Keeping ScoreCollege Sports
Amid reports that Heisman trophy officials would strip former USC running back Reggie Bush of the 2005 award, Bush, who since college has played football and dated a Kardashian sister as a member of the New Orleans Saints, has …
Keeping ScoreFootball
It’s shakeup day at USC.
Wow.
Well, my earlier criticism of the Dutch is that they’ve tended to play up or down to the level of whatever team they’ve faced each day—a tactic that got them through the group round, but risked being trickier to replicate in the knock-out stage against the cream of the world’s footballing crop. The Netherlands not only …
Jeezo peezo. If that farce was a World Cup 1/8th final match, I wonder how we managed to avoid death by narcolepsy during the group rounds. Certainly the Netherlands deserved its 2-1 victory over Slovakia, but only because it lost what for the most part looked like a sleepwalk competition: the Dutch couldn’t quite manage to be as …
Japan’s inspiring play last night (and Tony’s post) have me daring to wish for what in any other Cup would have been the impossible: greatly favored sides being shown the door by nominally modest rivals. If France and Italy can both go out in disgrace, and the U.S. finish ahead of England, why not hope for (but not lay lots of money …
It just keeps getting uglier. Not 48 hours after their World Cup elimination, members of France’s soccer team returned to a French public whose lust for pay-back hasn’t been seen since locals who collaborated with Nazi troops were being shot or shorn of their hair. Indeed, the public, press, and political denunciation of the …
And so the miracle the entire world had waited for transpired after all. No, France didn’t pull itself out of the pathetic, self-mocking off-field tantrums for which it had become a laughing-stock in recent days. And didn’t knock in enough goals to beat South Africa and sneak into the knock-out round as Mexico lost against Uruguay. …
The match isn’t over yet (well, it is; just time isn’t out yet), but Portugal’s 5-0-and-counting drubbing of North Korea is as impressive as Germany’s opening pounding of Australia was—and perhaps then some. Sure, it turns out Australia isn’t as bad as it looked in taking four unanswered German goals last week, while North …
Herewith an update to my earlier post about Nicolas Anelka’s obscenity-driven verbal assault of coach Raymond Domenech Friday night. It now serves as a perfect reflection of the incompetence and hypocrisy of the entire French Football Federation responsible France’s South African debacle on and off the pitch.
Now we know what it took for French coach Raymond Domenech to—finally—pull the utterly useless attacker Nicolas Anelka off the pitch in the hopes someone else might create something remotely resembling an offensive presence: Anelka lavishly insulting the previously adoring Domenech in front of the entire squad.
As most people know by now, the big idea about staging the World Cup in South Africa, the grand experiment, is trying to change the perception of the country, and perhaps a continent. So: is it working?
Isn’t just France, but Raymond “I am not an idiot” Domenech drawing in his last, horrid breath as French coach. Just a few comments:
French coach Raymond Domenech may have decided to put the team’s best interests ahead of his many, many personal grudges for once, but that still doesn’t mean sanity has returned to France’s footballing soap opera. Though virtually all press reports in France Thursday say Domenech is set to make what has long been an obvious right …
