Search: 'Faustino Asprilla'

The drug money has dried up, but Nacional of Medellín are back – to the despair of their popular but inept neighbours. Jake Lagnado reports

Hear the word Medellín and you might think of Pa­blo Escobar and the Medellín Cartel. Indeed, in Med­ellín, as in the rest of Colombia, there were many financial and personal ties between the drugs trade and professional football, as symbolised by the campaign to free the city’s favourite son, Rene Hig­uita, from jail in 1993. Since Escobar’s death the same year, the trade has been reorg­anised: much less drug money is in­vested in the local economy, meaning football clubs now have to market themselves to avoid total ruin.

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Apparent misfits in the Premiership, more than a few imports have gone on to have perplexingly good careers elsewhere. We tracked down three of them, Ernst Bouwes looking at Jon Dahl Tomasson

In the spring of 1997 his fellow players voted him Talent of the Year in the Dutch league, with Giovanni van Bronckhorst and Arnold Bruggink second and third. A couple of days after accepting the trophy, he scored a hat-trick against Vitesse Arnhem to go top of the goalscorers list, leaving quality players like Luc Nilis, Roy Makaay and Patrick Kluivert (and Gerald Sibon) behind him. While his goals took modest Heer­enveen to their first Dutch Cup final, about 20 clubs  were rumoured to be interested in signing him, with Ajax, Atlético Madrid and Bar­celona the most persistent. A transfer fee of about £2 million seemed a laughably small amount for a 21-year-old who had just made his international debut for Denmark. Yes, we’re talk­ing about Jon Dahl Tomasson.

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Even with Ronaldo in one of his funny moods, Brazil rarely needed to break sweat to retain their South American title in Paraguay as Sam Wallace reports

At either end of the Defensores Del Chacos ground in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, stood enormous models of Budweiser cans which, at set in­tervals, would start to gyrate. Occasionally, a plastic bag thrown from the crowd behind the goal would sail over the cans, jettisoning in flight its cargo of urine. The irony was hard to ignore. No amount of expensive advertising ever quite managed to sanitise a gloriously chaotic Copa America 1999.

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Dear WSC
I have no time at all for deposed Ran­gers vice-chairman Donald Find­lay, but Gary Oliver’s article about him (WSC 149) was unfair in two res­pects. Findlay is Scotland’s pre-eminent defence counsel. He has defended sco­res of people accused of rape, murder, etc – including many Catholics. To extract from his long career two cases where the victims were Celtic fans is a distortion. And Findlay’s admittedly ill-judged joke that his birthday should have been on July 12th rather than St Patrick’s Day was a mutual one he had with a Catholic friend whose birthday is on the former date. The good news is that Rangers chairman David Murray has, by getting rid of Findlay, again taken strong action against sectarianism.
Ian McLean, Glasgow

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Day five of the WSC advent calendar and we’re on to Shepherds. Freddie Shepherd, to be exact, who was featured in issue 135, May 1998. Ian Cusack told how Shepherd and Douglas Hall had brought shame upon their club and looked at what was next for Newcastle

Isn’t it great to read about a team from the North East, playing in black and white stripes, with the whole community behind them, who have reached Wembley and are blessed with a decent and honourable chairman? Best wishes to Tow Law, population 2,208, for their trip to the FA Vase Final. Now what about Newcastle United?

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