Search: ' Paraguay'

Al Needham attempted to fulfil a long-term ambition again this summer. He didn't manage it but doesn't really mind

Doing the Sixty-Four – watching every single game in a World Cup, as they happen – has been a tantalising yet impossible dream, but, like a solar eclipse, all the celestial forces appeared to click into alignment for me in 2010. I was old enough to live away from my parents (so no dad saying: “Get this bleddy rammell off, Taggart’s on” – West Germany v Uruguay, 1986) and mature enough not to go on dates when games were on (England v West Germany, 1990 – yeah, I know). The hosts were in a decent time zone – so no missing games due to Sunday morning lie-ins (South Africa v Paraguay, 2002) or conking out on the settee at stupid o’clock (most of USA 94).

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Negative press stories allowed some World Cup visitors to justify staying in a sanitised environment. But those who did so missed out on the complete experience of South Africa in 2010. Jonathan Wilson reports

Maybe what I did was stupid – certainly the South African woman sitting next to me on the plane home thought so – but, frankly, the air of paranoia was driving me insane. In most cities in the world walking ten minutes out of a football stadium to a bar would be a normal thing to do; not in Johannesburg.

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The bosses at Major League Soccer in America thought it necessary to spend millions on a new web presence. Ian Plenderleith points out why it has been a disaster

“The days of the 800-word think-piece are over,” a football journalist recently told me as we discussed the state of internet writing. With all that content being condensed into ever shorter formats, readers want easily browsed headlines, Twitter snippets, news-based blog entries that end with a question, controversial quotes and a space at the bottom where they can launch in with their opinions. Those long paragraphs just give us a headache and take up time better spent watching that shaky YouTube clip where the loco ref scores with an overhead kick in a Paraguayan Fourth Division game before taking a out a handgun and opening fire on the crowd.

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Most of the controversy in the Portuguese season so far has happened on the sidelines. Phil Town reports

It’s been a vintage season for punch-ups in Portuguese football, with tunnels featuring strongly. In October, Benfica’s top-scoring Paraguayan striker Óscar Cardozo and Sporting Braga’s Brazilian defender André Leone were sent off at half time at Braga and subsequently suspended after the referee reported that they had been having a go at each other in the tunnel.

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Harry Pearson delves into a book containing allegations of football bribery on an international level

Declan Hill is an award-winning Canadian investigative journalist. The Fix – Soccer and Organized Crime was published in Toronto in 2008. So far no UK publisher has taken on this detailed account of match-fixing across the globe. There is good reason for this.

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