TOP 100 SOCCER SITES
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| Arsenal's Andrei Arshavin: If we win games in hand we are still in the race Andrei Arshavin warns team-mates they "cannot lose more points" if club are to retain ambitions of winning Premier League. telegraph.co.uk |
Ipswich Town striker Jon Stead has suspension increased to four matches • FA commission rejects red card appeal• Striker will miss three Championship gamesThe Ipswich Town striker Jon Stead will serve a four-match suspension, instead of the initial three, after his appeal against a Boxing Day red card was dismissed today.The Football Association's independent regulatory commission rejected Stead's appeal for wrongful dismissal, for a late challenge on the Crystal Palace midfielder Freddie Sears in the second half of a 3-1 defeat at Selhurst Park.The Ipswich manager, Roy Keane, will be without the striker until the match at Preston on 30 January.Stead's appeal meant that he was available for a 3-0 win over QPR on Monday, in which he scored twice. He has scored six goals in his last 10 games.He will miss Saturday's FA Cup third-round match at Blackpool and Championship games at Leicester and at home to Coventry and West Bromwich Albion.An FA statement read: "The striker will now receive a four-match ban, increased by one game and starting with immediate effect, as the commission felt the claim had no prospect of success."Ipswich TownChampionshipguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds 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 |
Ivory Coast v Ghana - live! Press the button below for automatic updates. An why not while away your Friday evening by emailing tom.lutz@guardian.co.uk with your thoughts on the game35 min: Eboué and his shattered leg help Opoku across the byline with a shove and he has a wee cry. 33 min: Kingson is as suspect as a man in a stripy jumper toting a swag bag. Another cross dropped. "Any word on what happened to Eboue," says a concerned David Mooney. " He was stretchered off in the 5th minute and either he's been substituted or the physio has been putting some magic spray on his leg for the past quarter hour. So is he crocked, or is his leg is frozen so solid that it will shatter into a million pieces if it's hit with a solid object?" Get this: his leg shattered into a million pieces and he still carried on. His left toe ended up in Samuel Inkoom's earhole.30 min: Opoku sprints into the box after Ivory Coast do a suspect job of clearing the danger. Once again the final ball is terrible though, as you may expect from a side with an everage age of 14 months.27 min: Drogba sprints for the ball with only Vorsah for company but the Ghana defender outmuscles him. Drogba looks at the turf. Pesky turf.25 min: Ghana's response is a lame shot from Badu that apologises wide. Maybe Essien should have started.GOAL! Ivory Coast 1-0 Ghana (Gervinho 22 min) Ivory Coast mount a counter-attacks and Gervinho is left with a tap in that he ... taps in. "I note your comment about Drogba stamping the turf," says El Naylor. "Pundits often say that 'for such a big man, he tumbles easily' but I've never understood that, as his higher centre of gravity should make tumbling over harder to resist. Anyway, I think we'll miss DD when he's gone, as he must be the biggest drama queen in football – the pouts, the screams, the stamps, even the occasional shy smile make him a right Veruca Salt, and the world's a happier place for it."20 min: Zokora fancies taking on Kingson and sends in another shot from distance that the Ghana keeper almost parries in. "Is it possible that the managers are having a competition to see who can make the most surprising omission from their starting eleven," asks Adrian Cooper. "No Kanoute for Mali yesterday, Essien left out for Ghana today. What next? No Mikel or the Yak for Nigeria tomorrow? No Eto'o and no goalkeeper for Cameroon on Sunday? If they keeps up by the time we reach the final the teams will only be fielding four players, an ox and a human statue between them." I think it's an attempt to rest players for later rounds. But of course, if you don't get to the later rounds in the first place...18 min: Zokora tries a shot that Kingson parries. Here's Declan Johnston: "Is there a more effortlessly suave continental manager out there than Zambia's Hervé Renard? He was marching up and down the touchline against Tunisia in half open unblemished white cotton shirt looking either deeply pensive or passionately rousing his troops, Alexander like. Certainly a contrast to veteran European in Africa (Rwanda, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Zaire, Ghana, Togo and Cameroon) manager Otto Pfister" I think Pfister has a more back to basics swagger about him, Declan.15 min: Gervinho is caught offside. Ivory Coast are on the attack, I guess Ghana know they can lose and still beat Burkina Faso in the next game and go through.14 min: Narry fould Kalou and Ivory Coast get a free-kick around 40 yards out. Drogba tries a shot that flies about 40 yards over. He does a few stamps on the pitch in a rather forlorn attempt to blame the turf.11 min: We're back as Ghana fire a shot into Barry's arms. I can also tell you Eurosport will be showing some swimming in the next few days judging by their adverts.9 min: We lose pictures for a while and all we're let with is a blank screen and the ghostly howl of Russell Osman's voice. They're showing crowd pictures now, exposing Eurosport as the kind of chancers that jsut rely on TV pictures for their commentary. Ha! "Of the five World Cup qualifiers playing at the ACN (Ivory Coast, Ghana, Algeria, Nigeria, Cameroon) how many games have they won between them," emails Alan Gardner. God knows why he emails me as he's sat right next to me. I'll say one (Algeria yesterday), Alan. But only because you printed the answer at the bottom of his email6 min: First chance of the game. Ghana take a very quick free kick and Barry scrambles across goal, lucky it was judt side because he probably wouldn't have got there.5 min: Eboué doesn't look too healthy and is stretchered off. Gervinho attempts a dart forward but is shouldered off the ball.3 min: Ivory Coast on the attack early on. Well, I say attack, they kick it out for a throw in deep into the Ghana half. Eboué is down injured at the minute.1 min: And we're off. Ivory Coast have one of those human statues among their supporters. Except he isn't painted silver and doesn't have boozed up stag do types trying to distract him by tickling his perineum. What do you mean you don't do that on stag dos?Team news! You can tell this is a big game because Reuters prints the teams 13 minutes before kick-off rather than three hours after full-time as has been the custom so far. Anyway, looks like Essien is on the bench:Ivory Coast: 1-Boubacar Barry; 17-Siaka Tiene, 4-Kolo Toure, 21-Emmanuel Eboue, 22-Soulemane Bamba; 5-Didier Zokora, 6-Yaya Toure, 9-Cheik Tiote, 8-Salomon Kalou; 10-Gervinho, 11-Didier Drogba. Ghana: 22-Richard Kingson; 18-Eric Addo, 7-Samuel Inkoom, 15-Isaac Vorsah, 11-Moussa Narry; 19-Emmanuel Agyemang-Badu, 9-Opoku Agyemang, 13-Dede Ayew, 17-Rahim Ayew, 14-Mathew Amoah, 10-Kwadwo Asamoah. Referee: Jerome Damon (South Africa)Enjoying your Friday night? No? Oh. Well this game may well cheer you up. Both sides can guarantee passage to the next round if they win.Ghana may be banking on beating Burkina Faso in the next game: rumour has it that Michael Essien will be on ther bench. Added to that injuries deprive them of the midfielders Stephen Appiah, Anthony Annan and Laryea Kingston, defenders John Mensah as well as John Paintsil and Sulley Muntari expelled from the squad for skipping a friendly in Angola last November.I'll have some team news once I can nick it off the wires.Africa Cup of NationsIvory CoastGhanaTom Lutzguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Tottenham Hotspur 2 Fulham 0: match report Peter Crouch and David Bentley eased Spurs to a comfortable London derby win. telegraph.co.uk |