Search: 'African Champions League'

Dermot Corrigan tells of how a player more used to scoring in Drogheda and Derry made his full international debut in Tripoli

On the first weekend in June, most Irish football eyes were fixed on Macedonia, where the Republic of Ireland won 2-0 in a Euro 2012 qualifier. One head though – that of Dublin-born Eamon Zayed – was more interested in Group C of the African Cup of Nations qualifiers, where his Libyan team drew 1-1 away to the Comoros Islands to remain in the hunt for a place at next year’s finals.

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Guy Oliver thinks the English-speaking world should take a more mature attitude towards football’s governing body

England has become the Millwall of world football. No one likes us and, judging by the coverage in the press and the posts on the internet, we really don’t care. To read the comments on the BBC website since the Sunday Times first “exposed” corruption in the FIFA executive committee last November is to enter a delusional fantasy land that only the English could have dreamt up.

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A principled former Premier League striker is raising money and awareness for charities in Africa. Dermot Corrigan explains

On December 30 last year, while most Spanish footballers were on their winter break, 60 African and European players were at Atlético Madrid’s Vicente Calderón stadium for a charity Champions for Africa game organised by Sevilla’s Frédéric Kanouté. Over 40,000 fans paid in to see a José Mourinho-managed Africa United team, featuring players such as Kanouté, Lass Diarra and Carlos Kameni, win 3-2 against a Spanish League selection captained by Sergio Ramos and including Kun Agüero, David Trezeguet and Juan Valerón.

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The climax to the 2010 World Cup adds a new name to the trophy, as seen on TV

Round of 16 ~ June 26
South Korea 1 Uruguay 2
There are acres of empty seats for a match played in a downpour. Last week Peter Drury compared chilly conditions to a match at Notts County; we now discover Jon Champion’s benchmark for a rainy day at football: “Weather you’d expect at Port Vale.” Some Uruguayan fans are wearing Óscar Tabárez facemasks. Park Chu-Young has the first chance, his free-kick bouncing off the post with Fernando Muslera beaten. But the Uruguayans might have been three up at the break – Lee Jung-Soo gets away with a handball and Luis Suárez is wrongly flagged offside when clean through. Their one goal is a calamity for Korea, the prone Jung Sung-Ryong swiping ineptly at Diego Forlán’s cross as it flies right across the area to Suárez. Muslera is equally at fault for the equaliser, failing to connect with a defensive header that goes straight up in the air – “Look up the definition of no-man’s land, he’s there,” says Craig Burley – and it is finished off by the “Bolton Wanderers man”, Lee Chung-Young. Uruguay’s deserved winner is superbly curled in by Suárez, “the man they call El Pistolero”, after the Koreans fail to clear a corner. That 49-goal season for Ajax, the most repeated stat we’ve heard at the World Cup, gets another airing while Suárez appears to bounce off a photographer’s head en route to a group hug with the substitutes. Such celebrations are treated as a felony in English football but no one has been booked for them at the World Cup. Korea get a final chance but “Middlesbrough fans will not be surprised” as Lee Dong-Gook’s weak shot is held up on the muddy pitch and cleared.X

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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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