Search: ' Euro 68'

Matthew Barker looks at Silvio Berlusconi's role in the Kaka saga and at what it says about Milan's diminishing status

Silvio Berlusconi broke the news during a televised phone interview that Kaka had decided not to leave Milan. “Ricky said to me, ‘there are more important things in life than just money,’” he gushed. “It’s as if we’ve won another Champions League.” If only, thought watching rossoneri fans. That the Brazilian was staying may have prompted celebrations in the Lombard capital, but the red-and-black half of the city has had little to smile about of late.

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Former star Stefano Borgonovo has motor neurone disease and, as Matthew Barker explains, some wonder if football is to blame

On October 8, a team of Fiorentina veterans played a Milan XI made up of current and former players, in a fund-raising match for Stefano Borgonovo. Now 44, Borgonovo is suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or motor neurone disease (MND), a condition that progressively paralyses the body when nerves that connect the brain to the spinal cord, and then to the muscles, die off. There is no known cause, with the majority of victims dying within two to three years of first falling ill.

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Dear WSC
I thoroughly enjoyed your blow-by-blow review of Euro 2008, noting with some reassurance that I’m not the only one driven to distraction by the so-called expert input of BBC and ITV pundits. However your assessment of the Holland-Italy game surprised me somewhat. The furious and defiant ignorance of the laws of the game displayed by Clive Tyldesley and David Pleat with respect to Ruud van Nistelrooy’s goal were surely worthy of comment, indeed arguably the most damning condemnation of their failure in their roles in providing insight and ­explanation. Instead, you bafflingly seem to support their case and argue, in effect, that an official ought to base an offside call on whether he believes a player is faking an injury or not. Actually he’d already made that call by not stopping the game to permit treatment to the Italian defender in question, who had in effect left the field without permission and thus had to be playing the Dutch striker onside. One shudders to imagine the Machiavellian tricks that some domestic managers would concoct were it possible to play an opponent offside by tumbling off the pitch in a writhing heap. Next you’ll be condemning cliched and inappropriate English attitudes to the German team alongside an anglicised spelling of “dummkopf”…
Matt Rowson, Watford

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Sven is quietly settling in as Mexico manager while his lookalike makes the headlines, says Martin del Palacio Langer

Mexico has always had stormy relations with its national-team coaches. The process is generally the same. They arrive amid great expectation and, after a few poor results, end up arguing with the press and being hated by the fans. Although the national team got through the group stage of the past four World Cup finals, no coach has lasted more than four years since Ignacio Trelles, who was in charge between 1958 and 1968.

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Joao Pinto, one of Portugal's feted 'Golden Generation' and the scourge of England in 2000, has retired. Phil Town looks back at his career

So farewell, then, João Vieira Pinto. The diminutive forward has retired at the age of 36 after a colourful career that started stratospherically, with two World Cup winner’s medals at Under-20 level nearly two decades ago. Among the highs along the way was a glorious display and hat-trick in Benfica’s 6-3 away crushing of Sporting in 1994 – for which JVP was awarded an unprecedented 10 out of 10 by sports daily A Bola – and that sublime headed goal against England at Euro 2000. The lows included an ignominious exit from Benfica in 2000 – he was considered surplus to requirements by the subsequently disgraced club president João Vale e Azevedo – and a six-month ban from football after punching referee Angel Sanchez in the defeat against South Korea in 2002, an aberration that effectively ended his international career.

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