TOP 100 SOCCER SITES
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| Birmingham City defender Roger Johnson is relishing his Premier League opportunity Centre-back duo Roger Johnson and Scott Dann have provided the foundation for Birmingham's rise. telegraph.co.uk |
Is Patrick Vieira past his best? The Frenchman captained Arsenal's invincibles, but is now 33 and returns to England only after Internazionale opted not to renew his contract, and having played just 12 league games this season. Have City got themselves a bargain, or is he destined to flop? guardian.co.uk |
Sport's immunity has been stripped South Africa may claim there is no link between events in Angola and their World Cup but the seed of doubt has been sownMuggings, car-jackings, robberies and shootings were all spectres haunting Africa's first World Cup but not politically motivated machine gun attacks, until the continent's other football festival had the joy strafed out of it by the Front for the Liberation of the Enclave of Cabinda (FLEC).With indecent haste, Togo's footballers might feel, the thoughts of richer nations swung quickly from sympathy for the three killed and the others wounded on the bus carrying them to the implications for the global gathering further south, where there is no separatist or terrorist organisation for the authorities to fear but plenty of potential for imported threat.According to the head of South Africa's 2010 World Cup organising committee, Danny Jordaan, those "implications" are no more valid than a bomb going off in Spain would be to a World Cup in England. Geographically this may be true but Jordaan invites us to ignore the reality that this kind of opportunistic violence is now portable. It gets on planes and comes in by land and sea. It follows its targets across frontiers.South Africa's attention was already tightly fixed on the need to protect its visitors from the poverty-rooted crime that afflicts its own citizens. A precise analysis of those risks is complicated by the liberal urge not to overstate the depth of the country's policing problems and by a competing sense of panic when we read about rugby fans on the Lions tour being hijacked at gunpoint only minutes after leaving Johannesburg airport in their hire car.But this is peril – and fear – on a whole other scale. With the assault on Emmanuel Adebayor and his team as they drove to the Africa Cup of Nations we hear again the rat-a-tat-tat of the attack on Sri Lanka's cricketers in Pakistan. Did the Cabinda rebels take that as a template? In both cases the authors of the ambush can claim it as a success, in gunmen's terms. In Pakistan and now Angola, five months before an historic World Cup, an unremovable seed of apprehension has been planted in the minds of all sportsmen and women boarding the steps of buses with their ipods and washbags.To assail the psyche is one of the objectives of these outrages. FLEC, who have jumped from obscurity to global infamy through 30 minutes of trigger action, have forced Togo home, ruined the tournament, put Cabinda on the map as a trouble spot and provided encouragement for other fringe groups eager to advertise their killing power.This incident chills the bone partly because Togo's players were not enemies of the separatists. They were fired at simply because they committed the error of driving through a dangerous region and so happened to present a randomly convenient target.Since the Munich Olympic massacre sport has traded on the reluctance of violent groups to alienate world opinion by attacking organised fun. That immunity has been stripped away with the Pakistan and Cabinda tragedies. New rules apply and there were, in Adebayor's account of the 30 minutes he spent hiding under seats, eerie evocations of the September 11 attacks and the suspense endured by the victims as they prepared their goodbyes. "This Friday at 14.30 we were all dead on that bus," Adebayor said. "We sent our last messages to our families. We called our family to say our last word."However unjust it feels to South Africa, trepidation rises a notch, justifiably, because a football-centred attack on the same continent has achieved its aim of bloodshed and chaos. Trepidation lurches upwards across sport because a lethal formula has been established. A new menu of risks presents itself to security experts. Already spectators queue for miles to pass through cordons and scanners. Now armies of outriders will have to protect teams as they glide between hotels, training grounds and games.Many of us scoffed when a Japanese warship appeared off the coast of Awaji Island to help protect Sven-Goran Eriksson's 2002 World Cup squad. England have always seen demons in every hedgerow. For this summer's tournament no association will twitch more than our own at the thought of a group such as FLEC spiriting itself across the wide South African borders with havoc in its eyes.Sometimes in this age a vision presents itself of 50% of the world's population working in security to protect the other half against attack. South Africa has had its warning and will respond, yet there is no mistaking the sense that international sport is now a vastly more dangerous place.TogoAfrica Cup of NationsWorld Cup 2010Paul Haywardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Aston Villa reaches final of Carling Cup Aston Villa reached the Carling Cup final after rallying from 2-0 down to beat Blackburn 6-4. Villa won the first match of the two-legged semifinal 1-0 and advanced to the Feb. 28 final 7-4 on aggregate. cbc.ca |
Tottenham Hotspur 2 Fulham 0: match report Peter Crouch and David Bentley eased Spurs to a comfortable London derby win. telegraph.co.uk |