Search: 'Cuba'

In our third piece on anti-poverty initiatives in football, Paul Virgo reports on the unlikley circumstances that have brought together the corporate giants of Internazionale and the anti-capitalist rebels of the Zapistas in southern Mexico

Zapatista leader Subcomandante Marcos and Internazionale owner Massimo Moratti make an odd couple. The first spends his time fighting for the rights of indigenous people in the Chiapas region of Mexico, while the other spends his oil bucks on expensive footballers who don’t win many trophies.

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While today graffiti is a public method of making coded statements, in the 1970s it was about football and plain speaking, if not always great spelling, as  Jim Heath recalls

Apart from Arsenal fans spraying their hair red in honour of Freddie Ljungberg, it’s been a long time since spray paint played an active part in the football supporters’ repertoire. Football graffiti had its heyday in the early 1970s when it gave crumbling stadiums that extra, almost indefinable character, the worn brick and corrugated iron surrounds of the terraces being a per­fect canvas for budding artists. It wasn’t just re­stricted to the grounds themselves, with daubings on all points from the city centres and railway stations. Given its intimidatory presence which heightened the fear that you were going to get your head kicked in, it’s ironic that the graffiti trend was inspired mainly by the 1960s peace movement, who used it to protest against the Vietnam war and express support for Castro’s Cuba (“LBJ get out of Vietnam” was still visible on a wall opposite the Craven Cottage turnstiles into the 1980s).

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Kevin Keegan’s managerial excesses and successes have meant we have forgotten how, during his playing career, KK blazed a trail away from the pitch, believes Barney Ronay

In October 1995, with his Newcastle United team creating a stir at the top of the Premiership, Kevin Keegan travelled south to Brighton beach to meet Tony Blair MP, Leader of the Opposition. Dressed in shirtsleeves, with only a TV crew and a twitching mass of photographers for company, the two men stood and exchanged 27 consecutive headers. A bizarre tableau, perhaps, but far from unprecedented in the extraordinary public life of Keegan. Ron Greenwood once described him as “the most modern of all modern footballers”. In fact he was the first post-modern player: the first British footballer to exploit the commercial nexus between sport, celebrity and pop culture; to create out of himself a branded corporate persona; and the first reigning European Footballer of the Year to have a solo hit record – Head over Heels (B-side: Move on down) reached number 31 in the summer of 1979.

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His name is enough to secure him a coaching licence, but Diego Maradona’s forays into management have convinced few of his credentials, reports Ben Backwell

Following Argentina’s disastrous 2002 World Cup cam­paign, Diego Maradona declared from his Cu­ban retreat that he was willing to take over coaching the Argentine national team “for free”. “I have always said, and I repeat, that I am willing to manage the team without charging a single peso,” said Maradona, ad­ding that he would put the team “in order”. According to polls carried out by local websites among Argentines then howling for the head of coach Rafael Bielsa, there were few takers, and the offer was discreetly ig­nored by the country’s football ­association (AFA).

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Diego Maradona's new book has been the talk of Argentina. Chris Moss found few surprises in it

When it comes to resurrection, Diego Maradona is up there with the saints and prophets. Banned from playing for cocaine abuse, then ephedrine-laced cock­tails and now under doctor’s orders, hopeless as a manager, aged 40 but looking 50, he has turned to lit­erature. A new autobiography, Yo Soy El Diego (I am Diego), to be published in Britain next spring, is the edited recordings of chat, babble and bluster taped in Cuba by two “journalist friends” from Buenos Aires

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