By Rob | 18th March 2010 |
Bielsa has had a colorful career. Having come from a family of Argentinean politicians and lawyers he chose to devote his life to soccer. He played little football at senior level before qualifying as a physical education and went on to coaching, where he had some success with his old First Division Team, Newell’s Old Boys, which he took to a number of wins.
He then moved to Mexico for a while and then returned to Argentina.
In 1998 he was offered the coaching job for the Argentinean national side which he led to qualifying for the 2002 World Cup but failed to take beyond the 1st round. Notwithstanding this disappointing performance he retained the job and he went on to take Argentina to an Olympic Gold medal – the first time since 1928 that this was achieved by a South American side. Inexplicitly he resigned in 2004 as the Argentina coach.
Bielsa was subsequently appointed coach of Chile to take them to the World Cup 2010 and he did so on a roller coaster! After a couple of crush defeats against Paraguay (0-3) and Brazil (0-3) he went on to take his side to good wins against Argentina (1-0), Peru (3-1), a return victory against Paraguay (2-0) and Bolivia (4-0). These together with a couple of other games took Chile to qualifying for the Work Cup for the first time in 12 years.
He has taken the opportunity to develop young talent and adopted an attacking game plan.
El Loco is a hero in Chile. Although I think it will be an uphill battle in Group H which includes Switzerland and my favorite to win the World Cup 2010, Spain, I think his talented side has a fighting chance of getting into the Round of 16.
By Rob | 17th March 2010 |
I feel something of a bond with Maradona – we were born in the same year – in fact he is 2 months younger than me. But I guess that is where the bond ends.
This diminutive (1.65m) legend of the game has no less than 91 caps for Argentina and he scored an amazing 34 goals. His international career as a player spanned 18 years from 1977 to 1994 and he played in 4 World Cups – ‘82, ‘86 where he captained Argentina to victory scoring the “Hand of god” and “Goal of the century” goals against England in the quarter final clash, and also played in the tournaments of ‘90 and ‘94.
You’ll note I said legend and not hero. Maradona’s career has been a controversial one. He only played 2 games in the ‘94 World Cup before he was sent home after failing a drug test for ephedrine doping. He had a long-term addiction to cocaine from the mid ’80s to about 2004 which caused a heart attack at one stage. He also became obese and which has had gastric bypass surgery.
He has not endeared himself to the Americans with his support of Cuba and Iran.
His Argentina coaching career has also been controversial. When the position became vacant in 2008 he immediately proposed his candidacy!!! During qualification for the World Cup 2010 he suddenly found himself staring down the barrel of a gun after his team suffered their worst ever loss 6-1 to Bolivia and Argentina were 5th in their group. Luckily he was able to lift his team to victory in the remaining 2 games to qualify for World Cup 2010. During a media briefing after qualification he was abusive to the media and FIFA banned him for 2 months.
We are looking forward to the little maestro ’s presence in South Africa during 2010 and are wondering what controversial thing he’ll do next!
But I think my vote still goes to Pele as the greatest footballer of all time. The stats speak for themselves. Pele played for Brazil from 1957 to 1971 with 92 appearances and 77 goals… WOW!
By Rob | 16th March 2010 |
The French are a team to watch in the World Cup because no one will be paying much attention to them! They showed in ‘98 that they could come from behind as rank outsiders and catch everyone by surprise! Their present FIFA ranking of 7 means they are definitely in the mix and their form has been improving steadily over the last year after a bit of a bad spell.
The contravacy around Thierry Henry’s handball against Ireland will be remembered for a long time but essentially France should be going to the World Cup and not Ireland.
With 12 appearances in the World Cup and one win and one second place amongst those, keep your eyes on L’Equipe Tricolore they just may just creep up on the “big” boys once again on African soil!
By Riccardo | 10th March 2010 |
The main talking point in Seria A lately is the Milan giant Inter poor form especially in front of goal .. they have now drawn 4 of their last 6 games seeing a mammoth 11 point lead at one stage cut down to just 4!! The worry being that in these 4 draws they’ve managed only 1 goal!!! The 2 wins were 3 goal games but the consistency in front of goal must be a worry .. Eto’o, Balotelli and Pandev fighting to partner Milito seems to be doing more bad than good for Mourinho’s men.
AS Roma
Milan and Roma on the other hand have been blistering HOT in the last few games to keep the hunt alive except when they played each other and played out to the most boring 0-0 seen all season in Italy, that was until the next day when Inter and Genoa played 0-0 .. staying up late to watch these games truly is a waste of time.. and it seems to me that the Milan sides had their focus on the upcoming Champions League games.
Juventus truly have a BIG fight on for forth place Palermo looking unbelievably good, and Sampdoria regaining some of the early season form.. all putting on a fight. Napoli still within 5 of the Sicilians who currently hold that all important last Champions League spot!
At the bottom the other Sicilian’s Catania have screamed out of the bottom 3! Livorno being sucked back into the bottom, my other favourite for the drop Bologna has too found some sort of form and is now 11 Points ahead of the Tuscans.
Lazio are the next in line and they really need to get their act together to avoid the hugest sort of embarrassment!!
At the bottom we find an amazing Stat – Udinese this season have scored 32 goals this season 19 of those scored by Antonio di Natale 60% of his teams goals sees him lead Seria A’s top goal scorers!
This weekends game season the top 3 teams all playing bottom half teams, with Inter having the trickest fixture away to Catania, this game moved forward to Friday to give Inter a nice rest before they travel to London the following Tuesday . The Biggest tie of the weekend sees Napoli face off against Fiorentina in the late game on Saturday, and Udinese – Palermo my pick of Sundays miss-able games.. think I’ll be watching the F1 season kick off 
Takeshi Okada the 54yr old Japanese coach has 24 caps for the Japenese National Team which he earned in the early ’80’s. During this time he played for Furukawa Electric as a defender in the 1st Division of the Japanese Soccer League.