Alhaji Righteous De Ambitious: World Cup 2006 Blog

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

World Cup 2006 Blog

Link to World Cup Soccer - South Africa 2010

Zidane’s Son To Make His International Debut…For Spain.

Posted: 24 Mar 2009 03:00 PM PDT

Yes, you read that headline correctly. Now try and soak it in. Try and soak in the fact that France’s greatest ever footballing export will see his son pull on the rival international colors of the hottest car in the showroom at the moment.

Enzo Zidane was born in France, when papa was merely a fresh debutant for Les Bleus and still a ways off from being thought of as the (second?) greatest footballer of his generation. When dad moved to Torino and then off to Madrid, Enzo tagged along, as you’d expect. The family still lives in Madrid - eight years now - and Petit Zizou, the real one, is playing for Real’s youth team, and thus Enzo has decided that he would rather play for Spain, the country which produced his maternal grandparents.

Now this is only U-15 and there’s nothing to say he’ll actually get the opportunity to contemplate reversing his choice in nationality and if he does get that opportunity, which he would choose as his senior country.

There are precedents, of course, but none with a papa of Zinedine’s stature. The closest one can come is actually another Spaniard, Bojan, whose Serbian father played in Spain and whose mother is Spanish. Only difference there is that Bojan was actually born inside the walls, whereas Enzo was born in France.

Enzo might turn out to be nothing more than the next Jordi Cruijff - which isn’t all that bad, mind you, but papa he is not - or the next Diego Maradona bastard, but this must still sting a great deal for France as the true heir to the throne as “Next Zizou” and the son of its greatest ever player chooses what is currently the greener grass.

World Cup 2010 = Beijing 2008?

Posted: 24 Mar 2009 10:21 AM PDT

With World Cup 2010 getting closer every day, South Africa could do with a bit of good PR. So the global peace conference scheduled to be in Johannesburg this week - to promote soccer and World Cup 2010 as instruments of harmony - probably seemed like a good idea.

Until it all went wrong that is.

Without getting too much into the politics of it, seems China put pressure on South Africa to deny a visa to Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, because (according to spokesman Thabo Masebe) it “would not be in South Africa's best interests.”

In response, three of the scheduled guests - Nobel Peace prize laureates Archbishop Desmond Tutu and F.W. de Klerk, plus executive director of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Geir Lundestad - decided it wouldn’t be in their best interests to attend a sham conference.

And so the whole thing was cancelled and South Africa has a world of negative headlines to deal with. Good work fellas.

The South African - and Chinese - argument is that wherever the Dalai Lama goes, the issue of Tibetan freedom gets attention. And they didn’t want the peace conference being overshadowed by that.

But the cancellation has already gotten way more attention than the actual conference would have. So that didn’t work out too well for them. No good can ever come of denying a visa to a Nobel Peace Prize winner (the Dalai Lama won in 1989).

And I’ll tell you this: I wanted to use an image of the Dalai Lama looking angry to go with this post. But apparently no such photo exists. The one you see above is the closest I could get. Despite all the sh*t he has to put up with, the guy is always always smiling. Which is pretty impressive.

I’m still optimistic about World Cup 2010, and I’m still predicting some outstanding football next summer (we’ll have a better idea in about three months time, when South Africa hosts the 2009 Confederations Cup). But I’m not so confident about South Africa’s political maneuvering.

The one thing I remember from the Beijing Olympics 2008 was that it didn’t make China - or the Olympics - look too good. More than a couple of shady things happened, epitomized by the Milli Vanilli trick they pulled with that little singing girl. Let’s hope South Africa learns fast and doesn’t tarnish the reputation of the World Cup with any similar shenanigans.