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Today the FA charged 6 Arsenal players, 2 Manchester United players, Arsene Wenger and Arsenal as a club with various offences, following the incidents after the match between Arsenal and Man U. on Sunday. The charges are as follows:
Arsenal
1. Arsenal have been charged with misconduct for failing to ensure the proper behaviour of their players.
2. Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger has been asked to explain comments regarding Ruud van Nistelrooy made after the match
3. Ashley Cole – improper conduct
4. Martin Keown – improper conduct and violent behaviour
5. Lauren – Two counts improper conduct, and two counts of violent behaviour.
6. Jens Lehman – improper conduct
7. Ray Palour – improper conduct and violent behaviour
8. Patrick Viera – improper conduct (in addition to getting sent off)
Manchester United
1. Ryan Giggs – improper conduct
2. Cristano Ronaldo – improper conduct
All parties have 14 days to answer to the charges.
Arsenal may be docked points for their part in the fracas, as was the case in 1990, when a similar, but more severe incident occurred between the same two clubs. Gordon Taylor, the chief executive of the PFA, has warned the FA not to think of points deductions in this case, but most people believe that this will not happen. However, there is a feeling that this will happen. Gordon Taylor has said that points should be deducted until repeated warnings have been made, and possibly ignored. However, Arsenal’s disciplinary record has been scrutinized again and again, and they were non-repentant, and did nothing to improve it. Even former Arsenal players have criticized them. I was particularly disappointed in Martin Keown, with 20 years of international experience, acted like a five year old child, taunting Van Nistelrooy after he missed his penalty.
So right now, Man U. plans to fight to have the charges against their players reviewed, while Arsenal is still considering what to do, though Wenger has apologized publicly(why did he wait so long though?). The FA is planning to make the punishments process more efficient, fines don’t work against today’s super rich players, and what Arsenal will probably do is appeal against some charges in order to stagger the bans, and ensure that not all 6 players are suspended at the same time, a situation the FA does not want to happen.
I strongly suspect(and believe) that the FA should deduct points from Arsenal owing to their previous dismal disciplinary record, their arrogance and the fact that they have showed little or no remorse over this and other disciplinary incidents. And with the bans for all these players at the same time, that will mean they will find it difficult for about 3 matches or so. So I think with the competitiveness of teams like Chelsea and Liverpool, the title will be out of their grasp.
Man U did not play well on Sunday. They lacked the world class midfield play of a David Beckham or Paul Scholes. Van Nistelrooy has hit a dry patch, similar to that experienced by Michael Owen last season, evidenced by all his missed high-profile penalties. And with Solksjaer out, they will lack a top-class striker.
All this means only one thing. The premiership will be a two horse race again this season. But it won’t be the usual two teams. It will be Chelsea and Liverpool, my dark horses. Liverpool is just 3 points behind the leaders and with 3 wins in a row are gaining ground fast…………….
I rest my case.
That’s right, today Nigerians are protesting against high tarrifs from the mobile phone companies by switching off their phones. The mobile phone companies will loose millions today, as no one is making calls. Someone in my office who tried to be smart by not joining the protest, just discovered he can’t call anyone, all their phones are off !! So he’s joined us…….
I spend on average about N6000(Nigerian Naira) a month on my phone bills. This works out at about 30 (British) pounds a month. I used to spend an average of this while I was in the UK for my mobile phone, however in Nigeria this only allows me to talk for about a total of 30 minutes !! That’s right, 50 naira a minute……..which is a rip-off. In the UK, I had 1550 minutes off peak and I had to use the phone a bit to get a bill of 30 pounds……….This is plain unfair, and it’s a rip-off……plain and simple. To top it all up, the service is appalling. In the UK, if your call is dropped for any reason, and you call the same number back immediately, you get the first call for free(On Orange anyway). When I moved from the university to my uncle’s house in Liverpool, the coverage there was poor, and my calls kept getting dropped. My phone bill dropped to about 20 pounds per month, until the mobile phone sorted out the problem a few months later. And on top of all this, calls in Nigeria are charged by the minute as opposed to by the second. That means a 1 minute 1 second call and a 1 minute 59 second call cost the same.
The Nigerian governement awarded mobile phone licenses in 2001 to three companies….MTN, Econet and NITEL. MTN has now become the largest mobile phone network in Africa, as Nigerians bought over a million lines from them alone. They now have more subcribers in Nigeria, than their home country of South Africa. They make over 1 billion Naira in a day….(136 Naira to the dollar, 220 Naira to the pound).
The Nigerian government has not helped with the low tarrifs, so the people have decided to take matters in their own hands. Let’s force the prices down and improve the services.
Arsenal were outplayed, outclassed and outGUNNED.
Arsenal were left feeling black and blue, in the worst home defeat of matchday one in the champions league. (Black and blue…Inter’s colours….hahahaha)
Actually, that should be Arsenal 0 – Inter Milan 3, because Arsenal was at home !
Nigerian wonderboy striker Obafemi Martins capped a fine performance with a goal.
Need I say more ????
I just had to comment on this one.
My family has been using the Multichoice (Mnet) Satellite TV service from South Africa for over 10 years now. While it’s not the best satellite TV in the world, it’s the only option we have in Nigeria, and it’s not half bad compared to local TV. With TV shows like 24, Friends, CSI and Waking the Dead(BBC), it’s actually doing very well compared to what is available in other parts of the world. With competition on the way in the form of 21st Century Technologies Fibre Optic Cable TV, which will have largely American content, Multichoice is making efforts to improve their offerings, in what has become their largest market. Yup, even though it’s stupidly expensive, Multichoice now has more subscribers in Nigeria than in their home country of South Africa !!
Multichoice’s strengths however have always been their sports coverage. They have been offering live coverage of the Priemership for almost 8 years now. This was first offered through ESPN‘s Monday Night Football, and now via their sports channel Supersport, which now has 3 different channels.
When I got back from England earlier this year, it was nearing the end of the Premiership season. And I was amazed at what I found. I had known that we got to see more live football in Nigeria than in England, but this was ridiculous ! Supersport was showing two live matches at a time, you actually had to choose which one you wanted to see !! When Liverpool lost to Man City and West Ham beat Chelsea(last season), I actually missed all the goals because I was flicking the channels !!!
Anyway, last night, they gave us a deluge of football. An overdose. For the Champions League, we now have to choose between 4 different matches !!! Last night we had Man U v. Panathanakios, Chelsea v. Sparta, Rangers v. Stuggart and Real Madrid v. Marseille, all LIVE AT THE SAME TIME !!?!? How does a man choose? The temptation to flick the channels is strong, but I’ve discovered that the best thing is to choose one match, and stick with it. They show highlights from all the other matches at halftime and at the end of the game.
Tonight, the same thing, I have to choose between 4 live matches. THIS IS TORTURE !!!
The score is now Linux 2 – Microsoft 1, as Microsoft scores a spectacular own goal.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on Monday conceded that ‘his company is under attack from “thieves, con artists, terrorists and hackers”.’ in a speech to the Churchill Club, a gathering of Silicon Valley businesspeople in Santa Clara, California.
In response, the Redmond, Washington, software giant plans to develop new means for thwarting such attackers and aims to shut down the invasions before they wreak the havoc seen with recent viruses such as MSBlast.
To do this, they plan to work closely with security companies such as Symantec and Network Associates. With last week’s disclosures of three vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, I think this will count as an own goal in our ongoing battle on this blog, Microsoft v. Linux.
I’m trying very hard to be objective in this discussion, and since I’ve never used Linux before, I’ll need some Linux users to leave comments on this.
But the Penguin’s nose is in front…………..
Been trying to figure out for ages how to get the feedback feature on my blog, and after using the support feature on BLOGGER, they gave me some third-party tools I could use. I settled for Blogspeak, and if you look at the blog carefully, you’ll see that you can now leave feedback/comments on every post. All you need to do is place some HTML code in the blog template.
This will do one of two things. Either I will see that my blog is read by all my friends who claim they check it every day…….or I will find out quite painfully that no one reads my blog.
Which will it be?
I went to this site and found out what kind of revolutionary I was…….I was expecting a more exotic answer, but this is all I got………….
Liverpool notched up another 3 points in the race for the premiership this weekend, but the victory can only be regarded as bittersweet, as two key players left the field with broken bones, and are out till next year at least.
Milan Baros - was injured after being tackled by Markus Babbel, who ironically is on loan to Balckburn from Liverpool. The Czech striker supreme broke his ankle and has already has surgery, he had a plate inserted. Gerrad Houllier however said he did not hold Babbel responsible.
Jamie Carragher - was tackled by Lucas Neil, a two-footed tackle that was so reckless and X-rated, Neil received a straight red card. Houllier is angry with Neil and Souness, for the tackle and for not apologising immediately.
When the game had finished I wish Graeme Souness had come up to me and said ‘sorry, it was a bad tackle’,” Houllier told the Liverpool Echo.
Lucas Neil was actually angry with the ref for sending him off !! Souness waited till Monday to apologize. For a tackle to break the leg of a player wearing shin pads is crazy to say the least. Neil has been called a coward for the tackle in some sections of the media. But the irony is that while Carragher is out for 6 months at least, Neil only has to face a three match ban. Carragher has even said “I hope I’m walking again before my ten-month old son”. (How sweet!)
In a similar case in France where a player injured another with a bad tackle, which forced him out of the game for two months, the French FA banned the player responsible for the same length of time. Maybe the English FA should look at this. But then if they did, Roy Keane would not yet be playing after his no infamous, vicious (and delibrate!) tackle on Alf Inge-Halaand a couple of years ago!
But the trouble didn’t even end after the whistle ! Houllier became embroiled in a heated exchange with Blackburn’s ex-Liverpool midfielder David Thompson and with Graeme Souness during the game after Thompson seemed to aim a punch at John Arne Riise when the referee wasn’t looking. Riise needs to go and do something about this, just last week he got into a fight with John Carew while training for the NOrway game and got sent home after the scuffle (and since Riise didn’t, I guess that means he was not at fault!!).
So we won, but at a terrible price. But the battle continues……with Diouf, Heskey, Mellor and even Le Tallec available to partner Owen up front, we don’t seem to have too much of a problem. Finnan will finally be able to prove his worth after his transfer from Fulham with Carragher out for 6 months. What’s left is for Liverpool to recall Babbel from loan as cover. It’s only fair…….
The eldest sister of Venus and Serena Williams was shot dead late last night in Compton, Los Angeles. I was very surprised to find out that she has a Nigerian(Yoruba) name – Yetunde Price. ‘Yetunde’ means that ‘Mama (an elderly woman in the family) has come back’. Usually, when a female child is born shortly after an elderly woman in the family dies, the girl is named ‘Yetunde’. When an elderly man dies and a boy is born he is called ‘Babatunde’. This is a common practice in Africa, and different tribes have their own version of this. (For example, we have ‘Nnanna’ for males and ‘Nena’ for females in the Igbo tribe)
How she came to be called ‘Yetunde’, I’m not quite sure. She is the daughter or Mr. & Mrs. Williams, although she took her mother’s maiden name just before their parents bitterly divorced a few years ago. The mother of three herself has recently divorced her own husband.
Yetunde has been described as the Williams’ sisters ‘Rock’ and ‘Role Model’. Some new reports say she was ‘left in the ghetto’ while her sisters ‘lived the life’ in their Beverly Hills mansion. Some claim she has paid the ultimate price for growing up in Compton.
What is clear is that while her sisters were making millions playing tennis around the world, she was working a $7 an hour nursing job in Compton. Several times, she refused to take handouts from her sisters, deciding to pay her own way and only taking money for airline tickets when going to watch the play. Recently, she took a job as a part time Personal Assistant to her sisters, which gave her some capital to start a salon in Compton.
A man has since been arrested in the hunt for her killer.