believes he represents the multicultural nature of German society – and with 1,278,424 foreigners taking German citizenship between 1995 and 2004, it is hard to argue with him. The legitimacy of Germany’s “foreign” talent is not in question, but the patriotism of some players is. Do players owe a duty of responsibility to the lesser nations from which they originate?

It is perhaps unsurprising that seven of Germany’s eleven foreign players would not be appearing at the World Cup had they elected to play for a different nation. Are players opting for personal glory over national pride?

The Germans are not the only team with players whose nationality is ambiguous. Over 100 players in South Africa this summer are eligible for another nation – approximately 1/6^th of all players in the tournament. This includes players who: a) were born in a different country, b) qualify for another nation via parentage, and c) are naturalized citizens. Only seven counties have squads which include no players eligible for other nations.

75 players were born in a country other than the one they will represent in South Africa. In most instances, the players in question chose a football superpower rather than a minnow. Nations such DR Congo, Uzbekistan, Albania, Scotland, Bosnia, Kosovo, Suriname, Venezuela, Zaire and Cape Verde are being drained of talented footballers.

It’s hardly surprising, therefore, that in a world in which nationality is flexible we should see a World Cup in which the same is true. Even England, whose team include no players directly eligible for other nations, are benefitting from this mobility. Prior to Viv Anderson’s landmark debut in 1978, England were as white as the shirts they donned – but two weeks ago they travelled to South Africa with nine black players, mostly products of years of immigration, largely from the Caribbean. Several teams are still being propped up by their status as former empires – England, France, and Portugal. In fact, it could be argued that Portugal’s greatest ever player, Eusébio, is actually Africa’s greatest player, having been born in Mozambique. However, there would be another challenger for such a title: France’s Zinedine Zidane.

Zidane considers himself “first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman”. His decision to represent France would appear to contradict this affirmation of Algerian national identity, but Algeria’s civil unrest, and footballing inferiority (more so relative to France) would have been Zidane’s primary motivator. In order to compete at the highest level, and cement his credentials as one of the world’s best players, Zidane shunned an Algerian side that had not qualified for the World Cup since 1986. Many players, sadly, still take this view. Though there is a growing trend of Algerians “returning home”.

Today, Algeria find themselves in the curious position of having 17 French-born players, eight of whom have played for the French youth team. Are more Algerians picking their nationality with their heart rather than their head, or is it simply a case that most aren’t good enough to play for France? It is more likely to be the latter. There is more than a hint of irony regarding the surprise exclusion of Samir Nasri and Karim Benzema from the French side: both are Algerian.

Zidane and the Algerian side provide examples of two sides of a complicated coin. Zidane’s decision was influenced by a desire for personal glory, but also a state of national unrest. How many of the Algerian squad would have chosen to play for Algeria ahead of France if they had a realistic opportunity of representing Les Bleus? How many would have chosen to play for Algeria if the country was still in a state of extreme unrest? Probably very few, if any.

France’s procurement of non-French talent is not limited to Algeria. The World Cup winning “rainbow” French team of 1998 included Zidane, Youri Djorkaeff (of Armenia), Lilian Thuram (French Caribbean), Bixente Lizarazu (Basque), Patrick Vieira (Senegal) and others. Twelve years on and little has changed. France’s primary talent pool remains (though is not confined to) Africa, with ten foreign born or foreign descended players.

Increasingly, players are asked to choose between their heritage, ancestry and national pride, or trophies and personal glory. Some players “swap” nations in order to gain a second chance to play international football. While that is reasonable motivation, there is opportunity for exploitation.

In 2003, Equatorial Guinea were ranked 178^th in the world. The appointment of Spanish coach Oscar Engonga began a process of nationality “scouting”, with Equatorial Guinea scouring the world, though predominantly Spain, for players with ties (however tenuous) to Equatorial Guinea. In Engonga’s first competitive game in charge, he named 10 Spanish-born players. This policy of importing success continued, and Equatorial Guinea thrived, reaching the dizzying heights of 64^th in the world.

Many players are granted a second chance, but at what cost? We could end up with a structure in which players have a “first choice” nation and a “back-up” option. This would inevitably lead to a two-tiered structure of international football: Those who are good enough for their first choice, and those who aren’t (and play instead for a “consolation nation”), and the margin of supremacy between the bigger nations and minnows will only extend further.

Despite his Turkish roots, Özil opted for Germany because it was the nation that represented him best, and that he owed the most to. A mind-set not unlike that of French-born Mali international, Frederic Kanoute: “Though I am French, born in France, and I grew up there, I always took my holidays in Mali. And inside me, something always said, ‘You are of Malian origin’.”

Similarly, Didier Drogba was given the opportunity to play for France, but opted to represent the Ivory Coast (despite an unstable government – General Robert Guei imprisoned the team after several poor performances in the 2000 African Cup of Nations), and it’s a decision he does not regret: “The call-up brought me closer to my origins, my roots and my people. Like all those who have a double culture, I was looking at myself a bit....accepting that invitation to play for my country helped me find out who I really was”.

Drogba adds, “I’m sure that if I had been called up as a youngster [to play for France] then I would have opted for France”. The temptation to represent a more prestigious and bigger (in terms of past and potential future achievements) is often too alluring for younger players. We must not deny similar opportunities for self-discovery and fulfilment to the youth players of today.

The World Cup is as much a representation of the diverse new world we live in as it is one of confused nationality. Many players face a crisis of nationality, and their decisions have an incredible bearing on themselves and their country. Players have a responsibility to themselves (to their sense of identity) and to their fellow countrymen. When the Boateng brothers face each other, whose decision was made with the greater integrity? Whose decision carries greater responsibility? Or is it simply a case that Jerome was good enough for Germany, and Kevin-Prince was not?

Whatever the permutations of the manner in which players perceive their own notion of nationality, the World Cup will undoubtedly be a cauldron – a calabash even – of nationalities. 32 teams have qualified, but many more are represented. The Rainbow nation could not be a more apt setting to deliver a truly World Cup.

World Cup Steward Strikes - Where Next?

2010-06-15T23:24:00.001+01:00

Having sat through - and tried to enjoy, despite the lack of quality on show - the World Cup match between Italy and Paraguay on Monday night, I logged onto Twitter. I had hoped this might provide some respite from the relentlessly dreary match, in which one group of long-haired, swarthy types kicked lumps out of the other.

Instead I was shocked to read this tweet from Nigerian sportswriter Colin Udoh:

BIG TROUBLE at Durban Stadium!! Something just exploded. outside. Media being forced to stay inside the Media Centre

There was more to come - according to journalist Kris Fernandes inside the Moses Mabhida Stadium where the match had taken place,

a pungent scent of smoke is wafting in the media centre from the warning shots (Not actual bullets from what we're told) that were fired off

As it turned out, the commotion was caused by an attempt by the South African Police Services (SAPS) to break up a demonstration of match stewards outside the stadium. The stewards were angry at not being paid the wages they had anticipated, and have since complained about their working hours and conditions to numerous media sources.

Since Monday evening a further four of South Africa's World Cup stadiums have seen their stewards go on sympathy strikes, in solidarity with their co-workers in Durban. If newspaper reports on the issue are to be believed, the organisation contracting the stewards, Stallion Security, appear to have misled and/or mistreated their workers, and the strike appears to my eye (albeit here in the UK) justifiable. 10-12 hours work paid at something like £1.50 per hour, in an economy where GDP per capita is around £7000 per annum, with only partial regard for worker wellbeing, does not a happy workforce make.

In the absence of the striking stewards, the World Cup Organising Committee have charged SAPS with providing security services on matchdays in the five locations concerned.

It's worth stating the ostensibly banal point that, having feared the worst, we can all be relieved that this was not a terrorist attack. But - and I hate to sound alarmist - some of the implications of the steward strikes for this World Cup could be highly damaging to the successful organisation of the tournament.

First and foremost, few people seem to have noted the grim irony of handing over responsibility for crowd control inside stadiums to SAPS - an organisation that chose to deal with a potentially volatile crowd of striking workers at the Moses Mabhida Stadium by charging them with stun grenades and rubber bullets. One wonders if SAPS are briefed to deal with misbehaving football fans in a similar way - and what, if they do, might be the consequences.

Secondly, and arguably of even more concern, is the fillip that the stewards' strike might provide to organised labour across the rest of the South African economy. On the eve of the World Cup a number of South Africa's economic sectors are threatened with industrial action. Eskom, the state-owned utilities company, could be one of those hit by strikes. Some 1.3 million public sector workers had also threatened to take industrial action prior to the tournament, a threat that has only been postponed by the South African government's agreement to negotiate over wage increases.

South Africa's workforce may well have legitimate grievances; they equally may be using the World Cup, and the threat of chaos that a strike would cause during the tournament, as a gun to hold to their employers' heads. If settlements cannot be found to the pay disputes, the World Cup may be derailed; if employers give in to potentially costly demands, the South African economy could be harmed long-term.

Whatever the case, this is certainly not the last we will hear of the issue. Prior to the tournament so many stories circulated about the potential logistical problems of holding the World Cup in South Africa that there has been a kind of media backlash, as major broadcasters and newspapers have largely ignored or underplayed the trouble over striking stewards. We may all be in for a nasty shock - whether that be a major security incident involving football fans, or largescale industrial action.

I hope I'm wrong though.

Following the World Cup - an alternative guide

2010-06-10T20:12:00.001+01:00

Less than 24 hours away and this is the first World Cup-related article on The Cynical Challenge. This is an oversight, much akin to Graham Poll's three yellow cards for Josip Simunic (though not as bad as Ali ben Nasser's failure to spot Maradona's Hand of God).

But I have an excuse. It's difficult to write anything new about the goings-on in South Africa when every media outlet from Al Jazeera to Der Zeit (A-Z: geddit?) is covering it.

So rather than give you my own opinions - and I have many - on what might happen throughout the next month, let me point you in the way of a few choice places where you can get the most out of your viewing and reading experience.

Readers in the UK - and indeed beyond - will probably use the BBC website as their 'one-stop-shop' for World Cup news and live match commentary. Which is fair enough, and the Beeb has justly earned a reputation for reliable, entertaining and sophisticated online coverage. But stick to them and you might be missing out on some really fantastic coverage of the tournament.

If you're still a bit behind on the runners and riders in South Africa, why not head over to Some People Are On The Pitch and check out their World Cup pull-out. They've provided details not just of the teams and players competing, but have put together a fantastic mélange of stats, trivia, downloads and useful links. In short, it's everything you wanted to know about the World Cup but were afraid to ask.

For views and opinions worth reading, check out When Saturday Comes. The monthly magazine has spent a lot more time in recent months getting more out of their website, but thankfully that hasn't come at the expense of good writing and alternative perspectives on the action.

If you want to follow matches online try the brand new ITV Live site. I ought to add a caveat at this stage that I'm working for ITV during the tournament, so I'm not entirely unbiased in this respect - but I'm also one of the few people to have seen ITV Live in action prior to the tournament. It provides live video coverage of ITV's televised matches, plus text commentary of every game of the World Cup. But the really unique feature of ITV Live is that it may be the only place to find in-game video replays online - without having to resort to illegal streaming. Throughout the game ITV will be feeding video replays onto the site in real time, so you won't miss a thing.

If I'm going to plug my own office then I might as well give a shout out to some friends - the team behind the twofootedtackle blog now have their own dedicated World Cup site, Kwaitoball. If it's intelligent, clued-up and slightly cynical opinion you're after, Kwaitoball is the place for you.

And if you're not listening to the Football Ramble podcasts - well, frankly, where have you been? Four guys, a microphone, and a serious amount of football knowledge, delivered with a wit sharper than John Fashanu's elbows. The Ramble are going to be out in Johannesburg for the week of the World Cup Final, and I'm already pinning my colours to the mast by saying they, not the national media, will be breaking the great stories that week.

Hopefully that'll keep you entertained throughout the next month - but don't forget to keep visiting The Cynical Challenge for plenty more.

Why do the English love football?

2010-06-04T12:16:00.000+01:00

With the World Cup just a week away many people here in England are taking leave of their senses - most notably in the last couple of days, as millions of people attempt to read Fabio Capello's mind by staring for hours at England's squad numbers.

That's in addition to the idiotic (loosely) World Cup-related products which companies are hawking at the moment. Check out this blog from the good people at Some People are on the Pitch for an analysis of just how stupid Mars, Gillette and others think we are.

But in fairness we English are pretty football mad. We are a country which can support 92 professional football league clubs on a population of 60 million - by comparison, Russia, with a population of 140 million, has under 40 professional clubs.

The reasons why football brings out the obsessive in an Englishman could fill books, but I've offered one reason over at TM Lewin's blog: check it out here.

Photoblog: On the Road with CSKA Moscow

2010-05-24T01:11:00.000+01:00

These photos are a series taken for The Cynical Challenge whilst I was in Kazan, Russia. I travelled to Kazan to watch home side Rubin take on CSKA Moscow in a top-of-the-table Russian Premier League match. The game ended 1-0 to CSKA, the only goal of the game coming after some lovely build-up and finished off by Liverpool cast-off Mark Gonzalez, but it was action off the pitch which really captured my attention.

An hour before kick-off, Kazan's police ready themselves outside the city's Tsentralny Stadium. The police (militsiya) and security services (OMON) are a highly visible presence at Russian Premier League matches - I would estimate about 750 members of the militsiya were at the game in Kazan, policing a crowd of 17,000. Moreover, fans have to undergo several security checks, including searches of bags and pockets, prior to entering the stadium. I was told that a pen in my bag, a souvenir from Kazan, could be used as an offensive weapon, and was therefore confiscated. Bastards.

Written on the back of this CSKA fan's t-shirt: "God is with us".

Kazan's lovely Kremlin, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site, reflected in the glass of the Tsentralny Stadium. It's also worth pointing out that the young lady in the blue skirt at the front of the shot was giving away free packets of cigarettes to everyone - including minors.

In the background - the Qol Sharif Mosque, one of Europe's largest mosques. Kazan's population is around 48% Tatar, a Turkic-Muslim ethnic group, and 44% ethnic Russian, and the city is regarded as a true melting pot of Eurasia's cultures. In the foreground - a CSKA fan brandishes the tricolour flag of the Romanov dynasty, Russia's Imperial royal family. In recent times the flag has become popular among ultra-nationalist groups, and waving it in a Muslim-majority city such as as Kazan brings its own, rather overt, political connotations.

A view from the away end at the Tsentralny Stadium. Note the fences surrounding the away fans on all sides. Also, regular readers of The Cynical Challenge will know of my soft spot for Eastern Europe's lovely floodlight pylons, and here's yet another fine example.

2,000 CSKA fans travelled to Kazan, many making the 1,600 mile round trip by sleeper train. By comparison with some away trips in the Russian Premier League, Kazan is relatively local. Still, you have to take your hat off to supporters for making the journey - and it's worth adding that, as the match took place on a Friday evening, the visiting fans would have had to take a day off work to do so.

The practices of Russian football supporters differ from that of their British counterparts in one particularly noticeable way. Fans in Britain tend to behave spontaneously, with chants and songs begun from within the stands. In Russia, by contrast, fans tend to look to supporter representatives, posted at the front of the stand and armed with loudspeakers, for a lead on which songs to sing. This is rather more reminiscent of the Ultra groups in, say, the Bundesliga, who orchestrate continuous (and impressive) vocal support throughout matches. You have to be pretty fit to lead the chanting - the man standing at the front of the shot stood on a narrow metal beam, shouting through his loudspeaker, for the full 90 minutes, in 30 degree heat. Rather him than me.

Once the cry of "shirts off" went up there were plenty of volunteers.

Leaving the stadium under the watchful eye of the Russian special services. It's rather like having the SAS police a Premier League game. Still, this is Russia...

Russian Football - Good for Collecting Air Miles

2010-05-17T13:52:00.001+01:00

As a country that spans nine time zones, you sometimes have to wonder how Russia functions as a coherent, unified state. The short answer, as many discussions on Russia's enormous territorial size conclude, is that it often doesn't.

But having said that, Russia does have a fully-functioning, truly national, football league pyramid. Although the Russian Premier League has five representatives from the Moscow region - Spartak, CSKA, Dinamo, Lokomotiv and Saturn - the league can fairly claim to represent most of Russia's major population centres. Likewise in the country's second tier, the First Division, teams from across the entire expanse of the Russian Federation compete against one another.

Indeed, last week saw two First Division teams play what is probably the single furthest domestic league away trip in the world. Baltika, based in the Baltic seaport city of Kaliningrad, nestled between Poland and Lithuania, hosted Luch-Energiya, from Vladivostok on the Pacific Ocean, just a short hop away from Russia's border with North Korea.

The teams are effectively located in Russia's westernmost and easternmost extremities. Ordinarily, this would mean that Luch-Energiya would have to undertake a 4,500 mile journey, taking some nine hours by plane, just to play 90 minutes of football. However, after an incident at a previous home game in which the match officials were attacked and threatened inside the team's Baltika stadium, the match was moved from Kaliningrad to Moscow's Rodina Stadium.

Whilst that shaved a couple of hours off the away team's journey time, no doubt the time cooped up in a plane, combined with a touch of jet-lag (Moscow is still seven hours ahead of Vladivostok), played havoc with Luch-Energiya goalkeeper Mikhail Komarov's concentration span, as he allowed a long ball to comically bounce over him for Yury Lebedev to score the only goal in a 1-0 Baltika victory.

I was interested to know how a football league is administered over such an enormous territory, so I dropped in to Russia's "Dom Futbola", a building in central Moscow, to chat with Andrei Sokolov, the General Director of the Professional Football League (PFL), which administers Russia's First and Second Divisions.

Territorial considerations shape the make-up of the Second Division, which is split into five regional leagues and means teams only have to travel to away games within their region. Having said that, there are still some pretty hefty away days to be had even at this level - in the Second Division East, a game between Radian-Baikal Irkutsk and Okean Nakhodka involves a 3,000 mile round trip for the away side.

But, as Mr Sokolov explained, the real challenge comes with the First Division, which is a nationally-integrated league of 20 teams.

A map showing Russia's First Division teams by location. Sorry to English speakers, could only get one with Cyrillic lettering (courtesy of Wikipedia), but Luch-Energiya are at the bottom right of the map, Baltika the top left.

"Our biggest challenge is to organise the calendar around the two Far Eastern teams, Luch-Energiya from Vladivostok and SKA-Energiya from Khabarovsk," he told me.

"What we have done this season is to organise the calendar into pairs of matches. Luch-Energiya and SKA-Energiya are paired up with two teams from similar areas of the Russian Federation. They travel away to play their respective matches, and then a few days later the teams swap over for another fixture.

"So, for example, there are two teams in the First Division this year from Krasnodar, FK Krasnodar and Kuban. Luch-Energiya and SKA-Energiya will both travel to Krasnodar one week, with one playing FK Krasnodar and the other playing Kuban. Then a few days later, they'll reverse the fixtures.

"The same applies when teams from Western Russia travel East to play."

An ingenious solution, no? Still, there's no doubting Russian football teams rack up some serious air miles throughout a season. And as for carbon emissions...

Russian football fans - more English than the English?

2010-05-12T11:44:00.000+01:00

The Cynical Challenge is back on tour. After January's weekend in Zagreb to take in an ice hockey match, this time Russian football is on the agenda. I'm in Moscow, where the streets are paved with either gold or discarded beer bottles, depending on your viewpoint.

Though The Cynical Challenge is here in a professional capacity, to research various aspects of Russia's football league system, it's been difficult to avoid being sucked into the country's seductively heady mix of cultural heritage and, ahem, cheap booze. That's even more the case at the moment, as Russia has just marked the 9th May holiday, Victory Day, celebrating Russia's victory over Fascism in Europe in 1945.

Just one of the many Victory Day banners around central Moscow

Over the weekend Muscovites pulled out all the stops to mark the 65th anniversary of Victory Day. There were all the usual festivities - patriotic songs, parading of veterans, street parties, fireworks and the like - alongside a very public demonstration of

Russia

’s array of tanks, military aircraft, armoured vehicles and weaponry. Imagine it as a village fete where first prize in the tombola was an atom bomb.

Still, it was an enjoyable day, and moreover a perfect example of the pride large numbers of modern Russians take in their country’s heritage.

Which is interesting, considering that their football fans tend to doff their caps to

England

. For them, English football is the lead to follow.

This doesn’t only comprise the action on the pitch. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the high profile of the English Premier League compared to Russia’s domestic league, many Russian football followers prefer to watch televised matches from England to watching their own local teams.

No, more than that, Russian football fans revere English football’s traditions – and particularly the hooligan element which, many of them assume, continues to play a decisive role in English footballing culture.

Having attended a Russian Premier League match between Spartak Moscow and Anzhi Makhachkala in my first few days in

Russia

, I got into conversation with some fans after the game. One of them, knowing I was English, asked me what I thought about Dougie Brimson. His face was a picture of disappointment when I told him I had no idea who Dougie Brimson was. Indeed, having mentioned the anecdote to a number of football fans in Russia, all of them have heard of the exploits of the man – a former hooligan turned writer who has chronicled the ultra-violent exploits of British fans in a number of books. His works are bestsellers in

Russia

Tales such as those told by Dougie Brimson, along with films such as Green Street (which Brimson also wrote) and Football Factory, have helped to raise the profile of English football’s hooligan traditions in Russia – even as these tendencies have rather fallen away amongst supporters in

England

. Indeed, many Russian fans I have spoken to during my time here continue to believe that at many clubs the gang violence of the 1970s and 1980s is alive and kicking (pun very much intended). Ask young Russian fans – one I spoke to was as young as 13 – who their favourite English club is and, apart from the usual suspects (Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea in particular), Millwall and West Ham tend to figure unusually prominently.

The reverence on the terraces for

England

occasionally becomes outright mimickry. CSKA Moscow fans, for example, chant their club’s name in English. Banners around Russian stadiums are often written in English. Even terrace fashions are consciously and scrupulously copied, from Burberry caps to Sergio Tacchini tracksuits. And, inevitably, football-related gang violence is not uncommon.

The ubiquitous "Burberry" cap, sported by a CSKA Moscow fan

Ironically, in following what they perceive to be the English model of football fandom, Russians have in fact created a more exciting and atmospheric football environment than the rather sanitised experience to be found at many English Premier League matches. This is not to draw a rather twisted connection between football’s power to entertain and fan violence – more an observation that high ticket prices, a clampdown on anti-social behaviour and all-seater stadiums in

England

have robbed many Premier League football matches of an edginess which is prevalent in Russian football.

Indeed, it's probably not unreasonable to suggest that, as far as terrace behaviour these days is concerned, Russians are more English than the English.

Extra Time

2010-05-01T09:40:00.002+01:00

Just a quick note to point you in the direction of this week's edition of the twofootedtackle podcast. Listen in, it's good for your ears

Despite the fakery, IPL gets top marks

2010-04-26T10:10:00.001+01:00

So long, the Indian Premier League. For another year at least, we will have to do without your inimitable blend of fireworks, dancing girls and gross advertising, interspersed with a bit of cricket.

Actually The Cynical Challenge is loath to join the ranks of the IPL’s detractors. The month-long tournament has had plenty of 'thrills and spills' to satisfy even the most casual – or ADHD-afflicted – cricket fan. But it has also provided cricket purists with plenty to ponder.

The standard line levelled against the IPL, even in its third year of existence, is that it is a poor imitation of the tradition-steeped colonial game. The last month’s action instead suggests that, for all the IPL’s big-hitting and unorthodox shot-making, for all the flashing lights and incessant bhangra blaring out of the PA system, the Twenty20 format can produce entertaining, and technically-sophisticated, sporting contests.

Sunday’s IPL final between the Mumbai Indians and the Chennai Super Kings in many ways encapsulated the character of the tournament, good and bad.

We began in the studios of ITV4, with a sight enough to bring British IPL devotees out in a cold sweat – Matt Smith sitting on a couch alongside Mandira Bedi. This gruesome twosome fronted the initial two weeks of ITV4’s IPL coverage, to much criticism. A sadly brief act of mercy on the part of the channel saw Smith and Bedi moved aside in favour of the more astute Mark Pougatch, but the 'comedy' double-act returned to front the final.

Bedi was at her useless best (worst?). Her trademark has been to wear a different colour sari for each day of the tournament, and she pulled out all the stops on Sunday, enrobing herself in a sari the colour of molten lava – perhaps as an homage to the Icelandic volcano, who knows?

Then straight over to India for footage of the closing ceremony. Flashing lights, loud music and an attractive woman waving from the back of a golf buggy. It was pure, unadulterated pap, which surely couldn’t be topped. And then, the pièce de resistance: a 50ft tall inflatable cricketer, looking like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters. Not since Diana Ross’s performance at the 1994 World Cup has something so costly and pointless been beamed onto our screens.

On to the coin toss, and who better to perform the tossing than IPL chairman Lalit Modi? Make of that comment what you will. Modi has been at the centre of something of a media storm after he revealed his reservations over the ownership of some IPL franchises via Twitter, leading to political resignations and the opening of an investigation into financial malpractice.

Quote-friendly Modi’s appetite for social media appeared to remain undiminished though. Before the final he used Twitter again to suggest that there were 'the men who have tried to bring disrepute to the game', to then refute 'baseless stories' about the IPL in the media, and add as a footnote details of an IPL general council meeting.

The coin toss may be Modi’s last act as IPL chairman, however, with his controversial approach to PR earning him plenty of detractors. And indeed this morning it was announced that Modi had been suspended pending an investigation into his role.

Another signature of the tournament is the willingness to whore anything and everything for corporate sponsorship. So instead of sixes we have DLF Maximums. Instead of wickets there were Citi Moments of Success. Never mind the continuous, nauseating references to the MRF blimp, as if the audience watching at home had never encountered the concept of air travel.

The IPL’s extreme culture of corporate sponsorship has been brilliantly sent up by the good people at Test Match Sofa, who have suggested such gems as 'Cleethorpes Community College Gay & Lesbian Hotline wicket - helping you get out and stay out'. They will be commentating throughout the summer’s Test series in England, so expect plenty of the same.

But once the final actually started there was plenty to admire.

Having won the toss, Chennai, skippered by the dashing MS Dhoni, made 168-5 off their 20 overs. Chennai’s innings was anchored by a fine knock of 57 not out off 35 balls by Suresh Raina. Raina also took a superb catch to dismiss Saurabh Tiwary during Mumbai’s reply, topping a superb day for him.

The final over of the Chennai innings, bowled by Sri Lankan paceman Lasith Malinga, was also noteworthy as a thrilling display of fast bowling. Malinga bowled four dot balls in a row to start the over – menacingly fast, reverse-swinging deliveries – and only blotted his copybook by going for five wides off his fifth ball. When he is bowling on form, Malinga is one of the most exciting players in world cricket.

In reply, Mumbai began more sedately. Sachin Tendulkar, who ended the tournament the leading run-scorer in IPL 3, demonstrated once again that you don’t have to hit sixes to be successful in the Twenty20 format. Tendulkar hit only three sixes during the entire tournament, and his 48 off 45 balls in the final was another example of his technically-sound run-scoring.

Sadly for Tendulkar he received little support from his big-hitting teammates. Harbhajan, Tiwary, Duminy and Morkel all perished without scoring a boundary, and it was only with the explosive arrival of Kieron Pollard, who bludgeoned a brutal 27 off just 10 balls, that Mumbai started to accumulate quick runs. Had Pollard come in a couple of places up the order we might have had a tight finish, but as it was Mumbai fell 22 runs short. Chennai proved worthy winners.

The IPL will undoubtedly be back next year with more of the same. And, its many irritating foibles notwithstanding, the tournament will again be embraced as a success. The final of IPL 3, as a microcosm of the entire month’s action, demonstrated why the IPL brand has become such a popular one.

Interestingly, as a final thought, Sunday’s final of this grandiose, self-important, unorthodox but incredibly successful tournament was held in the Indian city of Navi Mumbai – at over 300 square kilometres in size, and with a population of 2.6 million, one of India’s most prosperous cities. It also happens to be the world’s largest planned, man-made city, built from scratch out of fields, marshes and salt-pan in 1972. As hugely successful fakery projects, the final and its venue are a match made in heaven. Roll on next year and more of the same.

My Marco Boogers Moment

2010-04-20T14:24:00.000+01:00

Hello all. The Cynical Challenge has been offline for some time now, so I thought it necessary to provide an update. I've recently moved house and have been without the internet for nearly four weeks. And, to paraphrase Blackadder, whoever heard of a blog without an internet connection?

This sudden and unexpected absence calls to mind the tale of footballer Marco Boogers. After signing for West Ham in the summer of 1995, Dutchman Boogers was sent off on just his second appearance for the Hammers. He then went AWOL for a number of days, during which time a story emerged (later found to be apocryphal) that Boogers had returned to Holland, depressed, to spend some time in his caravan. West Ham manager Harry Redknapp sold him just a year later.

Boogers now works as a coach at Dutch Eerste Divisie side FC Dordrecht, where he works alongside another former Premier League player, ex-Newcastle United midfielder and the King of Commentary Innuendo Brian Pinas.

Rest assured though - The Cynical Challenge is not depressed, and is not living in a caravan. I'll be back with plenty more sporting comment as soon as somebody at a certain telecom company (any guesses which one?) pulls their finger out.

In the meantime, if you're in the UK at least, you can while away the hours enjoying the wall-to-wall coverage of the World Championship Snooker from Sheffield.

Reasons to watch the IPL: How many do you need?

2010-03-22T01:40:00.000Z

Readers in the UK will be very familiar with the output of ITV. For those with either the good sense or the good fortune not to witness the televisual fare on the channel, ITV's programming is often so spectacularly piss-poor it almost looks like satire.

Every day millions of British people - among them your friends, family members and generally law-abiding citizens - take leave of their senses and tune into ITV's moronic chat-show/fly-on-the-wall-celebrity-documentary/regional-soap-opera formats. These are interspersed with intervals where advertisers really put the boot in, by demonstrating how brainless they think we really are.

(A particular favourite at the moment is an advert for Just For Men, which requires no comment. Just watch it and weep.)

But, lo and behold, in the last week ITV have hit upon a winning formula - the Indian Premier League cricket. This is the first cricket shown free-to-air in the UK for nearly five years (since the 2005 Ashes, which was shown to much acclaim on Channel 4), and it's been a thrill a minute. The Cynical Challenge is truly chastened.

The IPL has its detractors: for the lack of quality it is perceived to encourage, for the damage it may wreak on cricket's power politics, even for its speed. But watching the first week or so of IPL coverage on ITV has been truly compulsive viewing.

Partly that's because the channel has brought its own inimitable style to televising the tournament. The studio line-up of Matt Smith, one of a long line of mediocre British sports presenters (headed by Matthew Lorenzo - google him if you like) and, in his own words, a gay icon, and Bollywood actress Mandira Bedi, has all the chemistry of arsenic. Smith in particular has excelled, demonstrating that lack of knowledge is no barrier to employment. For more on this look no further than Barney Ronay's superbly funny article in Saturday's Guardian.

Fortunately there is more to the IPL than watching John Emburey and Graeme Hick battle for the title of most boring cricket pundit on TV. The cricket played in the tournament's first week has been, frankly, excellent.

Praveen Kumar bagged a hat-trick for the Bangalore Royal Challengers - with a slow yorker, a bouncer and an off-cutter - in their match against the Rajasthan Royals. Matthew Hayden showcased his mongoose bat, which everyone laughed at until he started launching balls into the stands. Hayden ended up with 93 from 43 in the match against Delhi Daredevils. And speaking of big hits, how about Irfan Pathan clearing the grandstand in Cuttack against Deccan Chargers?

Meanwhile, in answer to those who say Twenty20 is all about power at the expense of technique, it has been cricket's technicians who have led the way with run-scoring - in particular, Sachin Tendulkar and Jacques Kallis. To most Indians (and some English cricket fans too, I might add), Tendulkar is something akin to a deity - indeed, 'Tendulkar is God' was number one trending topic on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. But even with such a reputation, it has been astounding to watch a player score big in the IPL without going for "big" shots. Tendulkar has hardly altered his naturally patient game from the 5-day format to 20 over cricket, yet cracked a breathtaking innings of 63 off 32 against Delhi. Kallis, meanwhile, has allowed his figures to do the talking - 4 innings, 4 not outs, 264 runs scored. That puts the South African top of the IPL batting rankings.

The tournament has also given British viewers a firsthand view of some of the up-and-coming stars of Indian cricket. Particularly impressive in the early matches in 2010 have been a pair of batsmen, Bangalore's Manish Pandey and Saurabh Tiwary of the Mumbai Indians.

Pandey made a name for himself last year, aged just 19, after becoming the first Indian to score an IPL century. He subsequently grabbed the headlines in India with an incredible catch in the final of the Ranji Trophy (India's domestic 5-day competition). This year Pandey has scored 120 runs at an average of 40, and is looking every bit a future Test star. Tiwary has recorded similar figures - 139 runs at 46.33 - and one innings of 61 from 37 in partnership with Tendulkar was reminiscent of India's current Test captain MS Dhoni. Tiwary, like Dhoni, plays state cricket for Jharkhand, and with his long straight hair bears more than a passing resemblance to him. Coincidence? I think not.

But if the young guns are less your thing, the IPL also gives viewers the chance to see former Test greats for possibly the very last time. At 40 you'd think perhaps we'd seen the back of Shane Warne, but there he is, still lugging his "bulky" frame around the field for Rajasthan. Leading the Deccan Chargers, and doing a fine job too, is 38-year-old Adam Gilchrist. And there's even room for a berth in the starting XI at Rajasthan for Damien Martyn, who was last seen in the 2006 Ashes series. Safe to say he won't be making a shock comeback in Test cricket though - he was out for 19 from 24 balls in his side's crushing 10 wicket defeat to Bangalore.

The lesson is this - watching the IPL is rewarding on a number of levels. Great cricket from great players, young and old, in a format accessible to all. Besides, even if you don't like the cricket, you can still derive perverse enjoyment from watching ITV's often laughable coverage. And what's not to like about that?

A Crash Course in Russian Football: Part 2

2010-03-15T01:51:00.000Z

"One man's meat is another man's poison", as the saying goes. That's actually not true at all. Neither vegetarians nor hardened carnivores would enjoy a nasty dose of E. coli from rotten beef. No, a more accurate message is perhaps this - sometimes even our favourite things can leave a lot to be desired.

Following on from Friday's Part 1, providing some background to Russia's Premier Football League, The Cynical Challenge spent the weekend watching the opening weekend of Russian football fixtures. And as I've already made clear, watching the Russian Premier League, in my book, is right up there with tea and dark chocolate digestives as one of my favourite spare time-fillers.

Sadly, though - and this is where the opening paragraph of this blog comes in - the first round of matches in the Russian Premier League did little to whet appetites. In the eight matches played this weekend there were a mere 11 goals.

There were admittedly some highlights among this rather paltry number. Zenit St Petersburg's Portuguese international Danny, once the subject of a £20 million inquiry from Chelsea, scored a lovely solo winner against Krylya Sovetov. Terek Grozny's Andrey Kobenko proved that you don't need to be Brazilian to score a spectacular lob. And Rubin Kazan's fans proved they have a sense of humour, suggesting in a chant that rivals Krylya Sovetov Samara, who are suffering from well-publicised financial problems, ought to try Ebay for a solution.

[Note: There's a hidden message to the Ebay chant - in Russian the company's name also sounds like the f-word...]

But, as much as The Cynical Challenge aims to champion Russia as one of the more exciting championships in European football, the games on Friday, Saturday and Sunday were for the most part akin to watching grass grow. Which is funny, really, as one of the things which would have improved the spectacle across the Russian Premier League would be a bit of decent turf. Defending champions Rubin, for example, played on a pitch at their Tsentralny Stadium which was something out of the World War I battlefields.

Even where the football had no need for grass - in Spartak Moscow's Luzhniki Stadium for example, which has a synthetic pitch - the icy conditions detracted from the spectacle. Blizzard conditions (watch the first couple of minutes of this video) during the first half of Spartak versus Dinamo really proved the old Russian adage that "snow is pretty, but it freezes your feet". I hate to sound like a broken record, as I've referred to this numerous times, but if there was ever an argument for maintaining the Russian football season in summer it was this weekend's round of matches.

The good news, though, is that things will improve. Pitches will thaw and players will get up to speed, and the Russian Premier League will soon be back to its combative, close-fought best. Because the truth about the Russian championship is that any one of perhaps six teams have a good chance of winning it.

Winners in 2008 and 2009, Rubin are again going to be a tough nut to crack. They easily dispensed with title rivals Lokomotiv Moscow on Sunday, winning 2-0 in Kazan. Back in October Rubin beat Barcelona in the Champions League group stages, demonstrating that, though they lack big name players, they are a hugely effective unit. Since the Barcelona victory they have lost their one star player, Argentine forward Alejandro Dominguez, who opted to move to Valencia during the winter. But the addition of experienced Turkish striker Fatih Tekke and Israeli midfielder Bibras Natkho should allow Rubin to maintain their excellent run over the last few league seasons.

Despite the setback away to Rubin, Lokomotiv are themselves looking good for a spot among the top three or four. Ukrainian international Aleksandr Aliev, who was one of Dynamo Kyiv's brightest talents, has arrived at Loko along with Brazilian forward Maicon, both of whom should provide more firepower. They slot in alongside Uzbekistan-born Nigerian Peter Odemwingie, formerly of Lille, and Russian international winger/forward Dmitry Sychev. Add into the mix the persistent rumours that Tottenham Hotspur striker Roman Pavlyuchenko might return to Russia to join Lokomotiv in the summer, and the squad have among the best attacking line in the division. Expect plenty of goals from them.

CSKA Moscow enter the new season with high expectations. Last season was one of turmoil in the coaching department for them, having been managed first by Zico and then by Juande Ramos before finally opting for a Russian speaker, Leonid Slutsky. Results have picked up and CSKA remain in this season's UEFA Cup, but they have also lost enigmatic Brazilian striker Vagner Love, who has finally grown tired of the Russian winter and departed for home club Fluminense. They have been boosted, however, by the signing of Japanese international forward Keisuke Honda, who scored the winner on his league debut against Amkar on Friday, and the return to form of former Liverpool man Mark Gonzalez.

Speaking of Liverpool rejects, one of the Russian league's most high profile signings was Andriy Voronin, who departed Anfield for Dinamo Moscow in January. Voronin played the full 90 minutes in Dinamo's 1-0 away win at Spartak on Sunday, and his side look a good outfit under an excellent young manager in Andrey Kobelev. Dinamo have the league's second pair of identical twins (after CSKA's Berezutsky brothers), the dynamic wingers Kirill and Dmitry Kombarov, while in midfield the indefatigable Dmitry Khokhlov, who had spells with PSV Eindhoven and Real Sociedad in the '90s, continues to pull the strings. Despite finishing eighth last year, they are this blog's outside tip for the title.

After losing manager Dick Advocaat, with whom they won the league and UEFA Cup in 2007, Zenit St Petersburg started the season with an easy 2-0 win over stricken Krylya Sovetov. New coach Luciano Spalletti has a big job on his hands, not least in keeping his bald head warm throughout the cold months, but his squad is taking shape. Fatih Tekke departed, to be replaced by PSV's Serbian forward Danko Lazovic, and he will team up with burly Russian international Aleksandr Kerzhakov, once a UEFA Cup winner with Sevilla. But most important to Zenit's cause is the return from injury of playmaker Danny, and if he remains fit the club will be around the top spot this year.

The final word goes to Spartak Moscow. For those unacquainted with the Russian league, they are the Manchester United of Russia, in the sense that they are the best-supported club in Russia, and are loved and loathed in equal measure. Hugely inflated ambitions have meant the club has gone through a string of managers over the last ten years, has alienated good players, and as a result has largely underperformed. Now, under former Celta Vigo and Real Sociedad player Valery Karpin, the club at last looks set for a tilt at the title. Alex, a Brazilian midfield playmaker, provides the team's craft, while a Brazilian forward pairing of Welliton, last year's top scorer in the Russian Premier League, and Ari, a new signing from AZ Alkmaar, will be among the goals. The club's potential downfall, as ever, is infighting - Spartak's fans are, paradoxically, incredibly loyal and infuriatingly fickle in equal measure, and the slightest hint of disquiet in the ranks could tear apart their season.

So that's my pick of the six potential title-winners in the 2010 Russian Premier League. I defy you to find another league of 16 teams where so many clubs have a genuine chance of success. So sit back, wait for the sun to come out, and enjoy what could be a seriously close title chase.

A Crash Course in Russian Football: Part 1

2010-03-12T00:54:00.000Z

It's a chilly -8 degrees C in Moscow, with heavy snowfall forecast for Sunday - so what better than to kick off the new Russian Premier League football season?

Yes it's that time again. No sooner have Russian sports fans witnessed their country's dismal performance at the Winter Olympics (they finished just sixth in the overall medal table, having won only three golds, leading to President Dmitry Medvedev effectively sacking Olympic Committee chief Leonid Tyagachev) than they can pick themselves back up again with an icy dose of springtime football.

This weekend sees the first round of matches in the 2010 Russian Premier League, starting with today's match between CSKA Moscow and Amkar Perm, kicking off at 4pm GMT.

Rather than looking forward, though, The Cynical Challenge is going to start by looking back. After all, to most people at least, knowledge of Russian football is a luxury (and a dubious one at that), rather than a necessity. So, like Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds, or the fat one out of Pie in the Sky in The History Boys, I'm naively going to attempt to take you on a journey of discovery through what I regard as one of Europe's most interesting football leagues. Besides, I'll be returning to Russian football periodically throughout the season, as it's personal hobby horse, so pay attention.

This blog began with observations about the weather in Moscow, and that's a theme we should return to. The Russian Premier League begins in March and ends in November - sensible, you might think, given Russia's well-known meteorological extremes during the wintertime. Well, 2010 may actually be the last full season in which we see football in Russia being played in sunshine.

As I have written more extensively elsewhere, the Russian Premier League is seriously considering playing games throughout the winter, in conditions which can plummet below -30 degrees C, accompanied by huge snowfall. For now the plans are embryonic, but watch this space on that story.

From plummeting temperatures to plummeting budgets - the winter of 2009/10 will go down in Russia's footballing annals as one in which financial conditions got a little out of control. Obviously the high-profile cases of Portsmouth and Chester City in England, and the travails of many clubs in the Netherlands (starkly described this week by Ernst Bouwes) have made stories of financial mismanagement rather de rigeur in the footballing press.

Having said that, Russia's example is an interesting one. Over the winter one club, FK Moskva, have had to fold after their corporate backer pulled the plug, and another, Krylya Sovetov Samara, have been bailed out by a combination of regional and national government, and big business.

You might ask why Samara were saved and not Moskva. The answer largely depends on how much of a cynic you are, and this being The Cynical Challenge I'll give you my frank appraisal. Pure economics played its part, but there were important political reasons for sacrificing Moskva and sparing Samara.

Firstly, the numbers game: Moskva were a Moscow-based club, and in a city already groaning under the collective weight of four other clubs (Spartak, Dynamo, CSKA and Lokomotiv) there simply wasn't a market for a fifth in a league of 16. In fact, if you look back as recently as 2005, the Russian Premier League actually contained seven sides based in the Moscow region, so clearly a tipping point was reached. FK Moskva were regularly playing to crowds of less than 10,000 last year (this in a city of 12 million inhabitants), despite having qualified for the UEFA Cup the year before, which tells you all you need to know about the club's fan base.

But the political side is more intriguing. It's certainly seen as being in the Russian government's interests to develop cultural or leisure institutions outside the Russian capital. Samara, home to Krylya Sovetov, is a city on the Volga some 900km south-east of Moscow. With so much power, wealth and opportunity concentrated in both Moscow and St Petersburg, the risk is that the millions of Russians living outside these centres, including those in Samara, may become disaffected.

To that end money has been poured into Krylya Sovetov to save them, ensuring one of the few national beacons emanating from the city of Samara, its football club, remains an ongoing concern. This is not a trend confined to Samara. In recent years sides such as Rubin Kazan (Tatarstan), Terek Grozny (Chechnya), Spartak Nalchik (Kabardino-Balkaria), Luch-Energiya Vladivostok and Tom Tomsk (Siberia) have all experienced promotion - and in Rubin's case title success - in the Russian Premier League, thus expanding the geographical reach of the championship. It also helps keep those who live in Russia's poorer regions happy.

And continuing in that vein, replacing the now defunct FK Moskva in the Russian Premier League are Alania Vladikavkaz, from the North Caucasus republic of North Ossetia - a region you may remember as instrumental in the conflict between Russia and Georgia in 2008.

Spare a thought for Alania, by the way, who were informed of their promotion less than two months before the start of the season. The have since gone on the kind of spree to make even Victoria Beckham blush, picking up 14 players, but look worryingly unprepared for the season ahead.

And that moves me nicely on to the part where I talk about the coming Russian Premier League season. But I won't be doing that until Part 2 of this series, coming up on Monday. For now, class dismissed.

____________

If you would like to read more about the ideas in this blog, especially the point that politics looms large over the Russian Premier League, you may also want to take a read of Marc Bennetts' excellent Football Dynamo.

The biggest waste of resources in British sport

2010-03-08T03:10:00.001Z

Back in 2002 the bodies of thousands of soldiers serving in Napoleon Bonaparte's Grande Armée were found in a mass grave outside Vilnius. They had perished during Napoleon's hubristic, gruelling eastward advance in 1812, with the purpose of conquering Russia.

Another bleak and depressing tale of shattered ambition arose over the weekend in the Lithuanian capital. Great Britain's Davis Cup team were defeated 3-2 by Lithuania in their Euro/Africa Group II tie in Vilnius, a result nothing short of humiliating. Excuse, if you will, the rather graphic metaphor - but The Cynical Challenge doesn't quite know whether to remove one's cap and pay respects at the graveside, or to stick another knife in the corpse.

Actually that's not true. It's definitely time to put the boot in.

For once, though, the target of ire shouldn't be the players. There have been times in the recent past when Great Britain's Davis Cup players have shouldered responsibility in defeat. One thinks particularly of Alex Bogdanovic, the loser of six live singles rubbers in Davis Cup matches. Despite being the current British number 2 singles player, 'Boggo' has not been selected for a Davis Cup tie since 2008, thanks largely to what has been seen as a suspect attitude. And he has an awful nickname, though that's less his fault.

This time around, though, like Leonidas at the Battle of Thermopylae, hell, like Jedward in the X-Factor, the British players can retain some pride in a losing effort. Credit goes to doubles pairing Ken Skupski and Colin Fleming (rather dubiously dubbed 'Flemski' by the press), who breezed through their rubber in four sets.

Meanwhile the performances of 19-year-old Dan Evans and his 23-year-old counterpart James Ward were courageous and at times promising. But as the BBC's Jonathan Overend points out in a frank interview in the aftermath of the defeat in Vilnius, it was not for lack of effort that the pair lost out over the weekend's singles rubbers. It was lack of quality that did for them.

Ultimately, responsibility lies squarely on the shoulders of the LTA. Britain, Andy Murray aside, has consistently failed to produce players of a good enough calibre to defeat teams like Lithuania. Never mind Lithuania - it should never have come to this. Britain should be producing players able to come through previous ties against stronger teams - the likes of Austria, Poland and the Ukraine.

Instead, the LTA has shown unbelievable hubris. As has been pointed out by many, the LTA's annual budget for producing talent is over £40m; the Lithuanians had a mere £90,000. But after a series of damaging defeats across East/Central Europe which make Operation Barbarossa look like a cakewalk, Britain now languish one match away from Europe Group III and some unwelcoming ties against the likes of Armenia, San Marino, Moldova and Malta. As a tabloid might put it (and who wouldn't love to see this in print?) Vilnius was truly GB's Stalingrad.

Appearances suggest the LTA is currently operating the biggest waste of resources in British sport. It earned £29.2m in 2009 in profits from the Wimbledon Championships. A further £14m was earned in sponsorship and commercial partnerships such as that provided by AEGON, who as an insurance company who ask their customers to "rely on our resilience and experience to help them plan for their financial futures" should really have spent their money more wisely. According to the LTA's 2009 annual report, the organisation has also secured a further sum of up to £26m over the next four years from Sport England - a public body which draws from tax revenues. Yes, that's right, your money is being spent on this failure, and plenty of it.

And where does it go?

£40m has been spent on the new tennis centre at Roehampton, south-west London, which opened to great fanfare in 2007. It has 22 courts, which is good, and a hydrotherapy unit, which is probably not an entirely necessary facility for producing tennis players. Either way, it has been criticised in some quarters as, well, a bit of a waste, not least in the Daily Mail, in its own imitable (but on this occasion pertinent) way:

The LTA spent £500,000 last year financing its elaborate canteen at Roehampton's National Tennis Centre, which is five times the annual budget for Lithuanian tennis. As [Dan] Evans could testify, all the five-star nutritional dishes in the world are not much help when you are faced with a deciding rubber against a hungry East European feeding off constant adrenalin refills from hugely patriotic support.

Not sure if that reference to "a hungry East European" isn't a tiny bit racist, mind.

And then there's the six-figure salaries to top coaches, £2.2m per annum by some estimates to men such as Paul Annacone, Peter Lundgren and Brad Gilbert, none of whom have really cut the mustard. In Lundgren's case, a rather embarrassing episode in 2007 culminated in the Swede, who had previously successfully coached Roger Federer and Marat Safin, being placed on gardening leave before being moved on.

The millions of pounds being spent with no end product is a diabolical misuse of valuable assets. The contrast could not be clearer, coming in the wake of the Vancouver Winter Olympics, where Amy Williams won gold in the skeleton despite the British Olympic Association having received only £6.5m investment in winter sports in the last four years.

The first decade of the 21st century taught us that money helps sport and athletes to thrive. I give you Chelsea FC as a case in point. The second decade has already revealed, through Portsmouth FC in particular, that hubris, mismanagement and financial excess in sport are liable to be severely punished. The LTA is no exception, and heads will roll.

A Shocking Tackle - but not a Malicious One

2010-03-01T00:18:00.000Z

Aside from Manchester United's victory in the Carling Cup and "Handshake-gate" at Stamford Bridge, the weekend's sporting headlines were dominated by the shocking injury suffered by Arsenal's 19-year-old midfielder Aaron Ramsey in his side's match against Stoke on Saturday evening.

I have no intention of amplifying the morbid fascination of many in the media, by publishing or providing links to footage of the incident. For those who haven't seen it, a description will suffice. In the 65th minute Stoke's Ryan Shawcross won the ball in the middle of the field. Shawcross took a heavy touch a couple of yards in front of him, and in attempting to retrieve the ball dived at pace into a challenge. Ramsey, arriving a split second ahead of Shawcross, flicked the ball away from the Stoke man's path, and was on the receiving end of Shawcross's outstretched foot.

The result - Ramsey suffered a fractured tibia and fractured fibula. He underwent a successful operation on Saturday night, though Arsenal are thus far refusing to provide a timescale for the player's return to action.

Given the seriousness of the injury, unsurprisingly public discussion of the incident has been dominated by immense sympathy for Ramsey, something to which I feel moved to add. Ramsey was one of the players The Cynical Challenge picked out as one to watch in 2010, and it is cruel that we are to be deprived of such a talented individual for what may be a long time. More than that, though, the idea that a young man should suffer so terribly in the line of sport, or entertainment, is a sobering prospect for any football supporter. One only hopes he can make a full recovery and will return to top-level football as quickly as possible.

But questions have also been posed about whether Ramsey has been unlucky, or whether Shawcross's challenge was unnecessarily violent and reckless.

Given the club's recent history of such injuries - Abou Diaby and Eduardo have suffered similar leg fractures in the last five years - Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger was forthright in his opinion that this was no mere unfortunate accident:

This is a young player who has been kicked out of the game. I'm shocked, that wasn't football. If I have to live with that, I don't want to be involved in the game...This is the third player - Eduardo, Diaby and now Ramsey – we've lost to tackles that are unacceptable, and spare me the articles tomorrow about how nice Shawcross is because we had all that with Eduardo.

Wenger is entitled to vent his fury, especially in the immediate aftermath of a game. But in the cold light of day many football fans are adopting similarly emotive rhetoric - often at the expense of a fair reading of the incident. Arseblog, for example, offers this thought:

I believe that these three injuries are a direct consequence of the 'Arsenal don't like it up 'em' ethos which has become conventional wisdom in recent years. 'They don't like being kicked', the implication that the wimpy foreigners can't take it. And it has been peddled across the football world by reporters, TV pundits, radio commentators, Sky Sports presenters and anyone else you can think of. 'Arsenal don't like it up 'em', as if Arsenal were somehow unique in this. Let me tell you, nobody likes it 'up em'.

I'm not sure that's an accurate depiction of the Ramsey incident, nor in fact the notorious tackle by Birmingham's Martin Taylor on Eduardo two years ago. Speed and momentum are what turned these challenges from bone-shaking to bone-breaking, and given that the Premier League is played at such a high tempo - something it is lauded for - it is clearly a factor in the relative prevalence of such injuries on these shores.

Besides, bad tackles - indeed, tackles seemingly worse than Shawcross's, and with obviously greater intent - occur all the time in the Premier League, in league and non-league football, and in football leagues across Europe and the world. Only rarely do they result in injuries as bad as Ramsey's. One can only deduce that Arsenal have been really unlucky.

If there is any single odious act of violence on a football field it is not this kind of high impact, mis-timed tackle. More, it is the calculated use of the elbow to the head of an opponent. There were a spate of incidents of this kind in the English leagues in the mid-1990s, the worst of which saw Wimbledon's John Fashanu fracture the cheekbone and eye-socket of Tottenham Hotspur's Gary Mabbutt. As recently as 2008 Sheffield United's Chris Morgan dealt a similarly malicious blow to Ian Hume of Barnsley, resulting in the latter receiving a fractured skull. If anything deserves mass vilification, it is this kind of incident.

Having said that, it is easy to understand why fans react so vociferously to incidents such as the Shawcross tackle on Ramsey. As noted concerning the waves of sympathy for Ramsey, it is the shocking nature of the injury which provokes such emotive criticism of Shawcross, Stoke and the euphemistically-termed "no-nonsense" approach of certain teams and individuals. Quite simply, witnessing such incidents shocks (in the medical, as well as the more general, sense) football fans. It jolts us from our comfortable armchair view that athletes are playing their part in theatre, and reminds us that they are putting their bodies on the line for our entertainment.

This reaction is fanned - unintentionally, perhaps - by the wall-to-wall coverage of the incident. Footage, stills and photographs of the tackle have been pervasive since Saturday evening. They are shocking and sickening, and it is no surprise that this provokes an emotional response.

But emotion and reason do not make for easy bedfellows. And for a reasonable assessment of the Ramsey-Shawcross tackle, we need to dissociate the shock of what we witnessed on Saturday from the realities of sport. As hard as it may be to accept, the physical rough-and-tumble of a sporting contest can lead, on occasion, to such outcomes as Ramsey's injury. Mercifully, though, such incidents remain rare.

A special/dubious treat

2010-02-25T01:43:00.000Z

Football fans, members of my extended circle of friends, and illiterates rejoice - The Cynical Challenge has gone from the written word to the spoken one this week. The good people (Gary and Chris) at Two Footed Tackle gave me the opportunity to run amok in their studio for an hour, talking about, amongst other things, this weekend's Premier League fixtures, Champions League and Europa League matches, and why Russian football clubs have the worst names.

All of which you can find here. Listen to it on your way to work. Listen to it on your way home from work. Listen to it in the bath, though try and avoid electrocuting yourself. But most importantly of all, listen to it.

What the Tabloids don't tell you about Portsmouth FC

2010-02-22T01:06:00.003Z

There's been a lot of hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and much else this week surrounding the plight of Portsmouth FC. It's a pretty sad story which has been documented in great detail and with some skill elsewhere. Some of the most readable and rewarding articles on the sheer hubris and financial calamity which has been the last five or so years at Portsmouth can be found at Pitch Invasion, Two Hundred Percent (and Two Hundred Percent again), and The Observer.

Notice the predominance of blogs in this list - which probably says as much for The Cynical Challenge's choice of reading material as for the treatment of the story in the national press.

Still, though, it seems that only in the "blogosphere" (it's an awful word, I know), and to a lesser extent among the broadsheets, have journalists truly got a handle on the situation at Portsmouth. The tabloid press have treated the story as a scandalous example of financial excess in the Premier League - but for the most part haven't really computed the stark realities of the situation at the club.

Those realities are as follows:

Firstly, the likelihood of anyone bailing Portsmouth out of this mess is now approaching zero. The club are not only in serious debt, but such is its financial structure that even if these debts were expunged overnight they would still run at a substantial loss.

Secondly, as a result, Portsmouth are in very real danger of going bust. We're not just talking administration and a ten point deduction, but liquidation, which effectively means the club would cease to exist.

This may not be news to many, but it's worth emphasising because, had you only been reading the red tops since the story of Portsmouth's woes broke, you might still think the club could escape this brush with the Grim Reaper (otherwise known as HM Revenue and Customs).

The Daily Mail, for example, reported as late as Sunday that Portsmouth might be able to make a quick buck on central defender Marc Wilson, and implied that the option of administration - in which the club settles its debts under the supervision of its creditors - was still on the table.

The "administration" line has cropped up again and again across the week. On Saturday The Mirror suggested that administration and a nine point deduction would be the expected outcome should Portsmouth fail to find funds by this week to carry on trading. The Sun did likewise a day earlier.

Under the circumstances, though, administration would be a preferable outcome for Portsmouth. The club would incur a points penalty, effectively consigning them to relegation. But it would allow the club to pay off its debts and restructure its finances in preparation, potentially, for a tilt at promotion from the Championship next season.

But administration appears no longer to be an option for Pompey. As the Guardian reported this week,

Simon Wilson, a partner with Zolfo Cooper, the restructuring experts, warns that despite handing in their statement of affairs, Portsmouth still face the very real threat of extinction and that going into administration is an unlikely salvation.

"Arguably, the level of debt associated with this case, will mean that it is unlikely that a suitable or willing benefactor will be found," said Wilson. "Portsmouth therefore face the very real threat of liquidation because it is increasingly unlikely that an administration order will be sought or granted."

In other recent cases, such as those at Leeds United, Southampton and Leicester City, HMRC were owed a substantial amount of money (in unpaid taxes, VAT and PAYE), but had to settle for a fraction of their debt when the clubs went into administration. Leeds United, for example, settled their debts at around 8p in the pound - in other words, only having to pay 8% of the outstanding tax bill - when Ken Bates bought them out of administration in 2007.

It now appears the taxman has grown tired this situation, and is instead pursuing Portsmouth's liquidation. In this case the club would be shut down and all assets sold off to pay outstanding bills. All players' contracts would be immediately nullified. All the off-field staff would be immediately laid off. Everything of value would be sold off, including the the very name and emblem of Portsmouth FC. The club's registration with the Premier League would be terminated, and Portsmouth FC would no longer exist.

Under these circumstances it is irresponsible for the tabloid newspapers to continue to speak ignorantly of the potential for Portsmouth to survive the season intact. From the viewpoint of The Cynical Challenge only a miracle will save the club - in the form of a philanthropist who is prepared not only to pay off the £12 million in back taxes sought by HMRC, but to bankroll a loss-making business until the end of the season, when contracts and agreements will be up for renegotiation after the club's inevitable relegation from the Premier League.

That miracle looks increasingly unlikely to occur, even as rumours of a buyout from a South African consortium grow. And in dumbly repeating the "administration" line, the red tops are seriously misleading Portsmouth fans. The sooner we come to terms with the likelihood of Portsmouth's demise, the better. It's a bitter pill for those who hold Portsmouth dear to swallow - but more palatable than the shock which an unanticipated liquidation of the club would bring.

It's time to wake up to this likely outcome.

Afghan Cricket: A Valentine's Day Heart-Warmer

2010-02-15T01:13:00.000Z

Even the most hardened sports fan can be forgiven for having missed one story this week. The press gave a surprisingly muted reception to the news on Saturday that the Afghanistan national cricket team had sensationally qualified for May's Twenty20 World Cup.

Perhaps timing played a role. Unfortunately for the Afghan cricketers, while they were doing some sterling work at the qualifying tournament in the United Arab Emirates, the British and US governments began a headline-grabbing military offensive in Helmand Province in Southern Afghanistan. Still, coming as it did on Valentine's Day weekend, Afghanistan's qualification for the 2010 Twenty20 World Cup in the Caribbean is the stuff of true sporting romance.

Cricket has been played in Afghanistan since the mid-19th century when the country came under British colonial rule, though owing to political instability and patchy infrastructure the sport never really took root. At its nadir, during the Taliban era, playing cricket in the country was banned.

However, parallel to these setbacks to the development of the game, encouraging signs were taking place. Over the border in Pakistan, large numbers of Afghan refugees who had fled during the Soviet invasion, Taliban rule and, more recently, the Allied invasion, began watching and playing cricket again. In 1995 an Afghanistan Cricket Board "in exile" was formed in Pakistan, with the northern Pakistani city of Peshawar becoming a hotbed of Afghan cricketing talent - so much so, indeed, that in 2000 the Taliban relented on their ban, making cricket the only sanctioned sport in the country.

For obvious reasons, since the 2001 Allied invasion cricket has been a secondary concern for most in the country, but following their elevation to international competition in 2008 the team's rise has been meteoric. Consecutive promotions from Division Five to Division Three of the World Cricket League have ensued.

But these pale into insignificance when compared with the exploits of the team in the UAE last week. In defeating the likes of Ireland and Scotland - both of whom have competed regularly against ICC Test Nations (Ireland famously defeated Pakistan in the 2007 World Cup) - the team demonstrated their readiness to take on the best in world cricket. More than that, their eventual victory over Ireland in the tournament finale, and the awarding of a trophy, represents a tangible achievement. As talented fast bowler Hamid Hassan commented in his blog,

"I am sure that our people want us to bring the trophy back to Kabul and celebrate with us."

One of those brought up on cricket in Peshawar, Hassan, 22, encapsulates the minor miracle of Afghanistan's rise up the world stage. Having fled Afghanistan with his family aged 6, Hassan played club cricket in Pakistan, and as a teenager linked up with the nascent Afghan national side after the fall of the Taliban. According to cricinfo.com's Will Luke,

"[he] was first spotted when playing for Afghanistan in March 2006 in Mumbai when they defeated an MCC side led by Mike Gatting, where the then MCC president, Robin Marlar, noticed his potential, and was stunned to see him bowling in flat trainers [fast bowlers ordinarily wear spikes to add grip]. Hasan toured England with the national side in 2006, playing several matches against county second XIs, winning them all and was drafted onto MCC's groundstaff where he bowled against his hero, Andrew Flintoff, and was quick enough to smash Monty Panesar's helmet in the nets."

It is perhaps tempting to cite the Afghan cricket team as an example of the benefits of the Western-instigated political and social regeneration taking place in the country. Similar sentiments were expressed after Iraq, then in the midst of internecine strife after the toppling of Saddam Hussein, won the Asian Football Confederation's Asian Cup in 2007.

Then again, one hopes that the team's success will not give rise to a bout of political points-scoring among those who debate the consequences of military intervention in Afghanistan since 2001. Never mind the artificial nature of drawing such conclusions, the upholding of Afghanistan's cricketers as exemplars of the rebirth of the country is rather distasteful.

Throughout the qualifying tournament none of the Afghan team have shown any desire to send out a political message - even when given an obvious opportunity to do so. When the team defeated the USA on 11th February, Hamid Hassan refused to enter into a discussion of the clear political ramifications of the result, commenting that

"after the match, I had to go to do a post-match media conference and they all wanted to know how it felt to beat USA, but the opposition didn’t matter to me. I was just happy to win another cricket match."

If the story has any message, it is of sport's ability to produce the remarkable. Moreover, events in the UAE can at least provide Afghanistan with some news coverage outside the dominant narrative of war and reconstruction. In these respects, irrespective of where one stands on the political spectrum, Afghanistan's cricketing triumph is something we can all salute.

*A documentary on the rise of the Afghan cricket team is to be aired on the BBC this year. For more details visit http://outoftheashes.tv/

Terry and Tebow - A Moral Maze

2010-02-08T03:29:00.000Z

Barely could you pick up a newspaper, browse the news online, or take a journey on public transport this week without encountering some opinion about the rise and fall of Chelsea (and now ex-England) captain John Terry. Expectations have been that everybody, from MPs to tabloid journalists, and obviously The Cynical Challenge, has to wade in, and throw its two-penn'orth into, the murky, foul-smelling waters of Terry's sex-life.

If these various vox-pops and opinion pieces about the issue are representative of the general consensus, then the British public are disgusted with Terry's infidelity, and are satisfied with England coach Fabio Capello's decision to strip him of the captaincy. The message is clear - any man who sleeps around, and especially with the ex-partner of an England teammate - is not fit to enjoy the ambassadorial and leadership role which the captaincy bestows.

Two fundamental points seriously muddy the waters of this narrative.

The first is the nature of Terry's indiscretion. Undoubtedly, beyond the tabloid "think of the children" brigade, people are angry. Many have drawn parallels with their own workplace and suggested that if Terry's behaviour were repeated in other professional contexts he might be out on his ear. Others are just upset that Terry - 'Dad of the Year', "my family means the world to me" - has fooled the public about the nature of his private life, and (worse, in a way) sought to cover it up by paying off the parties involved. That includes a rumoured £750,000 payment to Vanessa Perroncel.

As understandable as these reactions are, neither are reasons to relieve Terry of the captaincy. Indeed, the argument that Terry's wandering eye makes him an inappropriate leader of the England team is surely a red herring. As Guardian columnist Paul Hayward notes, it was his misuse of the position of England captain which forced Capello's hand:

"[The argument that] an England captain should be sacked for having extra-marital sex [was something] this saga was never really about. At its heart was persistent misuse of the leader's role: the latest being the allegation that an associate of Terry's management team offered the use of his skipper's subsidised Wembley box for £4,000 in readies."

Coming off the back of revelations in December 2009 that Terry had touted tours of Chelsea's Cobham training ground for £10,000 a pop, along with his contracting of an agency to market himself for advertising and endorsements, Terry's use of the captaincy was teetering towards abuse. The sexual dalliances in this story provide titillation, but not grounds for Terry's dismissal.

Indeed, the ins-and-outs (excuse the innuendo) of Terry's private life are far less interesting than the manner in which they have been discussed in public. And this forms the second reason why we should be more cautious in joining in the public airing of Terry's dirty laundry.

To illustrate the point, let's switch to another major sporting story going on across the Atlantic. Superbowl XLIV is being played literally as I type. It's one of the most-watched sporting occasions on the planet, and for some the most keenly-anticipated part of the Superbowl television coverage is the half-time advert break. Unsurprising really, since, at a cost of around $100,000 per second, each advert is a hand-crafted piece of televisual history.

This year's series of adverts included one rather controversial offering from an organisation named Focus on the Family. Starring Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow, rated as one of the NFL's biggest prospects (he will be drafted in 2010), the advert explicitly promoted a pro-life message. Never before has such a potentially divisive issue been given airtime during the Superbowl, and many observers, including one commentary from ABC news, are angry that the usually non-political flavour of sports programming has been tainted.

"If you're a sports fan, and I am, that's the holiest day of the year," wrote Gregg Doyel of CBSsports.com. "It's not a day to discuss abortion. For it, or against it, I don't care what you are. On Super Bowl Sunday, I don't care what I am. Feb. 7 is simply not the day to have that discussion."

Whatever ones view on abortion, it's hard to disagree that the use of a sporting occasion to open up debate on a moral issue leaves a bitter taste.

Sport and morality are uneasy bedfellows. Are sports stars expected to behave as paragons of virtue? Should sporting authorities encourage athletes to give a moral lead? When does a sportsman's private life become of public interest? These are tough questions, but I'm inclined to think that most people would prefer to see sport and morality largely kept separate.

Yet if we heap opprobrium on John Terry for his misdemeanours one minute - in other words, asking sport to be a moral arbiter - we cannot oppose the moral lead provided by the Tebow pro-life commercial the next. It's this inconsistency, this hypocrisy, which exposes an unpalatable truth about the tale of John Terry and Vanessa Perroncel: that Terry's job description does not include the role of moral leader to his fellow players and England fans. Whatever awful things he gets up to in private, they are irrelevant when they have little bearing on his on-field performance.

Euro 2012's own moral dilemma

A brief addendum to the sorry Terry story - UEFA revealed before Sunday's draw for the Euro 2012 qualifiers that, because of an unwillingness to mix politics and sport, neither Armenia and Azerbaijan, nor Russia and Georgia, would be drawn together. It's a point that quite neatly fits in with the argument of this blog - sport and politics, much like sport and morality, do not easily mix.

The problem is, of course, that by pandering to the political factionalism of these warring countries, UEFA has paradoxically done the very thing it sought to avoid - politicising sport, bringing football into the disputes over Nagorno-Karabakh and South Ossetia.

Funny: UEFA was pretty keen to extoll the virtues of sport as a unifying force in a similar example last year, the process dubbed 'football diplomacy' which brought together Turkey and Armenia after nearly a century of strife. Now the goalposts have been moved, it's hard to say where sport begins and politics ends. Like the private life of John Terry at the moment, it's all a bit of a mess.

The Nostalgia Industry

2010-02-02T01:06:00.004Z

Zagreb isn't the first place most people think of for a trip away in mid-winter. Nor is it a city which grabs all that many sporting headlines. Those who follow skiing, or who remember England goalkeeper Paul Robinson's night of shame at Zagreb's Maksimir Stadium in 2006, may beg to differ. But, on the whole, I hadn't expected too much to write about in today's Cynical Challenge when I booked to visit a friend in the Croatian capital over the weekend.

The one item of note was, I had assumed, a fairly inconsequential ice hockey match between the local side, ZG Medveščak, and Austrian side EC VSV from the town of Villach. About a fortnight ago, hoping it might provide something to do on a Friday night, I contacted Medveščak and acquired some press tickets.

What I hadn't realised was what a big deal the game was.

Medveščak are Zagreb's most successful hockey team, having won the domestic championship 14 years out of the last 16 since Croatia emerged from the war in the Former Yugoslavia. Ice hockey, along with many other professional sports, fell apart in the country during the war. But the game is undergoing a resurgence in Zagreb, with Medveščak having been invited to compete in the Erste Bank Liga, comprising teams from across Central Europe, for the first time in 2009-10.

Over the weekend, the club happened to be hosting a special event dubbed the "Šalata Winter Classic". Ordinarily Medveščak play their home games at the indoor Dom Sportova complex. But the Šalata Winter Classic was different - two matches, the first against Villach and the second two days later against the Vienna Capitals, held at Medveščak's former home, the outdoor Šalata Sport and Recreational Centre. These would be the club's first matches at Šalata, by all accounts a much-loved stadium among residents of Zagreb, in nearly 40 years.

Friday's game was an absolute joy. The slightly crumbling stadium was a sell-out, with 4,000 fans turning up to roar on Medveščak, even as the temperature dropped to -5C. The pre-match entertainment only added to the sense that this was a evening for looking back as much as forwards, with renditions of Stompin Tom Connors' The Hockey Song, released in 1973 - a year after Medveščak left Šalata. And, as if to emphasise the point, the crowd joined in a rendition of the Croatian song Za Stara Dobra Vremena - "to the good old times".

Sporting nostalgia works in mysterious ways. It has the ability to unite disparate supporters in a way that discussion of current sporting trends rarely does. The passing of a respected former footballer - one thinks of Bobby Moore or Stanley Matthews as recent examples - seems invariably to provoke eulogies from across the board, irrespective of partisan loyalties, and despite the potential for dissent. Even Manchester City supporters (broadly) respected the minute's applause at a home game after the death of former nemesis George Best in 2005.

In another way, fans often resort to the use of their club's history as a rallying call and a signal of their credibility. Witness the Manchester United fans who, in recent weeks, have adopted the green and yellow of Newton Heath FC, the Old Trafford club's forerunners, as the banner for their movement against the Glazer family - perceived to be outsiders and therefore improper guardians of the club's history.

Toasting the "good old times" in sport isn't always so positively-received, though. In his excellent Englischer Fussball German author Raphael Honigstein argues persuasively that English fans' inflated perception of their country's importance in world football has inhibited their team's performances at international level; while Germany's reluctance to think too hard about its past (particularly the years 1933-45) has allowed players the freedom to play, and win, without the weight of history on their shoulders.

And sometimes nostalgia can even be cynical manipulation. In football especially, the resort to appropriating club traditions - the interviews with faded stars, the tours round dusty old trophy rooms - is often, perversely, a symptom of the destruction of that history. As the game becomes ever more global, and the focus of clubs transcends the local communities which house them, tradition itself becomes commercialised, packaged and sold to fans the same as replica kits. In this way the clubs satisfy the emotional bond between a team and its local support base, while expanding into the global marketplace and thereby, slowly but surely, rendering that bond illusory.

However, albeit viewed from a position of ignorance, the Šalata Winter Classic represented a truly successful return to the roots of a sporting institution, the sell-out crowd a testament to the profound meaning attached to Medveščak's return to the club's Tito-era home.

Friday's game plainly demonstrated the fact that, for many sports fans, remembering their club's past can often be more important than planning for its future. It's a lesson that many who run sporting institutions in the UK may pay lip service to - but Medveščak's example is a relatively rare one, a beacon of credibility in a sea of clumsy attempts by many, particularly in the Premier League, to 'sell' tradition to fans.

The only let-down - the result. Medveščak lost on penalties after a 2-2 draw.

One hour to go. Nothing says 'Eastern European sport' like a floodlight pylon

Wheel out the prematch entertainment

Let's get ready to rumble. By the way, the little yellow lights in the crowd are sparklers

Game on!

The punching, stamping and general violence begins

A view from the gantry

Monday Bonus

2010-01-25T11:44:00.000Z

Also thought I'd draw your attention to an article I've written in today's Wall Street Journal Europe. That's two for the price of one today.

Mens Tennis: An Old Man's Game

2010-01-25T02:09:00.000Z

The Australian Open looks like it's shaping up for a fascinating second week, with Federer, Nadal, Murray et al looking more evenly matched than ever before. It's getting harder and harder to pick a Grand Slam winner these days, which is surely only a good thing.

Truth be told, though, the first seven days of the tournament haven't really generated a huge amount of excitement. The early rounds produced a few nice stories - a win for Louk Sorensen, the first Irishman to compete in a Grand Slam since 1985; victory too for Turkey's Marsel Ilhan, who followed up a win in the 2009 US Open first round with another against Sebastien Grosjean.

But there was only one person tennis romantics were concentrating on in Melbourne last week, and that was 37-year-old Fabrice Santoro. The Frenchman, of double-handed forehand fame, became the first man ever to appear in Grand Slams in four different decades. Okay, he kind of cheated, in coming out of retirement specifically to play in Melbourne. But still, such longevity is a true achievement, in an era when physicality, fitness and the demands of a worldwide ATP tour make youth a real asset.

But hang on.

A quick look at the ATP rankings suggests that perhaps youth isn't that much of an advantage in mens tennis. This may seem a surprise, but there isn't a single teenager in the world's top 150. The highest-ranked teen is 19-year-old Guillaume Rufin, at number 173 in the world. The young Frenchman's ranking shouldn't be sniffed at - but then again, to put things into perspective, he is positioned two places behind Great Britain's perennial underachiever and Davis Cup bottler Alex 'Boggo' Bogdanovic.

Rufin leads a pack of promising youngsters which includes Bulgaria's Uladzimir Ignatik (world number 193), compatriot Grigor Dimitrov (268), Finland's Henri Kontinen (293) and Argentine Guido Pella (319). There's even a Brit on the list, 19-year-old Dan Evans, who is current world 254 and thus next in line for the British tabloid media's title of Wimbledon-winner-in-waiting, worn with such aplomb by Andy Murray and Tim Henman before him.

But the best illustration of this seeming lack of teenage breakthrough talent, more than their relatively low ranking, is that few outside the hardcore of tennis followers will have heard of them. Perhaps the best known of the current crop of under-20s is Australian prodigy Bernard Tomic, who was defeated by another young gun, 21-year-old Marin Cilic of Croatia, in Melbourne last week. Tomic looks to have a bright future ahead of him, and is still only 17, but he is currently ranked 289.

And this lack of a teen presence among the world's top players does appear to be a relatively new phenomenon. As recently as January 2007 19-year-old Novak Djokovic occupied 14th position in the ATP rankings, while Andy Murray, a week older than the Serb, was one position behind him at 15th in the world. A year earlier it was French duo Richard Gasquet (16th) and Gael Monfils (30th) who were flying the flag for the acne-afflicted and the hormone-hampered (sorry).

Going further back, we have had the likes of Nadal, Federer, Hewitt - who at 19 became the youngest ever world number one in 2001 - Sampras, Chang and Becker, all breaking into the top 25 in the world in their teenage years. We're not just talking prodigies and Grand Slam winners either. Czech Tomas Berdych, 24, the current world number 21, entered the world's top 100 aged 18 - thus demonstrating that it isn't only once-in-a-lifetime players who can make the step up before the age of 20.

In addition, comparing the mens tour with that of the women puts the lack of teenage talent into stark relief. The current WTA rankings show 12 of the top 100 women in the world to be teenagers. These include the current world number 4, Dane Caroline Wozniacki, and American prodigy Melanie Oudin, ranked number 48. Although the headlines concerning the womens seem to be dominated by the return of a handful of older players - Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin, and, most sensationally, Kimiko Date-Krumm - the rankings show a concurrent trend in teenage talent breaking through.

So why the current lack of youngsters on the men's tour? The way the ATP rankings are worked out, while imperfect (the subject of a whole different article), don't seem to discriminate against younger players, in that they rely for the most part on the previous 52 weeks of competition. Even more counterintuitively, though there are far more successful teenagers on the WTA tour, there are limits placed on the number of ranking tournaments that young women can enter - while no such limitations exist on the mens tour.

Which leaves us with the only sensible conclusion. Mens tennis is going through a dry spell, with very few young players looking like they will make the grade at the top level. All of which must make happy reading for Fabrice Santoro's thirty-something contemporaries, who will all be relieved not to have to swap their tennis rackets for walking sticks quite yet.

Kickipedia

2010-01-22T01:52:00.004Z

It's 22nd January. That means only one thing in my house - it's my parents' wedding anniversary. They'll either be delighted or mortified that I've mentioned that on The Cynical Challenge. Tune in next week to find out which!

Anyway, 22nd January is also an important date in the sporting calendar. On this day in 1927 the BBC broadcast live radio coverage of a football match for the very first time. Arsenal 1-1 Sheffield United, in case you were wondering. As the now famous tale goes, in the week running up to the match the Radio Times printed a diagram of a football pitch divided into numbered squares, so that the commentator could describe where the action was taking place - whence the phrase 'back to square one' entered the English language.

What better day, then, for Kickipedia to list a few of the great moments in sports commentary? Below is a brief list of the good, the bad, and the downright appalling commentary sequences, which all ultimately have their roots in that first BBC broadcast from Highbury 83 years ago.

Call me Crazy

It's impossible to do justice to the significance of the 1954 World Cup final, the so-called Miracle of Bern, in a short paragraph. For that, check out Uli Hesse-Lichtenberger's quite superb Tor!, a history of German football. In a (long, rambling) sentence: less than ten years after the entire country was destroyed by the hubris of Nazism and the invading Allied armies, West Germany beat Hungary, boasting Hidegkuti and Puskas, to lift the World Cup.

But the commentary provided by German reporter Herbert Zimmerman has gone down in history, as much, in many ways, as the match itself. With the score West Germany 2-2 Hungary and with six minutes remaining, Helmut Rahn powered the ball past Hungarian 'keeper Gyula Grosics, sending Zimmerman into rapture. "Rahn shoots...Goal! Goal! Goal! Goal!" Eight full seconds of silence. "Goal for Germany! Germany lead 3-2. Call me mad, call me crazy!" The catharsis of an entire nation in the voice of one man.

Jones...

"Harmison...Jones...Kasprowicz". Okay, it's not the most elegant of sequences - but that makes it all the more special. Commentator Richie Benaud always allowed the sport on the field to speak for itself, and his perfect, concise description to the nailbiting finish to the 2005 Ashes Test at Edgbaston, which England won by just two runs, was a fine example. Benaud mastered the art of using silence to his advantage, allowing the drama to build on screen before adding his deft finishing verbal touches. It's a lesson that, where commentary is concerned, sometimes less is more.

Dennis Who?

This is perhaps as famous for the quite magnificent goal it accompanied as for the commentary itself, but it still goes down as one of the most dramatic pieces of sports commentary ever. With two minutes to go in the 1998 World Cup quarterfinal between the Netherlands and Argentina, and the score at 1-1, the tension seemed to have got to Dutch commentator Jack van Gelder, who announced to Dutch viewers, "I have a feeling we're going into the semifinals". What followed requires little explanation, but for those desperate to know: "Frank de Boer plays the ball, on to Dennis Bergkamp, Dennis Berkgamp, Dennis Bergkamp..." ad infinitum. Probably, football commentary is so full of exaggeration these days that, when a truly astounding goal is scored, commentators go into meltdown, as van Gelder aptly demonstrated.

Super Sid

Darts. Not a sport often linked to classical Greece (some would say not a sport at all). But commentator Sid Waddell, who served his intellectual apprenticeship at Cambridge University before opting to pursue a career in sports commentary, manages to produce these kinds of ambitious comparison by the bucketload. Once, commentating on a match featuring Eric 'The Crafty Cockney' Bristow - perhaps best described as the David Beckham of darts during the 1980s - Waddell uttered the immortal line: "When Alexander of Macedonia was 33 he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds left to conquer...Bristow's only 27." And there's plenty more where that came from.

Francis Lee's interesting face

BBC commentator Barry Davies has had a truly varied career. As one of the corporation's more versatile employees, he's been everywhere from World Cup finals to Winter Olympics. He even had a short stint in the 1990s voicing a sketch on comedy series Big Train. But nothing he has ever said during commentary compares with his description of events at Manchester City's Maine Road in December 1974.

Facing Derby County, the home side were being held 1-1 when Derby's former Manchester City player Francis Lee picked up the ball 30 yards from goal. The ensuing goal, and the surreal commentary to go with it (from 0:42), have gone down in footballing folklore, so much so that Davies named his autobiography after it.

Of course, these are just a selection of my favourites, so if you have any other contenders by all means make your suggestions in the box below.

African Cup of Nations - What's the big deal?

2010-01-17T22:52:00.001Z

Chelsea 7-2 Sunderland. It's what English newspapers would refer to as a cricket score - though only one in which the opening batsmen will have failed miserably (a test match involving England, for example).

Well done to Chelsea for putting seven goals past Premier League opponents who were challenging for the European places only a few weeks ago, and who had held Manchester United to a draw at Old Trafford whilst beating Arsenal and Liverpool at home this season. Okay, Sunderland put in a shocking defensive performance, but isn't this the kind of awe-inspiring display we should expect from Chelsea?

Hang on a minute, though. Weren't we all being told this season that Chelsea were going to struggle without Didier Drogba, Salomon Kalou, Michael Essien and John Obi Mikel, who are all absent at the African Cup of Nations?

'African Nations Cup could ruin Chelsea's season' opined that sage of the game, Franck Leboeuf. Matt Lawton, who already featured in The Cynical Challenge last week (fingers crossed for a hat-trick eh Matt), predicted a crisis at Chelsea as a result of their 'African exodus'. 'Chelsea facing striker crisis' screamed Simon Johnson in the London Evening Standard.

Well if seven goals against Sunderland are a striker crisis, one dreads to think what Chelsea might have managed with their Cup of Nations players in the side.

It's time to end this to-and-fro surrounding the departure of players to the African Cup of Nations. As the shocking events in Cabinda last week demonstrated, our primary concern should be with the welfare of players and their security arrangements. And as the savaging of Sunderland's back four on Saturday demonstrated equally (without wishing to diminish the seriousness of events in Angola), suggestions that Europe's top clubs are unfairly crippled, nay, emasculated during the African Cup of Nations are pretty much hot air.

The proof of this particular pudding is in results on the field. And strangely enough, few of those predicting that leading clubs would have it tough during the tournament seem to have bothered to gather supporting evidence from previous iterations of the Cup of Nations.

Back in 2008 Chelsea, missing the same four players as this year, went unbeaten throughout the duration of the tournament. Indeed, their most disappointing result of the season came a couple of weeks after the return of Drogba et al, when they lost 1-0 away to Barnsley in the FA Cup. In 2006 Chelsea gained two draws and beat Liverpool whilst missing Drogba and Mikel, though the latter had yet to start a game for the club at the time. In both years they remained top of the Premier League throughout.

And this, admittedly rather rough-and-ready, measure of performance translates across other clubs and other leagues too. In France in 2008 Marseille lost four players, the most in Ligue 1 - André Ayew, Modeste Mbami, Mamadou Niang and Taye Taiwo - yet still jumped five places in the table in their absence. Two years earlier second-placed Bordeaux lost three players - Armand Tchami, Naby Diarso and Marouane Chamakh - yet only dropped points away to table-toppers Lyon, who were only missing Lamine Diatta.

Clearly it's pushing the point too far to suggest that losing players to the African Cup of Nations makes no difference at all. Clubs with smaller squads and at the wrong end of the league table struggle without their players during the tournament. Take Portsmouth who, in 2006, had to cope without Collins Mbesuma, Kanu, Lomana Lua Lua and Benjani and ended up shipping 11 goals in four matches, gaining just one point. Similarly Rennes dropped four places to fourteenth in Ligue 1 in 2006 when missing John Utaka, John Mensah, Abdeslam Ouaddou, Youssef Hadji and Cheick N'Diaye.

But the point still stands - the clubs at the top, playing with confidence and with deep squads to delve into, barely bat an eyelid come Cup of Nations time. Meanwhile it's the strugglers who suffer the loss of players hardest.

Still, what with papers to sell, don't expect to read the headline 'Table-toppers will coast along during African Nations' any time soon.

* big shout out to www.statto.com for enabling me to compile the above article.

Anger over Angola

2010-01-11T01:13:00.001Z

It's never nice when politics gets in the way of a football match. Sadly this is precisely the situation the 2010 African Cup of Nations finds itself in where, despite the fanfares and a fantastic opening match (in which hosts Angola went 4-0 up against Mali, only to be pegged back to 4-4), the tournament headlines are still dominated by events off the field.

The Cynical Challenge was knocking up its own preview to the African Cup of Nations on Friday, when news broke of the attack by Angolan rebels on the Togolese national team in the enclave of Cabinda. It seemed churlish to have persevered with a low-down on 'the players to watch' when such a shadow has been cast over the tournament. In addition, the wall-to-wall media coverage of events in Angola has served to underline how football journalists and commentators can get out of their depth as soon as 'the beautiful game' starts to get mixed up with serious political issues.

Apart from a few notable exceptions, sports journalists have taken the opportunity presented by the shocking attack on the Togo team bus to spout the kind of drivel usually reserved for writers in the Daily Mail comments section.

On Saturday afternoon the usually reliable Daily Telegraph columnist Henry Winter wrote on Twitter,

"Fifa must investigate events in Angola and improve teams' safety before World Cup. S Africa are organised but nothing can be left to chance",

displaying a magnificent combination of both geographical ignorance and political insensitivity. Firstly, apart from sharing the same continent, Angola is nothing like South Africa. The distance between Angola's capital, Luanda, and Johannesburg is over 2,500km - that's about 800km further than the distance between London and, er, Kosovo. It's hardly sensible to draw conclusions about security provision during the 2010 World Cup based on the Cabinda attack.

Besides which, Winter's comment betrays the kind of broad-brush attitudes to the African continent which have so stymied development since the end of the colonial period. The assumption that post-colonial Africa is any less complex and multi-dimensional than modern-day Europe is not just ignorant, nor just racist (though that is not an accusation which The Cynical Challenge wishes to make of any football journalist). It is dangerously misleading, in that it perpetuates these ideas rather insidiously - in a sports column, rather than in the politics pages. And if you think this is all just hyperbole, have a read of some of the things ordinary football fans are saying about the situation in Angola.

But then there hasn't been much subtlety in the reporting of the Cabinda story generally. Perhaps understandably, hardly anyone among the sports journalism fraternity knew much about Angola's complex and bloody civil war when the Togo story broke, and scrambling to get the story written has inevitably involved cutting corners. But that shouldn't excuse writers from reporting the facts as accurately as possible.

From Matt Lawton, in the Daily Mail, writing that the Ghana team "flies into the death zone" of Cabinda on Sunday - despite the point that, though unsettled, the eponymous capital of Cabinda region is far less dangerous than the border region with Congo-Brazzaville where the Togo team were shot at; to the general criticism of the Togolese for travelling to Cabinda by road "against advice", which obscures the fact that both CAF and the Angolan government had made assurances on the security situation in Cabinda prior to the tournament.

One also wonders why more media outlets hadn't examined the possibility of violence in Angola during the African Cup of Nations. Hats off to a few writers - particularly Martin Samuel and the good people at Just Football and Pitch Invasion - for having identified the potential for trouble prior to the tournament. Conditions in Cabinda were no secret, and there were plenty of signs that trouble could be brewing - had anyone bothered to look for them.

"It struck me as unusual that matches were being played in Cabinda," International Relations graduate Jon Rivlin, who was brought up in Angola, told The Cynical Challenge. "Those that know Angola know that Cabinda is not a safe place to go." It seems the vast majority of the sports media were unaware of such concerns.

It may be asking alot of the press, what with tight deadlines and an audience not always receptive to discussions of complex political issues, to get stories such as the Cabinda shooting 100% right, 100% of the time. But equally, media coverage of the event shows that sometimes, when a sports story breaks with political ramifications, the sports hacks should leave it to the experts.

A Cynical New Year

2010-01-01T14:32:00.000Z

Happy 2010! A new year is upon us, accompanied by the sounds of Big Ben striking twelve, popping champagne corks and, later, the 'plop-plop-fizz' of hangover remedies. After weeks of the sports media looking back - on the year 2009, on the first decade of the 21st century, even on whole careers - readers must be suffering from pretty sore necks. So allow The Cynical Challenge to administer a corrective treatment, as we look forward to a few names to watch in the world of sport in the coming year.

Detroit Lions

It’s not as if things can get much worse for the Lions. As of this week, with only one round of the NFL regular season left to go, the team’s win-loss record stands at 2-13, with only the St Louis Rams (1-14) preventing them from being given the dubious title of NFL’s worst-performing franchise in 2009. This is on top of the Lions’ 0-16 season last year, the first time in NFL history that a team has lost all of its regular season games.

It all neatly, though depressingly, ties in with the story of the city of Detroit’s apparent economic and social decline, a process emphasised in 2009 by the bankruptcy of two of the city’s major employers, Chrysler and GM.

Under the circumstances, perhaps citing the Lions as a team to watch might be interpreted as mockery. But it isn’t intended as an invitation for schadenfreude – there was a moment in 2009 when the team showed guts, fighting spirit and maybe, just maybe, a hint of the green shoots of recovery in 2010.

On 22nd November in a home game against the Cleveland Browns, Detroit recovered from a 24-3 first quarter deficit to trail 37-31, in possession going into the final minute of the game.

Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford, a rookie who was starting only his eighth professional game, took an enormous hit and suffered a dislocated shoulder with only seconds remaining. Evading the doctors who had carried him groggily from the field, Stafford ran onto the field, left arm hanging limply by his side, to pass for the game-winning touchdown. Watch the video here, it’s truly spellbinding (from 3:22). And it might just point to grounds for optimism for Stafford and the Lions next season.

Aaron Ramsey

The Cynical Challenge knew it was getting old when a player appeared in the Premier League who was born in the 1990s. When Aaron Ramsey signed for Arsenal from Cardiff in the summer of 2008 it was assumed he would be another product of Arsène Wenger’s seemingly endless production-line of young talent.

Thus far, though, Ramsey hasn’t made the immediate impression made by the likes of Cesc Fabregas – himself still only 22 – or more recently Kieran Gibbs, having started only four Premier League games in his Gunners career.

Not that Ramsey has been out of the headlines. Coming off the bench, the Welshman has scored some outstanding goals, including a lovely individual goal against Stoke earlier this season; while his exploits for the Wales national side have rightly earned rave reviews, most notably for an absolute cracker he scored for Wales U21 against Italy in September 2009.

Over Christmas, with a hamstring injury ruling Arsenal talisman Fabregas out of the tie with Portsmouth, Ramsey grabbed his chance with another wonderful strike. After a slow start it looks, rather ominously for Arsenal’s rivals, that Wenger has found another starlet – one who will get more and more game time in the coming year.

Marcos Baghdatis

From an up-and-coming youngster to a relative old hand: 24-year-old Cypriot Baghdatis has already experienced the heights of world tennis, reaching the final of the 2006 Australian Open, and following that with a run to the semi-finals of Wimbledon in the same year. Bearing more than a passing resemblance to Colin Farrell, and bringing with him a faithful (and vocal) band of Cypriot-Greek supporters wherever he plays, Baghdatis is a popular member of the tour.

However, a succession of injuries – to his ankle, back and knee – marred 2008-09 for Baghdatis, and he slipped from a high of number 8 in the world to number 151 in July 2009.

Returning to action, he won his first title for over two years in Vancouver in August, and followed that up with a year-ending victory in the Stockholm Open. On the way Baghdatis also managed to pick up the Tashkent Open title, an event most notable for forcing its winners to dress in traditional Uzbek style for the presentations. Credit to Baghdatis for doing his best to put on a brave face for the ensuing photo call.

Back inside the world’s top 50, and with an injury-free winter under his belt, the popular Cypriot could be on his way back into the world’s top 10 in 2010.

The US Winter Olympic Speedskating Team

Readers in the United States will know all about comedian Stephen Colbert. The presenter of satirical chat show The Colbert Report, Colbert brilliantly sent up George W. Bush at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in 2006 and then attempted to run for the American Presidency in 2007.

But in late 2009 Colbert turned his attention from politics to winter sports, when he announced on The Colbert Report that he would be sponsoring the United States men’s speedskating team. The team had suffered a shortfall in funding after the collapse of Dutch bank DSB (whose liquidation, incidentally, has also ruined the season – and possibly the long-term future – of Dutch football league champions AZ Alkmaar), and Colbert stepped in with both cash and a superbly irreverent marketing ploy.

All eyes will surely be on the US speedskaters at the forthcoming Vancouver Winter Olympics, and not just to check out their lycra uniforms, emblazoned with Colbert’s signature “Colbert Nation” logo (modelled rather disturbingly by Colbert himself in Sports Illustrated last month).

The team broke a number of records at their World Cup meet in Berlin in November 2009, so they may just be good tips for a host of gold medals in Vancouver. Either way, though, the story is going to be good for a few laughs.

"Ref you suck" and other American sporting practices

2009-12-28T19:08:00.000Z

Some of you may remember a series of television adverts for the international banking conglomerate HSBC. Under the strapline 'The World's Local Bank', the adverts demonstrated how cultural practices differ around the world. There was the Chinese attitude to generosity, and their ideas on fishing; parking á la français; and the importance of getting your hand gestures right in Brazil.

Before you ask, no, these straightened economic times have not forced The Cynical Challenge to seek corporate product placements. It's just a reminder that, although the world is getting smaller, we shouldn't forget that things are done differently around the globe.

And sport is no exception, as The Cynical Challenge has found out in the last week after taking in a Christmas feast of American sport - including live basketball, where Miami Heat hosted Utah Jazz, and live American football at Miami's Dolphin Stadium between the Dolphins and the Houston Texans. And, like the sportswriting equivalent of Claude Lévi-Strauss (let's be ambitious), this blog is reporting back its findings on these most American of leisure-time activities.

More more more - how do you like it?

Turn on the TV at any time of the day in the US and you'll find more sport to watch than on an average matchday in Britain. There's the usual suspects, American football, hockey, basketball and baseball (the latter less so as it's currently off-season). Then there's "soccer" - sorry, it had to be done - from England, Italy, Spain, South America and even Australia. There are even Spanish-language versions of all these channels for the United States' sizeable Hispanic population.

In short, there's something for everyone. On Christmas Day, traditionally the worst day for television in the calendar, lucky American viewers could see five (five?!) NBA games back-to-back whilst digesting their Christmas turkey, running from 1pm to past midnight. On Boxing Day fans of English Premier League football could watch three games consecutively, starting with Fulham vs Tottenham and ending with Liverpool vs Wolves.

And even the most desperate sports fan finds themselves sated. In the last week - purely for research purposes of course - The Cynical Challenge has watched a bunch of 12-year-olds from Texas and Kentucky play Little League Baseball, a re-run of the 1982 playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Dallas Cowboys (one of the greatest games of all time, by the way - read more here), and former New York Giant Tiki Barber do a turn on daytime TV as correspondent for NBC's Today.

Food glorious food...

Watching live sport in the US is as much a culinary experience as it is entertainment. Foot-long hot dogs, corn dogs and chilli dogs. Pizza slices the size of an average pizza in the UK. And as many salt-infused empty calories as you can think of - nachos, popcorn, grilled cheese, and pretzels so large they could be murder weapons.

Best of all is the beer. Dispensing with standard-sized cans, the Americans go for a 24 fl-oz ring-pull can (that's over 700ml) while they watch a game. That's heavy duty. Shame they cost $12 a piece.

...and impeccable toilet habits

Clearly The Cynical Challenge's experience of bathroom facilities in Europe's sport stadia only takes in 50% of the available toilets - best not to get arrested for inspecting the ladies loos, even for a blog post. But it can be said without much reservation that American stadium toilets are the best in the world. The sight of Leeds United fans effectively destroy the toilets through, shall we say, 'misuse' on an away day at Norwich City's Carrow Road stadium about 3 years ago were banished to the past as soon as I saw all that spotless ceramic.

And not only that - some people actually washed their hands. With soap. That'll be the day.

"Ref you suck"

Continuing with the theme of politeness and etiquette, here's another difference between watching sport in Europe and in America - here in the States you hardly ever here a swear-word raised in anger or for amusement.

For a young British boy of primary school age, being taken to watch the football was a rite of passage. Once you'd seen your local team live in the flesh you were a man, and not just because of the cultural connotations that attendance meant, but because you heard, probably for the first time, the English language being put to highly colourful use. Ubiquitous, for example, is 'the referee's a w*nker', heard across English football grounds pretty much every weekend without exception.

By the way, an interesting exception might be Russia, where, like in the US, swearwords are largely confined to quiet grumbling among supporters rather than orchestrated chants. The Russian version of 'the referee's a w*nker' is pretty clean. They shout 'referee to soap', which sounds if anything odd, but actually has quite an insidious connotation. Back in Soviet times the regime had a nasty habit of dispensing with people they didn't like by killing them off, and boiling the bodies to turn their fat into soap. The fans are effectively calling for the ref to be taken away by the KGB for a nice dose of "re-education".

Anyway, in the US the closest you'll get to that is 'ref you suck', ad infinitum, which sounds, to use another Americanism, a bit 'lame' in comparison. Still, it makes for a very family-friendly atmosphere, without all that turning the air blue, and it's hard to think of too many reasons why you wouldn't want to take young children to watch live sport in America. Besides perhaps the threat of morbid obesity from all those snacks.

Sport as entertainment

More than anything, though, the overriding impression from watching sport in the US is that sport is less about partisanship and localism, and more about entertaining the viewer. And for the purists reading this and scoffing, it's worth saying that that isn't such a bad thing.

The average Premier League ticket price is around £30 per game as of 2008, and for that princely sum the paying punters get about two hours worth of entertainment, maybe more if you can bear the pre-match buildup. In America ticket prices vary considerably, but for about £20-£30 you can get a decent seat at a game which lasts for perhaps 3 hours. That factors in not just the running, passing and scoring, but the cheerleading, the fireworks, the music and video replays, the t-shirt giveaways and much else besides, that go into an average game-day.

Stadia and arenas are built with entertainment in mind too. At the American Airlines Arena, home to the Miami Heat basketball team, you can comfortably see the game from any of the 19,600 seats, even on the top tier. There simply isn't a bad seat in the house.

As for generating atmosphere, it's hard to argue that American sports can generate the kind of intensity from the crowd that a big football or cricket match can over in Europe. Having said that, the prematch buildup at an American sports arena matches any examples The Cynical Challenge can muster from Europe. The players enter the field one by one, called by the stadium announcer, accompanied by fireworks and flashing lights. Then comes the national anthem, and though it's hard to talk about this as a Brit without sounding disingenuous, it must be said that hearing The Star-Spangled Banner live, along with 60,000 others, gets the hairs on the back of your neck on end.

Cynical's Final Thought

The message is this: Britain can learn a few things from the Americans about its relationship with sport. First and foremost, and this is only my opinion, you get better value for money from a ticket to an NBA or NFL. game than you do to a football match in Britain. Sure, the food and the drink all costs money; the dancing and singing and fireworks are all incidental to the sporting action; and the free giveaways are a huge marketing gimmick; but it all adds up to a hugely enjoyable, longer-lasting bang for your buck.

Still, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Political correctness is something that should never be imposed on British sporting chants.

Kickipedia

2009-12-25T15:11:00.001Z

Merry Christmas! Or as they say over here in Florida, "time for Chinese food". Yes, it's Friday 25th December and that can only mean two things - it's Jesus' birthday, and it's time for another of The Cynical Challenge's Friday features. This week it's Kickipedia, the column that moves through sport's rich history like a hot knife through brandy butter, and puts the facts and figures under the microscope like a Food Standards Agency official checking turkeys for E. coli.

I appreciate most of you will have stuffed yourselves full of pigs in blankets, turkey and cranberry sauce, whilst carefully avoiding the sprouts, so I'm going to keep it light this week. You see, once again, as in the first ever post on The Cynical Challenge, I've become interested in names. More specifically, the names of birds.

Some of you who know me well might say that's a welcome development in my chat-up technique, as usually I show no interest at all. But actually I'm talking about birds of the feathered, flighty variety, the reason being that South Florida is home to some fantastic specimens. My parents own a book entitled Birds of Florida, and I've been going through it identifying the ones I've seen. So now I know that the long-legged-long-necked one is a Great Egret, the black-and-white-fuzzy-head one is an Anhinga, and the one-that's-just-showing-off is the Purple Gallinule.

But leafing through Birds of Florida I found two outstanding bird names, the Chuck-Will's-Widow and the Whip-Poor-Will. After further digging it transpired these are so-called because their songs sound like the words chuck-will's-widow and whip-poor-will (follow the links and click 'song' to download and hear for yourselves).

It's quite neat when names so aptly fit the thing they describe - which is why, for Kickipedia, I've cobbled together a list of sportsmen whose names very much precede them.

Football can certainly count a few appropriately-monikered professionals. Robbie Savage, formerly of Leicester, Birmingham and Blackburn and now winding down his career at Derby, is one. Never has the aphorism 'never judge a book by its cover' been more apt than in Savage's case, for despite his perfectly-conditioned shoulder-length blond hair, the midfielder has forged a career out of kicking the ankles, bruising the shins and crippling the nipples (probably) of his opponents, picking up a Premier League-record 89 career yellow cards in the process. Funnily enough video evidence of Savage's brutality is hard to come by - the most popular offering on Youtube is actually of Savage himself being injured in a variety of comic ways. Perhaps that's karma. As a footnote, Savage's behaviour doesn't seem to have been replicated by namesakes Bas and Dave, though they would have made a great tribute act together.

If ever a man was born to manage a team it's this next example. VfL Wolfsburg are the current Bundesliga champions, but back in the late '90s when they were relative newcomers to Germany's top flight they famously appointed Wolfgang Wolf as coach. Arsenal made a pretty half-hearted effort at this kind of synergy when they appointed a manager named Arsène; over in Wolfsburg, for five seasons club and coach had the kind of mutual understanding that only a shared name can bestow.

Incidentally, the town of Wolfsburg has its own naming story. Constructed by the Nazis as the factory town for their new 'People's Car', it was originally known as Stadt des KdF-Wagens - or in English, in full, The City of the Strength Through Joy Car. Catchy eh?

A few tennis players merit inclusion. There's Maria Bueno, who was, as her name suggests, quite good. There was Margaret Court, who made a career playing on one. But they all rather pale in comparison with the Israeli Anna Smashnova. For a while after her marriage in 2002 Smashnova insisted on being called 'Anna Pistolesi', but thankfully for sportswriters around the world she compromised with the double barrelled 'Smashnova-Pistolesi' until giving up completely and getting a divorce.

In cricket meanwhile notable mentions go to Peter Bowler, who took 34 first class wickets with his part-time offbreak, as well as a trio of Battys, Jeremy, Gareth and Jon (though only the latter could really wield a bat with any authority). In a similar vein, there have been plenty of cricketing Glovers, but none of them seem to have been wicket-keepers. And then there's the, albeit tenuous, example of Dominic Cork - for those unclear on this, the famous cherry cricket balls are made using a core of cork wood, wrapped in string and leather.

In motorsport American Scott Speed did his level best to live up to his surname in three seasons as a Formula 1 driver, but failed to pick up a single point. Speed left his team, Toro Rosso, in controversial circumstances in 2007, amid allegations that he came to blows with team chief Franz Tost. At the time Toro Rosso's co-owner Gerhard Berger commented on Speed's departure, saying, "he didn't perform and that's why he isn't here any more". Which is Formula 1-speak for "he was total rubbish". He now races NASCAR in the States.

A few others to run through include rugby players Neil Back (though he was a forward) and speedy winger Austin Healey. If you don't understand the latter, click here. Any football goalkeeper named 'Hans' deserves a mention, so that's Hans Tilkowski, Hans Segers, Hans-Jorg Butt and Hans Vonk. In golf it's no surprise Gary Player actually became a sportsman, while Tiger Woods used plenty of woods (no jokes now), along with drivers and irons, until his personal life caught up with him recently.

And then there's swimmer Mark Spitz - winner of seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics, and the man who set 33 world records in his career. His name is derived from a German word meaning 'peak'. Amen to that.

Better late than never?

2009-12-21T15:06:00.000Z

The Cynical Challenge is running late this week. This entry should have been running to press at about 2am on Sunday by normal standards, but here it is, vying with the London Evening Standard for attention mid-way through Monday. This is partly because The Cynical Challenge is standing in solidarity with fans of Wigan and Bolton, whose match this evening has been postponed owing to snow.

It's also partly because I have horrendous jet-lag after a marathon trans-Atlantic flight to Florida, with a mercifully brief stopover at delightful Charlotte, North Carolina. At this point I'd like to wish the gang of 25 people from Swindon with whom I shared airspace a lovely visit to Disney World, and I hope the 7-year-old in your party gets over his vomiting fits soon.

Anyway, The Cynical Challenge is a bit of a mixed bag this week. Much of the contents of my head - like the aforementioned 7-year-old on the flight in fact - are being randomly thrown out at all angles, for others to deal with as they see fit. As always, comments and opinion are welcome.

Life begins at 40

Over here in the States breakfasters munching on their waffles, pancakes or 5-egg omelettes will this morning be reading reports from yesterday's matches in the NFL. Lead story for much of the papers was the Minnesota Vikings' shock 26-7 loss to the Carolina Panthers. Minnesota, who on Sunday night had been confirmed as NFC divisional winners - making them hot favourites to reach the Superbowl - gave up 20 straight points in the final quarter against a team with a 5-8 win-loss record and with little to play for besides pride.

And yet aside from that, having watched the game and read the reports, The Cynical Challenge can only marvel at one thing: the fact that Minnesota quarterback Brett Favre is still playing in the NFL, aged 40. Favre is a miracle of modern sport. His hair is as grey as that of two other famous sporting silver foxes, Fabrizio Ravanelli and Graham Kavanagh - only he has the excuse of age. And Favre is still performing well. In fact, with a tally after 14 games of 27 touchdowns and only 7 interceptions thrown, 2009 has been one of Favre's best seasons ever.

If Favre and the Vikings make it to this season's Superbowl at Miami's Dolphin Stadium it would be one of sport's great romantic stories. If they do want to go all the way, however, the Vikings defence need to protect their 40-year-old talisman from big hits, something they didn't really do last night (see 2:03).

A damp squib

Firstly, before anyone writes in to complain that it should be "a damp squid", can I refer you to this article?

Okay, on with the blog. Back in the UK, Manchester hosted the first ever Duel in the Pool this weekend, generally referred to as the "Ryder Cup of Swimming". America's swimmers, Michael Phelps et al, took on the best that Britain, Germany and Italy had to offer and promptly wiped the floor with them, winning 185-78. The Europe team only won 9 out of the 30 races, and in 6 of the races the Americans swept the board, taking the top three places. No surprises there.

The biggest surprise is that the Duel in the Pool managed to claim as much air time as it did in the sports media. Okay, Michael Phelps performed surprisingly poorly, winning only his individual 100m butterfly and the 400m freestyle relay (the latter in a world record time); Phelps was beaten in the 200m butterfly by Britain's Michael Rock, hardly a household name. But despite all the headlines that this story grabbed, it should be remembered that Phelps was racing in an all-textile suit, rather than the ultra-fast polyurethane suits which Britain's swimmers wore, and which will be banned from 1st January 2010.

The Cynical Challenge is all for encouraging coverage of more marginal sports, especially if it can break up the blanket, microscopic coverage of Premier League football. But outside of the Olympics, swimming isn't really the sport to capture the imagination. On TV all the thrashing and churning makes swimming pretty difficult to follow. Watching live is worse, an eye-wateringly boring afternoon made worse by the fact you have to sit in a disorientatingly-echoey sauna. Plus even if you know which swimmers to look out for you can't really keep track of them - all the swimming caps and goggles make the competitors look identical.

Fans of swimming - convince us.

The end of the Premier League's best rhyming pun
So Mark Hughes has been sacked. Subbers will have had their heads in their hands on Saturday evening, as the departure of "Sparky" from Manchester City deprived them of a flurry of tried-and-tested favourite headlines. Random combinations of "Hughes", "Blues", "News", "Short Fuse" and "Santa Cruz" have been doing the rounds on the back pages of most tabloids for some time now. Mark Hughes' sacking is a sad day for headline writers. Back to the drawing board lads - though great effort from Vital Football to squeeze one last corker out of the story.

Kickipedia

2009-12-18T01:03:00.001Z

It’s Friday morning so it’s time for another of The Cynical Challenge’s patented features. The Kickipedia column tells the story of sporting events which are memorable, wonderful, or just plain weird.

This week, to commemorate the fact that the weather has been freezing in the UK, and that the hot water has been cut off in my house, Kickipedia remembers when the meteorological conditions intervened to make what was already an exciting end to one Italian Serie A season into a real nailbiter.

The headlines at the start of the 1999-2000 Serie A season concerned the transfer of burger-loving striker Christian Vieri from Lazio to Internazionale for a world record fee of £32 million.

Lazio, managed by Swedish lothario and future England manager Sven Goran Eriksson, did not, however, appear to suffer from having lost the burly (why is it only ever strikers who are “burly”?) Vieri, staying in touch with the pack of clubs chasing early pace-setters Juventus.

The biancocelesti found an able replacement in the equally rotund Croat Alen Boksic, who would later demonstrate his love of the odd pie in a short, ill-fated spell at Premier League Middlesbrough. But they did boast some genuine class with the likes of Nesta, Nedved and Veron, while some apparently average performers would surpass all expectations – such as Matias Almeyda, who scored this screamer against Parma in September.

Juventus meanwhile raced out of the traps, and by April led the table with a 9 point lead over Lazio in second place. Theirs was a star-studded team, with Edgar Davids, Alessandro Del Piero, Filippo Inzaghi and the imperious Zinedine Zidane. Juve began to falter, however, and they had managed to retain only a two point lead of Lazio going into the final round of matches – though, in a foreshadowing of events to come, accusations of bribery were levelled at them in early May after what appeared to be a perfectly legitimate goal from Fabio Cannavaro of Parma, which would have brought Lazio level on points at the top, was controversially chalked off.

The final round of matches took place on 15th May 2000, with Juventus needing a win away to mid-table Perugia, who had nothing to play for, to give them their 26th scudetto. Lazio faced Reggina at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome, knowing that only a win combined with a Juve defeat could win them the championship.

Lazio began well and did their bit in comfortably brushing aside Reggina 3-0.

Over in Perugia, however, an enormous downpour had turned the Renato Curi Stadium into a swimming pool. With the score still 0-0 approaching half time, referee Pierluigi Collina began to show concern about the playing conditions. After blowing the whistle to end the first half, Collina proceeded to undertake a pitch inspection, and decided to delay the restart.

Minutes passed, and though the deluge had let up, the Renato Curi turf was still soaking wet. However, over an hour after the scheduled start of the second half, Collina’s unmistakeable features emerged from underneath an umbrella and the teams returned to the pitch to kick off the last 45 minutes of the season.

Having completed their victory over Reggina, Lazio’s players huddled around TV screens at the Olimpico to follow the heartstopping events in Perugia. And their mood brightened when, just four minutes into the second half, Perugia’s Alessandro Calori latched onto a poor headed clearance by Antonio Conte and rifled the ball low into the corner past Edwin van der Sar.

Chasing an equaliser which would put them level on points at the top with Lazio and into a playoff for the title, the bianconeri were dealt a further blow when Gianluca Zambrotta was sent off by Collina for two bookable offences. Juventus created chances but Perugia held on, and Lazio’s players – perhaps fittingly under blue skies in Rome – celebrated just their second ever scudetto.

"I never thought it would be this beautiful," Lazio coach Eriksson told journalists after the result was confirmed. He probably says something similar to all the ladies.

Meanwhile Juventus could only curse their luck that the weather in Perugia brightened up sufficiently for Collina to allow the players to return. I suppose, if I was going for the easy pun, I would say that it quite literally rained on Juve’s parade – but I’m not, so I won’t.

In Praise of the Own Goal

2009-12-14T00:18:00.001Z

Tragicomedy is a very topical art-form.

Tiger Woods (sorry to keep bringing it up, but it's pure gold) plays away with a string of disreputable women and, though we are witnessing the tragic destruction of a family, and the downfall of a man who had it all, we still laugh.

Meanwhile everyone's favourite misogynist Silvio Berlusconi gets whacked with a miniature model cathedral and we feel sad that, however disagreeable he may be, a 73-year-old man has been publicly and brutally assaulted.

In the sporting world, there is probably nothing quite as tragicomic as football's own goal. And this weekend served up some real bittersweet treats across Europe's top leagues.

A tasty starter was provided by Chelsea's Petr Cech, who was a little unfortunate to have one go in off his back (it's goal number 1 on this link). Even so, seeing the big Czech goalkeeper hitting the ground like a pigeon suffering an in-flight heart attack raises a smile.

But the main course was a veritable feast of own goals at the Bundesliga fixture between Borussia Moenchengladbach and Hannover 96. Hannover managed six goals in the match, though unfortunately for them three were in the wrong goal. Special mention should go to Hannover defender Karim Haggui, who grabbed a pair of own goals in the game.

But the Romeo and Juliet Memorial Prize for an own goal inviting most hilarity goes to Constant Djakpa for his spectacular long-range effort, Gladbach's third goal of the game. Djakpa then provides his own punchline by collapsing to the floor, head in hands, looking like a man who has just crashed his car, been attacked by his golf club-wielding wife and been revealed as a serial philanderer. Oh wait...

There are plenty more where that came from too. A favourite is Jamie Pollock's majestic strike for Manchester City against QPR in 1998, which incidentally also condemned City to relegation. Franck Queudrue, playing for Lens, scored a superb volleyed lob against his own goalkeeper. And what about Chris Brass of Bury, who not only scores a contender for greatest own goal ever but broke his nose in the process?

The Cynical Challenge reckons there's nothing in sport which provokes that potent mix of laughter and sympathy quite like a football own goal. Watching a batsman run his partner out can be funny, but cricket being a gentleman's sport, cricketers tend to be quickly forgiven by crowds for their errors. Watching figure skaters sprawl out on the ice after an abortive triple lutz is hilarious, but it's hard to really laugh hard about it when the skaters look so upset.

But this is a democracy so I'm going to throw this one open to you, the readers. Feel free to leave your suggestions for similarly tragicomic sporting moments in the comment box below.

Handbags at Ten Paces

2009-12-10T23:46:00.000Z

The first of The Cynical Challenge’s weekly features, Handbags at Ten Paces gives ordinary sports fans the chance to foam at the mouth about the big sporting stories of the week. This Friday:

The British Grand Prix is saved and will return to Silverstone from 2010

fantastic chance to watch quality sport close to home :D come on england, be proud and support our boys button and hamilton!
3Lions

Hasn’t everyone forgotten about climate change? These cars have a carbon footprint the size of North Wales. F1 fans will be laughing on the other side of their face while they’re watching racing at Silverstone under 2 feet of ice-melt, surrounded by the carcasses of Polar bears. :(
Swampman

wt a giant waist of taxpayers money :( ordinerry britains like me and my dorter britney wll SUFFER
angry_mum

Well said Swampman. Motorracing is a pointless waste of our Earth’s natural resources. Anyway nobody ever overtakes these days, it’s more entertaining watching traffic from a footbridge over the M1.
MeltonMowbray230

give f1 a break “tree-huggers” for once bernie ecclestone has done something for this country instead of running off to monaco with his 7ft wife
3Lions

burnie ecclustun? wots it got to do wiv dr who?
angry_mum

If you like this you might also like Jim Lovetoy on The Football Ramble blog OR anything featured on the BBC Have Your Say site.

World Cup 2010: Answers to the questions nobody is asking

2009-12-05T14:33:00.001Z

Over the next week there's going to be alot of column inches taken up by the 2010 FIFA World Cup draw, which took place in Cape Town on Friday evening. At the risk of jumping on the bandwagon, The Cynical Challenge is going to be no exception.

Much of the fallout from the draw has revolved around a limited number of topics. Will Brazil emerge unscathed from their "Group of Death"? Will France wilt in the face of a partisan South African crowd in their final group game? Will there ever again be a drawmaster as attractive and brilliantly irreverent as Charlize Theron?

But even though this blog is essentially covering the same story as every other sporting publication on the planet, The Cynical Challenge likes to be a bit different. So below is a list (they're all the rage at the moment) of some of the more alternative questions to be asked following the draw.

Will Honduras have another Football War?
Back in 1969 Honduras and El Salvador went to war in the immediate aftermath of a World Cup play-off match, a conflict which was dubbed the Football War. Not that it's surprising that sport can spark off military conflict - for instance, some writers, among them Jonathan Wilson in his superb Behind the Curtain, have suggested that the war in the Former Yugoslavia really begun after fans of Partizan Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb clashed during a league match in 1990. Still, Honduras have been drawn alongside fellow Spanish-speaking nations Chile and Spain, a rivalry which is being stoked up by the Honduran media. "The Spanish think we are Cinderella...the weakest team in their group," Honduran newspaper La Prensa reported on Saturday. There could be fireworks.

Will anyone have any national loyalties in Group D?
Germany, Serbia, Australia, Ghana. Four proud nations with well-defined national identities. Pity some of these countries' players, though, who must have a few divided loyalties as a result of the draw. Germany's Jérome Boateng, born in Berlin, is of dual Ghanaian-German nationality. The parents of Australia's goalkeeper Mark Schwarzer emigrated from Germany in the 1960s, while his compatriot Danny Vukovic is of Serbian descent. Serbia's Neven Subotic was born in Banja Luka but brought up in Baden-Württemburg, Germany. And Ghana's national coach is Milovan Rajevac, who is from...Serbia. Phew.

How many goals will be scored in the Ivory Coast - Brazil game?
20th June 2010, Johannesburg. Mark the date in your diary. The attacking might of Brazil versus the power of Ivory Coast's forward line. Kaká, Luis Fabiano, Robinho, Alexandre Pato. Didier Drogba, Bakari Koné, Salomon Kalou, Abdel-Kader Keïta. It could conceivably finish 4-4. Making predictions is a tricky business, but it would be a real surprise if this wasn't one of the most entertaining group games in South Africa.

How many Air Miles will Holland's fans clock up?
Johannesburg on 14th June, Durban five days later, and then over to Cape Town on 24th June. Approximate travelling distance 2100km. That's after the 12 hour plane journey to actually reach South Africa. The Dutch tend to bring a jovial travelling support, but anyone would be forgiven for getting crabby on such a long trip.

And finally...will Ireland ever stop talking about the Henry handball incident?
No.

A Blog by Any Other Name

2009-11-30T00:44:00.000Z

First of all welcome to The Cynical Challenge Sports Blog.

Essentially it's one step along the road which will eventually, I hope, land me a plum job as a sportswriter at a national newspaper. If not, and I end up as a middle manager, at least I might have entertained a handful of readers along the way.

The first issue was deciding on a name, which I decided had to be a recognisable sporting cliché. I toyed with the idea of "Meat Pie Sausage Roll", but as a friend pointed out I ran the risk of a) jingoism, and, b) being mistaken for a butcher. Similarly I decided against "Handbags at Dawn" because I didn't want to be bombarded with emails by disappointed retail shoppers. So "The Cynical Challenge" it was - less for its connotations of physical brutality, more for the pun (which, if I have to explain, basically ruins this entire enterprise).

Anyway, this business of naming blogs got me thinking about my first theme which is, admittedly a few weeks too late, the issue of stadium naming rights. It's in the news chiefly because of owner Mike Ashley's superbly entertaining attempt to dismantle Newcastle United Football Club piece by piece, starting with the name of their St James' Park home. And the issue reared its rather ugly head again this month with the news that both Chelsea Football Club and, more surprisingly, that most venerable of sporting institutions, Lord's Cricket Ground, have considered doing the same.

It's no surprise that most sports fans intensely dislike the commercialisation of their beloved game. It's equally no surprise that sporting authorities and organisations are seeking to pursue all possible avenues for financial gain, even if that means changing the long-held names of stadia. This conflict of interests between a sports club's management structure and its support base is basically unwinnable - the pros and cons of either argument make this a zero-sum game.

However, Europe's sporting authorities might look to America as a model for how this creeping commercialisation may pan out. American sports fans benefit from great entertainment and unparallelled stadium facilities. Professional sports franchises make mountains of cash, even during a recession.

But it's not quite QED. A stadium name is still a significant part of a sports team's identity, and when American teams gets it wrong their sports fans have to put up with some pretty rotten ones. MLS team FC Dallas play their home games at the tasty-sounding Pizza Hut Park. The San Diego Padres play their home baseball games at Petco Stadium, sponsored by a pet supplies company. However, it's the fans of the University of Oklahoma Sooners who I feel most sorry for...