Olympism

Football troubles never seem to end. That must be the conclusion of many of the sports most loyal fans around the world after all that has been happening over the past several months.

We have had the spectre of the FIFA elections, the so-called ‘cash for votes scandal, the seeming football demise of Austin ‘Jack’ Warner and now the unfortunate remarks made by Beleaguered FIFA President, Sepp Blatter on racist comments on the field of play. Here at home of course we have had the accusations of Bin Hammam’s money flying left, right and centre, football elections, the suspension of the General Secretary and the resignation of the technical director and head coach of the St Vincent and the Grenadines Football Federation (SVGFF).

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At the conclusion of the game against Grenada when Vincy Heat won by a 2 – 1 goal margin, a journalist briefly asked the coach his impressions about the team’s performance and whether he felt that they would be moving ahead in the 2014 World Cup Preliminaries.

One is not sure how many people listened to the coach’s comments in response. He really skirted the question. Instead he commented favourably about the youthful nature of the team with an average age of 21 years and declared that they would really come good in another four to five years time. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Vincy Heat, this country’s senior national football team takes on the might of Guatemala, a team that defeated them in the first round in the Central American country, 4 – 1. While we have not had the best of the exchanges with Central American teams except perhaps Nicaragua, the expectation is that we should give good account of ourselves before the home crowd.

Even before the first whistle is blown to start the game however the national team would have already defied the expectations of some who did not believe that we could have defeated Grenada here a few weeks ago. With the victory in the friendly the week before against the little-fancied Dominica, the team rose to the occasion and handed a strengthened Grenada team a 2 – 1 victory at Arnos Vale. Read the rest of this entry »

Jack Warner (left) and Mohamed Bin Hammam Photo: AP

Over the past several weeks the international sports community has had to contend with the issues that have emerged with the international governing body for the sport of football.

The allegations came from FIFA insider, Chuck Blazer, General Secretary of the CONCACAF, with startling revelation of possible corruption within the latter organisation. Reports indicated that Blazer was armed with affidavits in support of his claim. Blazer’s claim was that he had evidence that at a meeting of the Caribbean Football Union (CFU) in Trinidad, Bin Hammam of Qatar and Warner were involved in offering affiliates $40,000 USD to use as they deem fit, in return for their votes at the FIFA elections scheduled for 1 June 2011, for the Qatari official.

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