“If you are leaving Real Madrid, there is only one club you can join that is not a step down – and that’s Manchester United.”
— Rafael Van de Vaart a few weeks ago before joining Tottenham Hotspur.
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He was a former homeless man who had never played at a level higher than the Portuguese third division who suddenly an unexpectedly moved to Manchester United for £7.4m and hasn’t been heard of since. Sir Alex Ferguson has been hard in his defense of the player he signed without ever having seen him play saying its taking him time to get up to required fitness, while sceptics are claiming the kid is far from United standards and this could well be one of the all-time great transfer busts.
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What do you think when you hear the word unsportsmanlike? Do you think of someone that hasn’t played football like a Gary Linekar or raced a car like a Damon Hill? If you do then I have to ask why on earth you think that? What do you think a modern day sportsman represents? Riches, fame, woman, performance enhancing drugs and a bending of the rules that borders on the cheating depending on who you ask. Therefore would you not say that being “unsportsmanlike” would have you being the kind of upstanding competitor that we wish we had more of but know we’ll never get enough of because nice guys finish last? Just this week we seen some horrific unsportsmanlike behavior from a 14-year old kid Golfer.
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So as far as we were all aware, Javier Mascherano’s main reason for leaving Liverpool was because his wife could not settle in the city. Well, the Argentenian captain has today come forth to let us know that this wasn’t the case, but rather broken promises by the club. In a scenario that threatens to turn into a playground game of “he-said, she-said” Mascherano came out today to say that Liverpool upon refusing his move to Barcelona last summer, promised he could leave the club this year if an acceptable offer come in.
“When they started to involve my family and to say things that didn’t make sense, I obviously suffered,” he said. “They’d promised me something for a whole year and they never fulfilled their promise. And that didn’t have anything to do with my family or anything else. When you read or hear lies, you obviously get angry.”
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AirWolf Ryan Babel on his way to London this afternoon
So long as you can take most things you hear with a pinch of salt and so long as you can not take it all too serious (which can be sometimes hard when you’re club is linked to Roman Pavlyuchenko) then you can have a lot of fun with all the rumors and drama of the final day before the transfer window “slams shut” as the media would have it. Various people calling into radio stations reporting that they are a taxi driver or that their friends cousins ex-room mate at college is a taxi driver who just dropped Lionel Messi off at the Eastlands just moments ago. Unfortunately some good and serious rumors get caught up in the mix but it keeps things light as we try guess which ones might actually have some truth to them. If you believed the radio and the papers that were running live updates of the day, Liverpool’s Ryan Babel spent the afternoon flying a helicopter above London deciding whether to land it at West Ham or Tottenham. The reports were surreal, but, I suppose the end goal was achieved, everyone tuned in and everyone lapped up the rumors whether you were so gullible as to believe them or not.
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The U.S. Open is underway at Flushing Meddows in Queens, NY and on the first day of play for the legend that is Roger Federer he was showing that while he might now be the dominant ace he once was, he still has a few tricks up his sleeve, or in his racquet if you will, when he needs it.
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You don’t have to ask whether the Belgian Grand Prix will be a good race or not like you do with many other circuits on the F1 calendar, you just know it will be. It always is. Any circuit as long as that, with so many corners, straights, twists, turns, uphills, downhills and not to mention unpredictable weather will always make for a fascinating Grand Prix and once against in 2010 all those elements played into this race and made it a classic. After surviving a late trip into the gravel when it began to rain, Lewis Hamilton clung onto a lead he took on the first lap to take the checkered flag and move back into the lead of the drivers championship standings.
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