ROFLOL is right....
This from the same article, to add to the laughter....
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Just when we non-Italians had begun to wonder whether our ribs could take any further punishment, along came Luciano Gaucci, the president of the Perugia football club and therefore Ahn Jung Hwan's boss, to add to the gaiety of nations. Gaucci announced that Ahn was fired. "That gentleman will never set foot in Perugia again," Gaucci said. "I have no intention of paying a salary to someone who has ruined Italian soccer." Whether sacking a striker for scoring a goal is strictly in accordance with European employment law remains to be seen, and in any case a Perugia spokesman swiftly distanced the club from Signor Gaucci's remarks. At the time of writing, Ahn's future career plans are uncertain.
------ROFLOL------
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Despite all the underperforming giants and heroic underdogs, there was something bathetically reassuring about the final, held in Yokohama, Japan, in which Brazil played Germany. One or the other of these two teams has appeared in every World Cup final since 1978, and yet, weirdly, they have never played each other. Certainly, nobody expected either of them to make this final. Brazil lost an unprecedented six times in the large South American qualifying group; less than a year ago, Germany was hammered, 5-1, by England and forced into the indignity of a playoff against Ukraine to gain a place in the tournament. But, with the benefit of hindsight, it seems stupid to have written them off. Gary Lineker, a former player on England's national team who now works for the BBC, once memorably described football as a game in which twenty-two players chase a ball around for ninety minutes—and then the Germans win.
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Brazil, meanwhile, chose to infuriate in a different way. In the team's first game, against Turkey, an opponent kicked the ball petulantly but gently at Rivaldo, one of the most effortlessly talented players in the world, as he waited to take a corner. The ball clearly struck Rivaldo on the leg, but he fell to the ground clutching his face, as if he had just lost an eye. It was a contemptible piece of cheating for which the offending Turkish player was sent off, and Rivaldo was later fined for "simulation." In their semifinal, which was also against Turkey, the Brazilians had innumerable chances to score a second goal and kill the game but chose instead to shoot from impossible distances and ludicrous angles when better-placed colleagues were screaming for the ball. (If the just-enough Germans ever start mating with the profligate Brazilians, watch out.) And yet Brazil plays a brand of football—imaginative, fluid, absurdly skillful—that no one else in the world, and certainly nobody in Europe, has ever been able to emulate. This wasn't a vintage Brazilian team, but it still contained three forwards who could walk—or, rather, shuffle, with a couple of wiggles and the odd shimmy—into any other side in the world. |
