Search: ' Ariel Ortega'

For day four of the WSC advent calendar we have a piece from issue 259, September 2008. Ariel Ortega – nicknamed “little donkey” – was dubbed the next Maradona and so it partially proved, though not in a good way, reports Chris Bradley

There was one conspicuous absence as the open-top bus carried the victorious River Plate squad through the streets of Buenos Aires on June 22. The fans were there, with flags and songs; there was joy and champagne and fireworks; but, not for the first time this season, there was no Ariel Ortega.

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If clubs need hand-outs from the FA, then they're not going to ask too many questions of the man in charge – even when he lines up his son as his eventual successor, as Rodrigo Orihuela explains

The transfers of Carlos Tévez and Javier Mascherano opened Argentine eyes to Russian corporate involvement in football, but the background to the September 3 friendly between Argentina and Brazil in London was still a surprise to the average local fan. The game was the first arranged through a contract, signed in April, between the Argentine FA and Renova, a Russian corporation that calls itself “the leading Russian asset management company”. Viktor Vekselberg, Russia’s third richest man, is chairman of Renova.

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Sergei Rebrov is off to Istanbul – and his former translator, Dan Brennan, hopes the Ukranian will be better looked after at Fenerbache than at Tottenham

And so, finally, the Sergei Rebrov saga has drawn to a close. Just as it seemed he would be playing his football in West London, he has bid the Premiership a sad farewell and opted for Istanbul. It has been two wast­­ed years for the player, and an opportunity missed for Spurs and English football.

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Gabriele Marcotti, who predicted the poor displays of France and Argentina in WSC two months ago, attempts to sort World Cup fact from fiction

For a competition that lasts 31 days – and one in which half the teams play just three matches – it’s quite remarkable that the World Cup is held in such high esteem as a barometer of footballing trends and relative strength. Especially a competition such as this one, where poor refereeing and bizarre episodes saw the World Cup lose a host of juggernauts (or potential juggernauts) before the quarter-finals, as fans of Portugal, Nigeria, Argentina, Italy and France will confirm. Still, this was not a 64-match exercise in futility. Once the hype subsides and the pundits go back to spouting the obvious about players whose names they can act­ually pronounce, we’ll be left with a neat set of mem­ories we can stow in the back of our consciousness.

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There's a World Cup coming up, apparently, so we invited three well-travelled journalists to make some rash predictions about what will happen. As a Swede based in London Marcus Christenson has ties to two of the countries in Group F. Gabriele Marcotti has lived in Japan and how tries to explain English football to Italians and vice-versa. Alan Duncan reports regularly on Nigeria and Cameroon, who face England and Ireland respectively, as well as the three other African qualifiers

Are playing styles and tactics are becoming more homogeneous throughout the world, because most of the top players are playing in the same leagues? If so, does that make the World Cup less interesting?
Gabriele Marcotti There’s a greater uniformity. Not just in the way teams play, but also in how they train. If you look at the size of the Italian or Spanish players, they are now as big as the northern Europeans are expected to be. Everybody’s an athlete. Some of the English play­ers still get drunk and irresponsible but the impression I get with players like Beckham and Owen is that they train seriously and take care of their diet. In some ways it has become more uniform, but in a positive way – the level of fitness has definitely increased everywhere.

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