Tag: Soccer

Categories
New York Yankees

Odds and Ends: Yankees fans aren’t delusional at all

ESPN had an interesting poll on how the addition of Roger Clemens affects their postseason chances. A majority of voters (48%) said they’d miss the playoffs while 17% though they will be World Series Champs. What’s interesting is that only in 3 states do a majority of folks feel that the Yankees will be champions at year’s end: New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Delusion in a powerful force. (via be Recruited)

In other news…

[Jacksonville.com]: Goodell’s personal conduct policy claims another victim

[SI.com]: Mets fan who was crushed by a fat man is suing the Mets

[The Offside]: It’s a good thing he didn’t get a hot beef injection

[Wizard of Odds]: Our favorite entry into the Wiz’s great billboard competition

[Larry Brown Sports]: His soul probably still stinks

And finally, Malaysian officials are planning on dumping 196,00 cans of confiscated beer down the drain. It’s as if a million sports fans cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.

Categories
Soccer

Finally, someone understands how we feel about soccer


There are enough great sports here in North America that we at Sportscolumn don’t usually look across the pond for colorful commentary on athletics. But there are some quotes that just can’t be denied. Like Jorge Valdano’s remark about the poor play of Champions League participants Chelsea and Liverpool.

Put a s*** hanging from a stick in the middle of this passionate, crazy stadium and there are people who will tell you it’s a work of art.”

“It’s not — it’s a s*** hanging from a stick.

For a minute there we thought that Valdano was talking about the Green Bay Packers. But regardless of what sport it was about, that was one of the greatest quotes in the history of athletic competition. Rank it right up there with:

What’s that? Playoffs? Don’t talk about– playoffs? You kidding me? Playoffs? I just hope we can win a game!

and

I mean listen, we’re sitting here talking about practice, not a game, not a game, not a game, but we’re talking about practice. Not the game that I go out there and die for and play every game like it’s my last but we’re talking about practice man. How silly is that?

Links:

[The Sun]: S*** hanging from a stick

Categories
Atlanta Falcons

Odds and Ends: Michael Vick loves animals



Vick has a message for dog lovers

Michael Vick’s publicist might just jump off a bridge. The latest incident involves a search of a property in Virginia owned by Vick because authorities believed that dogs were being trained there for illegal fights. Vick doesn’t live at the house but his nephew does.


Early reports indicate as many as 70 dogs on the property, including 60 pit bulls with wounds that appear to be consistent with dog-fighting. Authorities have allegedly uncovered extensive dog-fighting paraphernalia, including rape stands (used to allow fighting dogs to breed while preventing them from attacking each other), equipment used to build strength and endurance in fighting dogs, and controlled substances frequently used in dog-fighting.

Now, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions about the extent that Vick was involved… oh what the hell, let’s just jump to conclusions. How the hell do you now know what your nephew is doing on a property that you own? This is just another example of Vick’s ability to win friends and influence people. Let’s just hope that nobody was pumping the dogs with steroids.

In other news…

[SC]: The Falcons now lead the league in animal cruelty

[Philly.com]: Meet Brian Westbrook’s brother, Byron. No, that’s not confusing at all.

[The Offside]: Croatian Footballer Given a Sheep for Every Goal he Scores. What he does with it is up to him.

[The Big Picture]: What movie sporting event would you have liked to attend in person?

[Our Book of Scrap]: Tony Stewart says NASCAR is fixed

And finally, if you have a lot of time to waste, you can watch cheddar as it ripens. Seriously. Or like us, you can sit around and wonder, “hey whatever happened to Bridget Fonda?” and “why does Nic Cage suck so much?”

Categories
Soccer

Want to buy a piece of an English soccer team?



The Target

Here’s the basic idea: 50,000 members each pony up $70 to buy a share of a “purchase fund”. The resulting $2.7M fund will be used to buy a football club. (In case you’re doing the math and it doesn’t add up — part of the membership fee goes to administrative fees, of course.) Then each member has an equal vote in determining which club to purchase, player acquisitions, starting lineups, etc.

Having fans decide on starting lineups isn’t a completely novel idea. Last summer, the Schaumburg Flyers, a minor league baseball team in Illinois, teamed up with MSN for something called Fan Club: Reality Baseball that put the daily managerial decisions in the hands of the fans. Unsurprisingly, the decisions were less than stellar.

However, Myfootballclub is novel in that it lets the fans actually have an ownership interest. Well, sort of. You can never sell your share and you have to pony up a yearly membership fee. We wonder what happens if the club gets sold for a substantial profit. Shouldn’t the shares be distributed to the ownership trust? We doubt it — but we’ll keep an eye on this site.

It’s unfortunate that a million Cubs fans couldn’t pony up $800 each to buy the Cubs this year. The bitching and moaning of Cubs fans as they argued over players, trades and lineups would have been priceless. The Cubs would be a last place team with a bloated payroll… oh wait, they already are.

Links:
[My Football Club]: How it works
[Wikipedia]: Schaumburg Flyers

Categories
College Football

Odds and Ends: Florida Gators boosters are doing a poor job


You’d think that a national football and college basketball championship would have the Florida boosters in fine form. But this story about a robbery is an excellent example of how they are just dropping the ball:


On Saturday, a UF student was taking kegs out of his truck when [five] men approached him. One 6-foot-4, 280-pound man attempted to steal his keg, cutting his neck in the process, according to the report. The cut was 5 to 6 inches long, the report states, and it appeared to be the result of a fingernail or ring.

The suspect was a Gator football player who had to be restrained from attacking the victim a few times by four of his teammates. Look at the travesty here. Why does a Florida Gator football player feel the need to rob a man of his keg? Shouldn’t the football players have unlimited access to the local beer distributor? After all, they are champions! For shame, Gator boosters, for shame. (Hat tip: Loserwith socks)

In other news…

[Fish stripes]: Dontrelle Willis pitches as his wife prepares to give birth

[Deseret News]: Andrei Kirilenko and Jerry Sloan just lost in translation

[Ben Maller]: Tigers Sean Casey comes home from a road trip to find his car on cinder blocks at the airport

[The Offside]: A book sheds more light (eccchhhh) on Wayne Rooney nailing a 48 year old grandmother/prostitute

[Can’t Stop the Bleeding]: Toriiiiii Hunter almost suspended three years for giving champagne

[Lopez@Large]: Yao Ming needs a strong postseason to define his legacy

[WBRS Sports]: The Orioles to offer groupies free mustache ride

And finally, if the Kansas City Royals adopted the My Name is Earl scratch and sniff episode promotion, would it just smell like garbage?

Categories
Soccer

Soccer player gets yellow card instead of black eye after kissing referee

We’re not big soccer fans; in fact, the only times we report on futbol is when riots break out or some chick rips off her shirt after a goal. But a story about a soccer player kissing a ref caught our eye because the referee decided to give his admirer a yellow card for the smooch. Apparently the ref took offense to the sign of affection and started saying “You can’t kiss me. You can’t kiss me.” You can’t blame the guy for getting upset at the kissing bandit; after all, the least he could have done was take him out to dinner first.

This got us thinking about some of the more famous kisses in sports history. What we came up with can be found after the jump.

Links:

[TheOffside]: Defender kisses ref. and gets yellow carded

Continue reading “Soccer player gets yellow card instead of black eye after kissing referee”

Categories
NBA General

Odds and Ends: The Chuckster goes cyber


TNT has decided to launch a MySpace page in order to further promote their domination of the upcoming playoff coverage. The page has a blog, playoff schedule, TNT crew bios and other interactive multimedia experiences just waiting to be enjoyed by the NBA faithful. And you thought that MySpace was just for ditzy girls and perverted old men.

In other news…

[SignOnSanDiego.com]: Joe Frazier loves his daughter; he just has a hard time trusting her with his cash.

[The Sun]: European soccer club owner tells American billionaire that he can take his money and shove it!

[eBay]: For just $15,555; you too can be a champion.

[USA Today]: Getting arrested sucks but getting arrested on accident really sucks ass.

[Our Book of Scrap]: Why doesn’t SI just rename itself MaximSports and get it over with?

And finally, in our “Well, duh!” story of the day; Victoria’s Secret released their list of the sexiest entertainers
and the smokin’ hot Jessica Alba was named the sexiest actress. Alba’s an excellent choice regardless of the competition, but Victoria’s Secret definitely made the right choice considering Danica Patrick also made the list. Danica Patrick?!? Having Patrick and Alba on the same list for sexiest entertainer is like having Tiger Woods and Charles Barkley on the same list for best golfers.

Categories
NFL General

Odds and Ends: You know who Chunky Soup should sign? Jesus


Chunky Soup has announced their latest lineup of “Mama’s Boys” and fans are hoping that their players aren’t affected by the Chunky Soup Curse. The eight man roster of LaDainian Tomlinson, Matt Hasselbeck, Vince Young, Larry Johnson, Jonathan Vilma, DeMarcus Ware, Devin Hester and Todd Heap is the largest that Chunky has ever had.

In a completely unrelated bit of info, we’ve previously stated that Jesus shouldn’t have any part in sports, especially in the Masters, but apparently some people don’t agree. And apparently he plays for the Dallas Cowboys.

In other news…

[Our Book of Scrap]: Speaking of curses, some Chargers fans are so concerned about the Madden Curse that they’ve started a petition against having LaDanian on the cover.

[10,000 Takes]: Cedric Griffin kicked out of a nightclub for not pulling up his pants. Hey, at least it wasn’t for pulling down his pants.

[Yahoo]: Oh sure, Agassi, go to the ‘I accidentally hit my wife with a racket during a fundraiser’ excuse. Jason Kidd sure does wish he’d thought of that one.

And finally, we’ve seen elephants playing soccer and puppies getting flagged for pooping in the Puppy Bowl but this might take the cake. Check out this video of a bunch of crazy Japanese drivers in some sort of weird demolition derby/soccer game.

Categories
Soccer

Beckham gets new tattoo… immediately issues publicity photo


You want to talk about irresponsible journalism? The headline for a Sun UK article on Beckham’s new tattoo is “Bizarre: Beckham Breaks his arm.” Imagine a MLS executive seeing that on a newsreader.

Well, it turns out the headline is their clever way to say that Beckham likes the show Prison Break so much that he decided to get a similar tattoo on his arm. It took six hours but now Becks has a sleeve tattoo that says:


Let them hate as long as they fear.

What’s interesting to us is not that he got a tattoo but that he immediately had a publicity photo taken prominently showing off the tattoo. It’s only been a week. Perhaps this is how it works when you’re a celebrity athlete and the fate of the world rests in your hands. The world must know about Beckham’s new ink. Or perhaps this could just be a way for him to thwart the Beckhams lookalikes in the States.

Links:

[The Sun UK]: Beckham Breaks his arm

Categories
Soccer

Riots and soccer go together like PB&J

Well, another day and another soccer riot. Man those Europeans love to fight. Last night’s brouhaha began around the 30th minute of a UEFA Cup quarterfinal game at Seville. Seven fans from the rival Tottenham team were hospitalized, mostly with cuts the head, and a police officer was also injured in the uproar.

The creative fans decided to use more than just their fists as they ripped up the stadium’s plastic seats and began hurling them at the coppers, who returned fire by swinging their night sticks at the rowdy bunch. As usual, these blood thirsty morons didn’t wait to get inside the stadium to start brawling because there are reports that about 50 Tottenham fans got their fight on with police outside the stadium before the match even got underway. Now that’s passion.

What’s worse than the actions of the fans is the reported response from one asshole cop who was seen striking a disabled fan, striking the man so hard with his baton that he was knocked from his wheelchair. Here’s a clip from the melee.

And yes, we agree; “that’s why you’re wankers!”

Of course, Italy is trying to take all the fun out soccer by passing an Anti-Soccer Violence Law.

Links:

[ITV.com]: Spurs: Police hit disabled fan
[Scotsman.com]: Spurs fans to face Seville court