Search: 'Johan Vonlanthen'

A nomadic lifestyle drove a young Swiss star to God, abstaining from football and eventually back to the country of his birth. Paul Knott finds out why

The 12-year-old Johan Vonlanthen was in tears when he was taken away from his hometown of Santa Marta in Colombia in 1998 because he thought it meant he would never see a football pitch again. For a while, it seemed that he need not have worried. There were plenty of pitches in Switzerland, the home country of his mother’s new husband. During his teens Vonlanthen did little else but play stunning football on his way to becoming one of the most sought after prospects in Europe.

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It hasn't been a great tournament for the host teams, writes Graham Dunbar

Switzerland travelled for six-and-a-half hope-filled years towards Euro 2008. Then it was gone in five days. The first country to play, the first to lose, the first to be knocked out. In a country whose real sporting passions are ice hockey, skiing and tennis, there were many face-painted converts to football left wondering if Switzerland was better off without the tournament.

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The fizz went out of football for a lot of fans in Salzburg, thanks to an energy-drink billionaire. In this update, Paul Joyce reports on the lower-league alternative to a team drained of its colour

The acquisition of SV Austria Salzburg by Red Bull owner Dietrich Mateschitz in April 2005 reduced the 1994 UEFA Cup finalists to a mere marketing trinket. “There is no tradition, no history, no archive,” stated officials of the renamed “Red Bull Salzburg”, who initially claimed that the three-time national champions had been founded in 2005. The violet-and-white colours in which the team had played since 1933 were jettisoned in favour of the red and blue of the energy drink’s tin cans. “I can’t play with a purple bull if the brand is called Red Bull,” Mateschitz stated bluntly.

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Smart-casual wear and laid-back pallyness proliferated on both channels during Euro 2004, even if expert analysis did not. But, says Cameron Carter, the pundits' humour was no worse than Skinner and Baddiel's

 I t started tensely and just got worse. Before the Portugal v Greece game many of us were troubled by Dull Host Anxiety – you may yourself have experienced this on hearing the voice of Norah Jones wafting earward as you pull off your mittens outside the neighbours’ door. I sat there on day one fearing that in the opening ceremony Portugal would be reduced to a demonstration of the port bottling process by a giant Eusébio doll, aided by Lisbon schoolchildren holding dining-table-shaped balloons. So it was with some relief that I learned Portugal had in fact discovered the world and taught it how to exist. To add colour to the nautical scene, several hundred citizens dressed as orange sperm arranged themselves into a representation of a giant football, a spectacle only partly diminished by a shot of two of the sperm clearly chatting about their costumes on their miraculous journey to the ball-womb.

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