Search: ' Roberto Baggio'

You've got to laugh. Well, probably not. Cameron Carter reviews the World Cup shows that did for comedy

After the initial frenzy of World Cup-related programming in May, terrestrial television apologetically dropped everything except coverage and highlights once the tournament began. The one exception was Rio Ferdinand’s World Cup Wind-ups, notable only for the host’s immoderate laughter at “stunts” such as David Beckham being made slightly late by a bogus chauffeur, and the fact that Ferdinand resembled the female saxophonist from The Muppet Show in his heightened state of elation.

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The investigation took six years, but Juventus’s doctor has just been convicted of doping players. Matt Barker wonders if the 1990s record books will be rewritten

Having cake-walked qualification for the knockout stages of the Champions League and with the side sitting comfortably in pole position in Serie A, this is shaping up to be a vintage season for Juventus, under new coach Fabio Capello. But the findings and verdict of a recent anti-doping inquest threaten to taint the club’s image. The investigation was prompted by the comments of Zdenek Zeman, a former Roma, Lazio and Napoli coach, now at Lecce. In a 1998 magazine interview, the Czech declared it was “time for Italian football to come out of the pharmacy”, pointing the finger at Juve in particular and talking of a process that had “started with [Gianluca] Vialli and has arrived finally with [Alessandro] Del Piero”.

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Football’s history remains largely untouched by the marketeers – but FIFA are determined to do something about that. Barney Ronay ponders Pelé’s official hot 100 selection

History is written by the winners. Pelé, twice a World Cup winner and the highest-earning 20-years-re­tired sportsman on the planet, is in the process of taking this process to a ludicrous extreme. As part of FIFA’s centennial celebrations the great man has been commissioned to draw up – possibly in biro on the back of an envelope – the “FIFA 100” list of the greatest living players, due to be unveiled this month after a mildly snowballing web-centred publicity campaign. As FIFA-run web­site The-100.com explains: “For the 100 years of FIFA, Pelé has chosen a living footballer that represents the best, most outstanding, crea­tive, play­ers of their generation.”

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As Matthew Le Tissier calls it a day, Cris Freddi looks back on some of the other players who have been almost great, but not quite, in his tricky position

So goodbye then, Le Tiss. Thanks for the sequence of great individual goals that season. If you’d got yourself injured there and then, we’d have called it a really big loss, someone who had the makings of a great player. Instead, they’re saying you didn’t have enough ambition to leave an unfashionable club. I think that’s bollocks personally, but we all agree that something went AWOL in the last few years.

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The football website intended to bring extensive football coverage to those in the US but as Rich Zahradnik explains the dream soon decended into a nightmare as spiralling costs and debt meant that the site had to be closed down

Football: speed, colour, noise, passion, even – when you’re lucky – dazzle. The web: click, click, click, yawn, click. Was there ever a bigger mismatch? The dotcoms are now dot-bombs and it’s become fun to bash the net. Did football gain anything from the web frenzy besides more of big media’s tentacles in the game?

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