Yesterday here in Paris Nicolas Sarkozy called an emergency session of their parliament (I think that's what it's called here) to discuss and debate the miserable failure the French National Soccer Team was in South Africa at this year's world cup. The team played poorly and evidently there's been misgivings about their coach for more than 4 years and those obvious misgivings led to out and out mutiny by some of their players in South Africa some of which was captured on film and replayed over and over and over again on French TV. These antics led to cancellation of several major sponsors and commercials being yanked from TV and print media as the French National Team never made it out of Group Competition and was sent home without a win early. We've never lived in a foreign country when the World Cup was happening and as you've seen in previous blogs, we've enjoyed it. We do however feel bad for our French friends who are very unhappy at the lack of professionalism by their team and the embarrassment it has caused here in France.
On a different note, not even the FIFA Referees were able to stop the USA Team from winning their group last night although the Belgian Ref tried mightily to do so. We've watched all of the USA games and the one constant in all of them was poor officiating that bordered on purposeful bias to the point the French commentators would yell "incroiable!" at almost every bad call and out and out declared the Americans had been robbed in the game against Slovenia. It was only fitting last night that Landon Donovan who's played with the US Team for as long as I can remember scored the winning goal last night and I shouted in the living room and had tears in my eyes. They were moving on to the final 16!
I'm including a link in this entry that tells the story far better than I ever could.
Love to all everywhere especially the USA National Soccer Team in South Africa!
USA!
Sid
http://g.sports.yahoo.com/soccer/world-cup/news/student-s-video-tribute-to-donovan-a-hit--fbintl_ro-videodonovan062510.html
If you think the refereeing was bad for USA during the group stage, you should have seen it during qualifying. For as many years as I can remember we have suffered with South American, Central American and Mexican refs who ignore the infractions by the spanish-speaking team and call the USA as if we are the dirtiest team on earth. Every little thing is called, yellow cards handed for something the other team has literally done over and over. By the time we reach the World Cup we better be good because we've had to clearly win every game we've won with plenty of extra goals to make up for those called back. We've seen cheating at every step of the process and still made it to the final 16. I will never understand it but despite our funding not only our defunct budget every year but also pouring money into the garbage pits of the third world to help them, they still hate us desperately. The ugly american lives!
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