Cebu Football

PATRICE Evra and the rest of the French team joined a lot of athletes who will have to pay for their antics for quite some time—the rest of their lives even. Athletes are mostly required to think quickly on their feet during their games but off court, some, as Evra and Les Bleus have shown, should have spent a little more time thinking before pushing through with their actions.

I WITNESSED history made the other night and it wasn’t even about the World Cup. It’s not about reigning World Cup champion Italy’s first-round exit, that’s not historic. France already did that in 2002. It’s about John Isner and Nicolas Mahut.

JUST as the England vs. Slovenia match was winding down, the telecast cut to the Slovenia coach, who, curiously, wasn’t signaling a play to his players. Zero-zero his hands say. That was the score of the Algeria vs. US game after 90 minutes. A score that would see Slovenia moving on to the knockout stage.

IRISH fans must be laughing at the misfortune of Les Blues. Heavily-favored to top a relatively weak group, the former world champion—the real kind, not the American version of a world champion—languishes at third with one point in two matches.

SHOWING a resiliency their team wasn’t known for, a squad of rag-tag players known for being a doormat of football in the region, surprised everybody by playing with all they have when they had nothing to play for. It was their third of four games in a tournament so often ignored that it was set to lose its major sponsor. But it was a game, and they were playing for the country, and they were tired of people asking not if they’d win, but by how many goals they will lose.

FOR a group in charge of promoting football the PFF, and its local counterpart, are conspicuously absent in the World Cup. I mean, people I know who don’t normally care about anything football, are watching the World Cup. They’re staying up late, just like the serious fans, watching the games.

I WATCHED the opening of the World Cup at Sports Exchange Bar and the experience, like the game, was beautiful. As expected, I saw a slew of familiar faces, some of whom I regularly saw at The Badgers during Germany 2006.

I CAUGHT a couple of nice (well, it depends on where you sit on the pitch) off beat stories in the 2010 World Cup. I guess the two journalists were bored stiff of the lack of action prior to kick off, and instead of harping for the nth time who could beat who in South Africa, they focused on two stories—the vuvuzela and a ref’s language skills.

HAD Jonathan Guardo, the former Cebusoc chairman, spent the P10 million SEA Games aid from the Philippine Sports Commission as intended, people would have lynched him for wasting government money. It would have been like spending millions to asphalt a perfectly fine paved road.

IS violence against football officials getting too common these days? First —and the worst—was the attack of a parent, a cop mind you, against a referee last February.