Strange and sad stories in the news

This will be my penultimate article for Soccernews as my commitments elsewhere mean that I no longer have the time to devote to my writing. I have written over 1300 articles on this site and have enjoyed doing the writing and reading your comments, both supportive and not quite so supportive, over the past three or four years.

Strength

The site will go on from strength to strength and other writers like David Nugent will continue to inform and give their opinions and spark, no doubt, heated debate. I shall certainly be keeping in touch with the site and will be using it as my first point of call for all the latest news and opinion.

Thank

I would particularly like to thank the readers of my articles. Football is a game of opinions and I have loved hearing yours even when they couldn’t have been more different to my own. In fact, when they have been different it has always been interesting and I have often looked at things from another angle as a result.

Anyway, enough about me!!

Ridiculous

In truth there isn’t much going on in the world of football at the moment. It is the usual Summer fare of ridiculous transfer rumour and occasionally ridiculous transfer (Jordan Henderson, you know who you are). The women’s World Cup is on, but try as I might, I just can’t get excited about the women’s game. I really want the game to succeed and
take off, but it just doesn’t quite do it for me.

There are some relatively interesting stories such as those going on at Hearts in the Scottish Premier League. Their owner has made a very strange statement about the game and players being influenced by thieves, criminals and the Mafia. At the same time, they have stuck by one of their players who has just become a convicted sex offender. You
couldn’t make it up could you?

Agreement

There is also the story about the potential Great Britain football team for the 2012 Olympics. An announcement was made saying that the team was definitely going to go ahead as agreement had been reached with all four of the home nations. Unfortunately, it seems that they had forgotten to tell the Irish and Scottish FAs, who don’t appear to have realised that they had agreed to anything. Once again, you couldn’t make it up.

There is also a big story in Argentina where the great River Plate club have been relegated out of the top division for the first time ever. There were riots after the game and police fired water cannons into the crowd. The game was actually finished a minute early because of the trouble. The scenes were very unpleasant and gave football a bad name.

Stupid

Talking of giving football a bad name, what about the stupid racist yobs in Russia? Roberto Carlos, one of the greats, walked off the pitch when a piece of scum threw a banana at him. It is beyond belief that football is still tarnished by this type of indescribably disgusting behaviour. I hope they catch the piece of filth that threw it and deal with him
appropriately in the only way he would understand!

Those are two stories that are sad to report as I still think of football as the beautiful game. It is sometimes hard to maintain that belief when you see things like this happening.

That’s a whistle stop tour of what’s happening in the football world. I’ll be back for the final time on Wednesday.