Search: 'Eduardo'

Simon Tyers is bemused at the football based talent show and bemoans the dumbing down of a national institution, BBCs Sports Personality of the Year

Top-class footballers have often been called upon to demonstrate their skills to the next generation down. This used to be mostly through cartoon-strip coaching advice in the weekly magazines. If a player became really famous he might be given 30 12-year-olds to instruct on television, as happened to George Best for one. It is therefore alarming, even accounting for progress and changing times, to discover that playing football in the street is now an extreme sport.

Read more…

When Nacional lingered one minute too long in the dressing room, the referee called off their match. Chris Bradley reports

Players from Nacional, one of Uruguay’s most successful and popular clubs, walked down the tunnel on August 31 knowing they needed a win to stay top of the table. Yet by the time they reached the pitch they found their game against Villa Española had been abandoned. Referee Liber Prudente ruled Nacional had forfeited the match by being one minute late. He subsequently left the stadium with a police escort to avoid fans waiting outside, baying for his blood. The unprecedented conclusion to the match plunged the once tranquil world of Uruguayan football into violence, threats, ­hearings, appeals and intense debate.

Read more…

Spectacle takes precedence over players

The broken leg suffered by Eduardo three minutes into Arsenal’s match at Birmingham prompted a swift and furious reaction, with Arsène Wenger’s call for a life ban for Eduardo’s assailant Martin Taylor, which he retracted a few hours later. However, Wenger’s request for analysis of the real problems in the game and concern that “if the newspapers all want to talk about [William] Gallas then Taylor will get away with it” was largely ignored in coverage of the incident.

Read more…

A documentary film that shows five diverse Britons on a road trip across the Americas to visit Maradona is the cinema’s best offering about the game in ages, in the view of Taylor Parkes

Perhaps the reason In the Hands of the Gods is the first enjoyable film about football for many, many years is that it’s not really “about football”. The cinema has never come close to capturing the atmosphere of a match, for players or supporters, and has only ever dealt with the mental/emotional/character-based aspects of the game in terms of cliche. We’ve all seen at least one of these efforts – Yesterday’s Hero, When Saturday Comes, Goal! – and been sick in a cup. This is different: a plot-driven documentary that doesn’t flinch, a cinéma vérité account of five freestylers busking their way across the Americas, ball-juggling for money, in the hope of reaching Buenos Aires and meeting their idol, Diego Maradona.

Read more…

Ben Lyttleton looks at what's going on behind the glitz and glamour in Spain

Spanish football looked in a healthy state when two billion fans tuned in to see David Beckham sign for Real Madrid last month. After all, the England captain had joined the biggest club in the world to play in the best league in the world. But Beckham’s arrival has coincided with a financial crisis in the Spanish game that Catalan daily El Periodico described as: “Total ruin, immense debt, crippling of the sector, zero credibility with the banks as well as on­going investigations by tax officials.”

Read more…