that was a gem, thanks for posting it!
I am pasting here some diamond excerpts:-)
>The midfielder Roy Keane, whose club side, Manchester United, is significantly better than his international side,
Ireland, reportedly told his national coach, Mick McCarthy, "You are a crap manager . . . and you're not even Irish, you English cunt. You can stick it up your bollocks." (Maybe Keane was simply troubled that McCarthy was, as far as we know, the only hermaphrodite coach at the World Cup.)
>"I can buy you, your house, and your family," Zlatko Zahovic,of Slovenia, told his manager. "You were a dickhead
player and you're the same as a coach."
>The Italians have always had a strange approach to football. Their players look like pop stars, and the squad almost always includes at least two forwards whom every other country in the world would kill for; all the outward signs suggest flamboyance and a sense of stylish adventure. But traditionally they play a stupefyingly defensive game, as if too much scoring would somehow cause people to doubt their masculinity. The Italian way is to score once, and then refuse to cross the halfway line for the remainder of the game.
>The Italians went stereotypically nuts. The FIFA e-mail system crashed after receiving an estimated four hundred thousand enraged messages about the refereeing decisions. Franco Frattini, the Italian minister for public offices, described the referee as "a disgrace, absolutely scandalous." He went on,"I've never seen a game like it. It seemed as if they just sat around a table and decided to throw us out." An official statement from RAI television, which reportedly considered suing FIFA for lost revenue, called the decisions "so blatant they could only be described as the product of serious fraud." The referee in question, Byron Moreno, of Ecuador,perhaps unwisely decided to snipe back. He suggested in effect that the accusations of bribery were a bit rich, coming as they did from a country not unfamiliar with the concept of the backhander.The Rome prosecutor's office, reacting to a complaint from an Italian consumer association, promptly opened an investigation into Moreno's conduct. TV stations, prosecutors,government ministers . . . at one stage it seemed only a matter of time before a small flotilla of Italian gunships would set sail across the Atlantic, to prepare the way for a full-scale invasion of Ecuador.
>But almost all the decisions that went against them related to bad offside calls, which are two a penny in football: to make a correct judgment, a linesman is required to look simultaneously at the player passing the ball and the player receiving it, a physical impossibility that produces tantrums in every single game. (My own proposed solution—that football be played with one of those children's balls that squeak when kicked, thus giving the linesman an audible signal and allowing him to concentrate solely on the receiving player—was once again foolishly ignored by the authorities.)
>This time, it wasn't only the defeated country's media that were outraged. The Daily Telegraph, in England, ordered us not to cheer for South Korea in its semifinal against Germany (a controversial instruction, given that most English football fans would root for a Taliban team against Germany in a World Cup match): "The records say that the Koreans knocked out Spain. . . . The records are a lie, and this tournament has descended into farce."
La Nación, in Argentina, argued that this World Cup should be "declared null and void."
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