Search: 'Concacaf'

Playing for your country is the peak for most footballers but, as Steve Menary points out, it can come at a cost for lower-league players

For players in the lower leagues, pursuing an international career is a real gamble. The latest international calendar allows for 19 matches over a two-year period ending in 2012. With no automatic suspension of games in the lower divisions, players going on international duty risk losing their place at their clubs.

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Football is popular in France’s former colonies but geography and politics provide a number of challenges. Steve Menary explains

French Guiana is probably best known as home to the European Space Centre, or the infamous island prison that once housed Henri Charrière – better known as Papillon – but not football. That is hardly surprising, as the country’s footballers face hindrances that few others could imagine.

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Ian Plenderleith wonders why World Cup qualifcation is assumed to take precedence over politics in some countries

Now that Honduras have qualified for the World Cup their people can expect to be the beneficiaries of the usual condescending, quadrennial interest that western sports journalists pay all poor nations who qualify for the tournament. Curtly researched columns and reports from now until June will sagely conclude that life is tough for the majority, but football offers a way out of poverty for a lucky, talented few. For the fans, we will be told, football is an escape from reality, dangling hope and maybe even salvation. For the political leaders, it’s the chance to stoke up patriotism and distract from the country’s real problems. Because people in faraway countries are easily duped into forgetting a life of hardship when faced instead with the possibility of winning a football match.

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The US college system is offering an increasingly popular way into the professional game for British footballers. Gavin Willacy examines the latest phenomenon in Major League Soccer

With Five no longer airing MLS games during the milkmen’s breakfast slot, even fewer British viewers will have seen the impact Darren Huckerby, Ade Akinbiyi and Danny Dichio have had on the American top flight than saw David Beckham try to inspire the hapless LA Galaxy last summer. While a string of English thirtysomethings understandably use MLS as a preferable last stop to Brentford or Brighton, there is another growing group of British footballers emerging in America.

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Dear WSC
Bruce Wilkinson (WSC 267) pointed out that ticket queues “seem a quaint ritual of a bygone age”. Waiting in a virtual internet queue bears no similarity to lining up outside the box office. I have my tickets for the FA Cup final, but I do not feel as if I earned them. Instead of getting up in the middle of the night, crossing London, losing half a day’s work, standing in the rain shuffling forward inch by inch while nervous that there are too many punters and too few tickets, I merely sat in my dressing-gown in front the PC. There is no one to talk to in the “virtual waiting room”. Your opportunity is allotted randomly. Suddenly it’s all over and you have what you came for. One should be happier as the process is simple and efficient and the desired result achieved, but somehow it feels like a hollow victory as it lacks the sense of accomplishment joy and triumph of the old-fashioned process. You can’t even wave the tickets in triumph above your head as they are sent by post.Obviously my complaining about the changes that actually improve my life marks me down as “old”. I am not asking to bring back rickets and polio and to repeal the Factory Acts but I do miss a modicum of discomfort and inconvenience. The old experience was akin to standing on the terraces or being subject to the over-zealous policing that used to mark us out as a tribe. Under the new regime the tickets are yours if your broadband speed is faster and your credit card more golden than the next, rather than if you have more commitment stamina and perseverance.Will the ultimate progress be when we treat football like theatre and opera by dressing-up smartly for the occasion and ordering our interval drinks? Or is that Club Wembley?
Patrick Sheehy, London

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