Below are some photos that I took of two games between African League teams. I was told that the games were friendlies and that the league itself will start next weekend. I will be returning to the league to do features on several of the teams. Check back soon for that!

Game #1

Dharee Oromo, the Ethiopian team

San Diego United, the Somali Bantu team

Game #2

Black Lions, the Southern Sudanese team

Africa United, a team with an accurate name (its players are from Congo, Nigeria, Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, Burundi, Cameroon, along with two Mexican-Americans)

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

Trust on 70-506 and MB3-208 for getting incredible online lsat classes. If you will believe on cisco dumps, 650-987 dumps and HP0-S27 dumps, it will not let you down.

Daniel Ridenhour (L) talking with locals in Uganda (photo: Daniel Ridenhour)

Daniel Ridenhour says that going to Uganda was an eye-opening experience for him personally. Having never been to the country before, he spoke with Winthrop’s two current Ugandan players, but he says, “they can tell you, but until you see it with your own eyes, it’s not what you think it’s going to be like.”

One of the first things that Ridenhour noticed upon arriving in Uganda was a very different attitude toward organization. Despite the fact that he had traveled thousands of miles, he arrived with Kampala with no “set schedule or set itinerary. You just know you’re going to watch games.”

Even appointments that were set while Ridenhour was there rarely began at the set time. When he went to see the Ugandan national team practice one day, the training session that was supposed to start at 9:00 kicked off at 11:15. The national team coach turned to him and said, “this is just Africa, it’s just how it is.”

In his two weeks in Uganda, Ridenhour spent most of his time watching high school games. Some of his time was spent looking at specific potential players for Winthrop, some doing general scouting and relationship-building. Ridenhour says that he was impressed by the skill he saw on the field – “talented, talented, talented kids” – even though the players often lacked equipment. One game he saw “half the kids [were] playing with shoes, half the kids [weren’t].” The fields were similarly lacking, and one match featured a very special pitch invader. “I literally watched one game and there were cows on the field. They’re not on the field the whole time but they’re just kind of passing through.”

Preparing for a pitch invasion (photo: Daniel Ridenhour)

Poor conditions did not damper the atmosphere at many of the games Ridenhour saw. He recalls one high school game in which 2000 students, almost literally, lined the field. “There was no net on the goal and … they were standing right on the field, a half yard off the endline behind the goalkeeper, egging him on. It was great.”

While in Uganda, Ridenhour sought to give something back to people he met. He gave clinics for local coaches and spoke with Ugandan officials who are working to put together a national coaching curriculum. Ridenhour notes that he often saw a lack of basic coaching knowledge, but no lack of enthusiasm to learn. “They were eager because they don’t get a lot of information.” Providing some information pleased Ridenhour. “It was fun to share,” he says.

Talking with local officials photo: (Daniel Ridenhour)

Ultimately, though, the purpose of Ridenhour’s trip was recruiting future players for Winthrop. Recruiting in Uganda is a difficult process, one fraught with difficulties that college coaches recruiting domestically don’t encounter. Although Division I Winthrop can offer scholarships, recruits from Uganda have to incur expenses that are prohibitive to many in the country. “They have to be able to support themselves when they get here, they have to be able to fly themselves over, basic expenses that they have to be able to afford. Being able to find out if a family can do that, that’s a hurdle unto itself because there aren’t a lot of families that can do that.” Daniel Ridenhour says he knows of examples of players whose expenses are being paid by a whole village in the hope that they will return and better the lives of villagers.

Then there is the potential hurdle of recruits getting student visas to enter the US. Winthrop has recruited players in the past, only to find out that their visa application has been denied by the American embassy. The process can be frustrating for all involved, says Ridenhour, but it is completely out of their hands and just one of the many hurdles involved in recruiting Ugandan players.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is the matter of ensuring that potential student-athletes have the academic and sporting talents to succeed. Given the unique system in which sports are intertwined with American colleges and universities, coaches looking for players overseas have to keep in mind the full range of talents that potential recruits possess. In Uganda, Ridenhour says, there are “a lot of kids who, academically, can’t cut it, but athletically can. And there are probably quite a few kids who can do it academically, but not athletically.” Finding those who can succeed on the field as well as in the classroom is one of the biggest challenges Ridenhour faced on his trip to Uganda.

The two Ugandans currently playing for Winthrop have succeeded on and off the field at the South Carolina school. Ridenhour describes Stephen Nsereko, who has represented Uganda at the under-20 level, as a “fantastic little attacking midfielder” with a “big heart.” Defender Henry Kalungi has played in every position across the back for Winthrop. With both players, Ridenhour says, “you put them wherever and they’re going to perform the job.”

In the classroom as well, Nsereko and Kalungi have both excelled at Winthrop. “They’re here to do two things: they’re here to study and they’re here to play. And they’ll tell you that. They’ll say, ‘Coach, grades and football, grades and football.’ This is all they worry about.”

Henry Kalguni (#4) and Stephen Neserko (#5) in action for Winthrop (photo: WInthrop University/Rich Posipanko)

Ridenhour sees another benefit to having Ugandan players on the campus of Winthrop University. Their presence and their life experience can provide a unique perspective to the American students. Ridenhour believes that Winthrop’s Ugandan players can also help to open up the eyes of Winthrop students. He tells me that Nsereko and Kalungi “bring a different perspective, a global perspective that not a lot of kids have.” It’s that perspective, combined with their on-field talents, that has made the many Ugandans who have studied and played at Winthrop University over the years such a success.

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

Incredible online toefl test, 70-505 certification training programs & MB3-207 help you in pass ccnp wireless dumps. We offer best quality 650-369 dumps and 646-230 dumps for your success.

After the 2006 World Cup, Sanchez got his wish and was named national team boss. He stuck with his promise not to select naturalized players until earlier this year when he called up one of Lavolpe’s favorites, Antonio Naelson. Sanchez retreated from his previous statements and relied on the same constitutional rationale that Chivas officials recently employed to justify Jesus Padilla’s spot on their team. “The doors are open for all Mexicans, and the constitution says that they are Mexican,” said Sanchez.

Hugo Sanchez has not been as revolutionary as he promised to be (Photo: FMSite.net)

Hugo Sanchez has a completely different set of problems today. As boss of the Olympic team, he recently failed to get out of a qualifying group that also included world heavyweights such as Canada, Guatemala, and Haiti. The cases of Chivas and the Mexican national team indicate that Mexico is a country currently working to define what it means to be Mexican.

Halfway across the globe, Qatar’s oil wealth has, for years, allowed its clubs to bring in talented foreign players (admittedly, slightly past the peaks of their careers). Gabriel Batistuta, Frank Leboeuf, Jay-Jay Okocha, and Romario have all spent at least some time in the Q-League. Despite these big names playing in the domestic league, the Qatari national team has achieved very little.

Recently, Qatar has begun to naturalize foreign players so that they can represent the country’s national team. This might seem to be controversial, but unlike in Mexico, there has been very little criticism of Uruguayan-born boss Jorge Fossati. Why is this the case? Just as in Mexico, political economy largely explains this phenomenon. Critiques of using foreign-born players (of Mexican descent or otherwise) in Mexico are rooted in a conception of Mexican identity originally promoted by Jose Vasconcelos, and shifts in this conception are now occurring largely because of the economic situation that has led to large numbers of Mexicans living outside of the country. In Qatar, foreign workers are an integral part of the country’s development. In a country accustomed to this reality, non-Qatari born soccer players representing the national team may not be such an, um, foreign idea.

Jorge Fossati is named Qatari national team boss in 2007 (Photo: FIFA/AFP/Karim Jaafar)

Like many countries in the Middle East, Qatar has, in recent years, brought in thousands of foreign workers. The US State Department reports that foreign workers are 52% of Qatar’s population and 89% of its labor force. In addition to native Qataris, Indians make up 20%, Filipinos and Nepalis 10% each, Pakistanis 7%, and Sri Lankans 5% of the 900,000 population of the gulf state. Foreign workers are employed in many industries and are the labor engine that is firing Qatar’s economy.

With half of the population made up of foreigners, Jorge Fossati has a limited pool from which to name his squad. He told FIFA last month, “You mustn’t forget that this is a country with a population of only 250,000, which makes it very hard to select a national team using only players born and bred here.” Just as bosses of Qatari industry have done, Fossati has looked for labor abroad. Michael Cockerill wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald last month of this plan:

After a string of frustrating failures at both World Cup and Asian Cup level, it dawned on the Qatari authorities that they were always going to struggle to make a splash in international football unless something radical was done. There are roughly 850,000 people in Qatar. Only one quarter of them are actually Qatari citizens, and only half again are male. To create a competitive national team out of such a limited talent pool was clearly a pipe dream. So Qatar began “buying” players from Africa, South America and other parts of Asia who hadn’t yet played for their own national teams. By accepting the lure of tax-free petro-dollars in the Q-League, they had to also declare their allegiance to the Qatar national team. For most, it was a no-brainer.

Qatar’s earlier attempts to lure relatively high-profile players such as Ailton and Dede to represent their national with promises of cash were shot down by FIFA. Instead of giving up on the idea of naturalizing foreign players to make them eligible for their national team, the Qataris simply looked for lower profile players. In a thread snarkily titled International Gathering of Failed Foreign Players in Qatar aka Qatari National Team, on the aliraqi.org message boards, user Al-Kazwami has detailed the foreigner players (and their country of origin) who have represented the gulf nation recently. They include Lawrence (Ghana), Wissam Rizk (Palestine), Talal Al-Belushi (Kuwait), Mujeeb Hameed (Sudan), Qassim Burhan (Sudan), Ali Mejbel Fartous (Iraq), Majdi Sidiq (Sudan), Ali Nassir (Yemen), Hussein Yasser (Egypt), Majeed Mohammad (Sudan), Sebastian Soria (Uruguay), Abdulah Koni (Senegal), Mohammad Saqr (Senegal), Fabio César Montazine (Brazil), and Marconi Amaral (Uruguay).

Qatar’s Uruguayan-born forward Sebastian Soria, in white (Photo: FIFA/AFP)

That this gaggle of foreign players representing Qatar has not caused more of an uproar in the gulf nation is not unconnected from the number of foreign workers in the country. Qataris accustomed to foreigners working in industries seem content to let them move into the sporting arena. The contrast with Mexico – a country with little history of immigration– is clear, and it is no surprise that bringing in foreign players for El Tricolor is more controversial. The controversy in Mexico is coming as a result of the high levels of emigration and the increasing number of talented foreign-born Mexicans like Jesus Padilla has forced Chivas to change its “Mexicans born in Mexico only” policy. Indeed, Hugo Sanchez and future Mexican national team bosses may begin to field more and more American-born Mexicans (New Mexico-born Edgar Castillo was part of the unsuccessful U-23 team). The team selections of Chivas, El Tricolor, and the Qatari national team are being drastically affected by global political economics.

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

Remarkable online 70-620 and MB5-199 training programs will lead you to success in the CISSP dumps. We also offer latest ccent dumps and HP2-Z07 dumps with 100% success guarantee.

Hilarious parody from Oz City Soccer

While Fulham’s expats are relatively high profile, there are many Americans playing abroad who are anything but. It’s a truly dedicated fan who knows Eric Lichaj of Aston Villa, Michael Enfield of Sydney FC in Australia or Tighe Dombrowski of IK Sirius in Sweden.

But while teams abroad are snapping up American players (among other reasons, the falling value of the dollar makes them a good bargain), they appear reluctant to look at American coaches. Only one native-born American coach has held a major job abroad (Steve Sampson, who was in charge of Costa Rica’s national team from 2002 – 2004). Scouring the depths of my brain and the Internet for examples of American coaches who have worked abroad was only able to come up with three, all of whom are naturalized Americans born in other countries.

Last week, Martin Vasquez’s career got a bit of a jump. Until then, the 44 year-old was an assistant coach for MLS’s Chivas USA. But then, Jürgen Klinsmann, who will take over from Ottmar Hitzfeld as Bayern Munich manager next season, announced that he will bring Vasquez across the Atlantic with him as his number two man. It will be quite a responsibility for Vasquez, especially if Klinsmann takes the type of hands-off approach he did during his time with the German national team, when many credited his assistant (and now head coach) Joachim Löw with being the driving force behind the country’s resurgence.

Martin Vasquez (photo: Juan Miranda/Chivas USA/Soccer America)

Klinsmann knows Vasquez from his time in Southern California. In a statement, the German legend said, “I’ve known Martin since 2003 when he was training at an elite football camp in the United States. I was impressed by his positive leadership style and I recommended him to LA Galaxy.” Vasquez was a Galaxy assistant for one season before moving to LA rivals Chivas USA. That move was nowhere near as big as his upcoming switch to Munich.Vasquez does not lack experience crossing borders. Born in Mexico, he moved to LA at age 12. Vasquez played college soccer at UCLA before returning to Mexico to begin his pro career. He played for several teams in Mexico and even earned a spot on the Mexican national team, playing for El Tri several times in the early 1990s. Vasquez returned to the US in 1996 to join the fledgling MLS. His play for the now-defunct Tampa Bay Mutiny and the soon-to-be revived San Jose Clash (known today as the Earthquakes) earned him a call-up from then US national team boss Steve Sampson (he was eligible having only played in friendlies for Mexico), where Vasquez eventually earned 7 caps.

Another coach making his name abroad is Iranian-American Afshin Ghotbi. Born in the Iranian city of Jahrom, Ghotbi remained in his homeland until just prior to the Iranian revolution, when his familiy left for the Los Angeles area, home to a large Iranian expat community. He continued to play soccer and like Martin Vasquez was a member of UCLA’s college team (in fact, given their similar ages, they would likely have been teammates there).

Afshin Ghotbi during his time with the Korean national team (photo: Soccerphile)

After his college career, Ghotbi was involved with youth soccer in Southern California. He coached several professional players in their formative years, including John O’Brien, who went to Ajax in part on Ghotbi’s recommendation. Ghotbi worked as a coach for the US national team, then spent time with the LA Galaxy before using his connections to Holland to get a job as an assistant to Guus Hiddink during his time coaching Korea at the 2002 World Cup.

Ghotbi’s biggest move, though, came last year when he returned to his homeland to take over Tehran giants Persepolis. Given the state of relations between his homeland and adopted country, Ghotbi was worried what reaction his return might bring, but he was welcomed with open arms. He has had tremendous success with his club team and has been talked up as a future Iranian national team manager.

The third and final American manager to have worked abroad is Alketas Panagoulias. Born in Thessaloniki, Greece, Panagoulias moved to the US to do university studies. While in New York, he became involved with the Greek American Atlas Soccer Club, serving as the team’s coach. At a time of little professional soccer in the US, Pangoulias’ amateur team won three consecutive US Open Cup (the American version of the FA Cup) titles from 1967-1969.

Panagoulias returned to Greece in 1972 to serve as an assistant coach for the national team. He was promoted to the head coaching position in 1973, and remained in that job until 1981. He took over Greek giants Olympiakos and led the team to the Greek title in 1982 and 1983. In 1984, he returned to the US to coach the Olympic team in the Los Angeles games. From there, he became the senior national team manager.

Panagoulias returned to his homeland in the late 1980s, coaching Olympiakos again and Aris FC. In 1992, he was appointed to a second spell as national team boss. Panagoulias led the team to its one of its greatest ever moments, qualifying for the 1994 World Cup in the USA.

Alketas Panagoulias (photo: View Images)

Why have there been so few American coaches abroad? My guess is that there remains a stigma against them, left over from the decades in which American soccer was a laughing stock. Although American players have become desirable for teams abroad, American coaches have not found work abroad easy to come by at all. Bruce Arena, the most successful American coach of all time whose greatest accomplishment was guiding the US national team to the quarterfinals of the 2002 World Cup, desperately tried to throw his hat into the ring for the Scotland job recently, but to no avail.

This is perhaps not surprising, as many more European coaches have gone to traditionally less powerful countries to play their trade than vice versa (of the 16 teams in African Cup of Nations, only four are African, though the World Cup Blog expresses some hope that this may change in the future). Even South American countries, who, given the players they produce, know a thing or two about their job, have found it tough to break into Europe (the most notable failure of recent times being Wanderlei Luxemburgo at Real Madrid).

For now, it seems, the only Americans able to break into the coaching ranks overseas are those whose foreign birth gives them a degree of street-cred that native-born coaches lack. Only time will tell if American coaches can become as desirable as the players they are increasingly producing.

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

Our 70-513, MB3-214 & comptia dumps include the latest set of 1Y0-A19 dumps practice questions. Beside 650-297 dumps is 100% guarantee for victory as well.

Peter Lupson’s book Thank God for Football! explores the religious backgrounds of many top English club teams (of the 38 teams that have played in the Premier League since its inception in 1992, 12 have their origins in churches). Churches that founded teams often did so for reasons other than pure love of soccer. David Goldblatt, in his history of world soccer called The Ball is Round, has written of the importance of so-called muscular Christianity in shaping early English football. He writes that “the Victorians were quite convinced of the relationship between physical, mental, and moral health” (27).

Drawings of the first international between England and Scotland in 1872 show some of the virtues of the burgeoning British style (photo: Wikipedia)

Lupson told the EPL Talk podcast last year that churches sought to instill 4 elements of character into their football-playing parishioners: courage, fair play, team spirit, and self-control (20:50). Such qualities are still seen today in the English game. Post-game press conferences with English managers almost always focus on at least one of these elements (Stuart Pearce is my personal favorite, rattling on and on about team spirit but with seemingly little concern for tactics and the like).

As soccer spread around the world, diverse styles of play developed that barely resembled the game played in England. In South America, short passing replaced the long ball made popular in England. In Argentina, this style was offered referred to as criollo. David Goldblatt writes that “criollo football and masculinity came to be defined in opposition to the English” who had brought the game to Argentina, and whose economic system was fundamental in shaping the country’s style of play.

The English were focused and disciplined, combining collective organization and physical force – the prerequisites of an industrial labour force turning out an industrial product. On the Rio de la Plata where industrialization had yet to completely stamp its imprint on the economy, landscape or rhythms of life, masculinity was more restless, impetuous and individualistic, spurning crude force in favor of virtuoso agility (204).

This “virtuoso agility” is still seen today in Argentine soccer. Marcela Mora y Araujo has written of the gambeta, which 1986 World Cup winner Jorge Valdano told her has two elements: “The first is ability: to show that I, with my foot, have the skill to do anything; the second is feinting, I have to deceive my opponent, make him believe exactly the opposite of what I’m going to do. This is also very Argentinian, the taste for deceit.”

Maradona gets his gambeta on in 1986 against England (photo: Telegraph)

Not surprisingly, given its proximity, Brazil developed a style in many ways similar to that of the Argentines, complete with intricate short passing and elaborate dribbling. Tim Vickery, South American correspondent for BBC, The World Game, Sports Illustrated, and World Soccer magazine, told me that “[soccer] was reinterpreted by the South American masses from a game of straight running, muscular Christianity to a much more balletic thing full of twists and turns.”

Alex Bellos, author of Futebol: Soccer the Brazilian Way, offers several suggestions as to how the “Brazilian” style has developed. The incredible technique that typifies Brazilian players may have come from the “informal kickabouts” in which a bundle of socks often substitutes for a ball would lead “their ball skills to be more highly developed and inventive” (34).

“Alternatively,” writes Bellos, “one could explain the flashy individualism by pointing to the national trait of showing off in public.” Tim Vickery concurs with this explanation. He offered me an example: “Say I’ve got the ball and you come and tackle me and I do a little shimmy and you fall on your backside. Even if that move serves no objective purpose and you’re on your feet instantly, I’ve made you look ridiculous, for that one little instant I have humiliated you. And that is the moment that will most get the Brazilian public up.”

Alex Bellos offers a couple of other possible explanations for how the Brazilian style has developed. It may have had to do with race relations, he writes.

Some historians have suggested that reliance on the dribble evolved because of the racism of the game’s formative years. They say that the style was created by black players who improvised artfulness as a way of self-protection against whites. If you were a black, you would not want to have physical contact with a white player, since this could end in retaliation. Blacks had to use guile rather than force to keep the ball. (35)

Or perhaps, Bellos suggests, the Brazilian martial art of capoeira played a part in developed the country’s soccer style. He suggests that the “hip-swinging body language used by a capoeirista is very similar to samba dancers and Brazilian dribblers” (35).

The Netherlands is another country with a unique style of play. The Total Football style of the 1970s, in particular, was unlike anything ever seen (and though not explicitly employed today, remnants of its influence remain). David Winner, in his book Brilliant Orange, claims that this style has much to do with Dutch conceptions of space.

Space is the unique defining element of Dutch football. Other nations and football cultures may have produced greater goalscorers, more dazzling individual ball-artists, and more dependable and efficient tournament-winning teams. But no one has ever imagined or structured their play as abstractly, as architecturally, in such a measured fashion as the Dutch. (44)

Winner claims that Total Football exemplifies the Dutch conception of space. It was “a conceptual revolution based on the idea that the size of any football field was flexible and could be altered by the team playing on it” (44).

Of course, the size of a football field is not flexible, Winner attributes this mentality to the land the Dutch have been given. A small, low-lying country with a long sea coast and a relatively large population, the Dutch have in fact expanded their land through the use of polders and other elaborate water control measures. Winner sees spillover of Dutch attitudes toward land into Dutch soccer. He calls the Dutch “spatial neurotics” and says that “the Dutch think innovatively, creatively and abstractly about space in their football because for centuries they have had to think innovatively about space in every other area of their lives” (47).

A Dutch goalkeeper ponders his country’s water reclamation projects (photo: Roberta on the Arts)

In 2000, I studied in Japan. At the time, Frenchman (and recent convert to Islam) Phillipe Troussier was coach of that country’s national team. The team had long used an all-action, team game (like that of the Koreans in the 2002 World Cup).

A constant refrain from Troussier, though, was that his team was too nice, too polite, too afraid to really mix it up. Japan’s style of play was too team-oriented, as were his individual players, and he told the BBC that “the Japanese are very organised.”

Even in their free time they need organisation. I gave them a day off and they all want to do the same thing. They take the same photographs, eat in the same restaurant. I had to close the hotel restaurant and told them to go out and do different things.

Troussier’s attempts to change the Japanese style of play ran up against the deeply-held value of group unity.

Troussier also constantly railed that his players weren’t tough enough. Again, what Troussier saw as a lack of toughness may have been a manifestation of the value Japanese place on harmony. Being tough is not encouraged in Japanese society the way it is in Europe, and Troussier saw his role as imposing this toughness on his players. In 2000, he told Sebastian Moffett of the International Herald Tribune that “the younger Japanese players are maybe better than Europeans in technical areas. My challenge is to prepare the players for world football — to play against aggressive foreign sides.”

Phillipe Troussier works on scaring his players into being tougher (photo: BBC)

If this last example is staring to sound like national stereotypes transformed into ideas about styles of play, it’s because it is just that. And it’s far from the only such example. One hears constantly about Germany’s Teutonic efficiency, Italian players’ sneakiness and diving, and many other examples that are nothing more than simple stereotypes put in the context of soccer. These stereotypes can at times come across negatively, especially when reference is made to African teams’ lack of discipline. Grant Wahl of Sports Illustrated has written: “[I]t sometimes strikes me as a veiled form of racism (especially when a European journalist asks an African coach if his team’s “lack of discipline is a reflection of the national character,” which actually happened during the 1996 Olympics.)”

Today, the traditional styles of play that have typified footballing nations for years are less pronounced than in the past. With more and more players and coaches crossing borders and games being broadcast across the globe, it’s often hard to pinpoint a style as coming from one country. David Winner wrote in March of last year that Arsenal – a team based in London but coached by a Frenchman and who rarely feature an Englishman in their lineup – are the only team that best typify Total Football today. But Arsenal are different, a team that actually seeks to play with style. Most are content to play with whatever style (or lack thereof) will win them the next match.

As an American, I have often thought about whether there is an “American style.” As a country of immigrants, it would make sense for our style to reflect the people who have come to the United States. But for most of our soccer history, I don’t think this has been the case. The historical soccer connections between the US and the UK have meant that American soccer has often been more British in its style than anything else. That may be changing today, though, especially with the influx of immigrants from Latin America.

Jay Martin, longtime men’s soccer coach of Ohio Wesleyan University, laments the fact that for too long American soccer has not had its own identity, but has simply sought to replicate that of other countries. He hopes to see the development of an American style, as he wrote in an article for the National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) in 2006.

The fact is we are Americans. We are not Brazilians, Germans, Dutch or French. We cannot play the style of those countries. It is simply not possible. We cannot replicate the Brazilian culture and society. These factors influence — no, dictate — how the Brazilians play. Social, economic, political and cultural forces directly impact how any national team plays. Nor can we replicate the club systems of England and Germany or the youth system of France and Holland.

American soccer is unique. America is unique. We can and should learn from other soccer nations, but we should develop and play an American style. There is no question that there is a great deal to learn from other soccer-playing nations. We should, however, take these lessons and use them in the context of an American style.

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

Get best 70-518 questions and answers product easily here beside MB3-230. In addition hp dumps, 646-223 dumps and 650-393 dumps is made available for your comfort.
So, my fellow gringos (and others), what do you think? Is there an American style of play? If so, what is it? Because frankly, I don’t have an answer to that question.

Steve Menary (photo: Play the Game)

How did you get the idea to write Outcasts?

I’m just a self-employed freelance journalist. There’s no career structure: you write an article and then you write another one and then you write another one and it goes on. I wrote an article about football in the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man and Jersey, and why they didn’t play international football. When I’d done that, I thought, “this is quite an interesting idea and no one’s ever written about this.”

Not everyone who applies to FIFA can get in or there would be the FA of David Keyes [ed note – not a bad idea!] and anyone could join. When I looked into it, they had turned some places down. FIFA would admit they turned someone down if I could find them out, but I asked them many times for a list of people who they’ve rejected and they would just ignore me.

I wrote a few chapters and I realized there were a few things like the Island Games … that I could go to and I could meet Greenland. They don’t even play in Greenland anyway and the flight there would have been about 1,000 pounds. The Falklands would have been about 2,000 pounds. But I realized I could go to the [2005 Island Games in the] Shetlands and I could see these people.

Shetland’s Steven Umphray during the Saaremma vs. Shetland match (photo: Shetland Islands Council / Steve Lindridge / www.idealimages.co.uk)

I sent it out to some big publishers and they said, “It’s very good, but we don’t know how much we’ll sell.” The publishers were okay, they gave me pretty encouraging rejections, if there is such a thing.

I knew David Conn and he said, “Why don’t you try to get in touch with World Soccer?”So I had a chat with [World Soccer’s] Gavin Hamilton and he said to me, “Come along, write something for us [on a non-FIFA “country”] each month.” World Soccer paid me fairly and he said, “If you get a book deal, don’t worry about [the rights]. It’s fine.” So that meant, for about a year, I could carry on researching the book. Each month I’d do an article [for the non-FIFA section] and I’d amass so much information, more than I could fit in a 500-word article. Then I found a smaller publisher after that, Know the Score.

Tell me more about the research you did for the book. Did you do it mostly at tournaments?

Yeah, I realized that the Greenland and the Falklands were good stories. I decided I was only going to do a chapter on a team if I could go see them play, meet with them in person, or have substantial dealings with them on the phone or by email. It’s very easy in this day and age to go on the Internet and cobble something together, but I just thought that was a cop-out. That was a quality control I set for myself.

I didn’t go to the Northern Marianas, which you probably guessed. The guys there, Vince [Stravino] and Peter [Coleman], were fantastically helpful. We exchanged a lot of calls and emails.

But I pretty much met [everyone else]. I went to the Island Games, I went to that tournament on the Isle of Man, I went to Gibraltar, I went to the Wild Cup in Hamburg, I went to the Occitania vs. Cyprus game, I took the whole family down to Montpellier. I went to a couple of NF Board meetings, one in London and one in the Hague.

Northern Cyprus and Zanzibar face off in the 2006 FIFI Wild Cup final (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

I went to the [2006 ELF Cup in] Northern Cyprus, which was a great bonus. They wanted to invite some journalists out there and they invited me and the guy who did the photographs for the book. That was great because the problem was the cost. I could have blown the advance I got for the book just going to the Falklands. You kind of had to have an imaginative way.

I also got some commissions. I did a thing for Guardian Unlimited about the Sami Cup. The great thing about that is that I’m in the journalist union and I was flipping through the magazine. There was a little ad in the bottom corner that caught my eye. It said that the Norwegian Embassy in London funds journalists’ trips to Norway. At the time I was thinking, “How am I going to get to Lapland? I’m never to be able to find another magazine to pay me to go up there.” I got in touch with a guy at the Norwegian Embassy and he said, “Right, when do you want to go?”

I had to make each thing pay. I wasn’t going to lose money going anywhere. It was more fun that way anyway.

Do you have an overall goal for the book?

I kind of wanted to try and look at how nationality is defined on the football pitch. I come from the UK and to most other places, it’s Great Britian. To us, we’re all English or Scottish or Welsh or from Northern Ireland. I live in a place that isn’t a country to the rest of the world, but it’s a country to us. In terms of football and rugby union, it’s a country.

I knew that I’d end up asking more questions than I answered. But I thought maybe it would just be a way of exploring it and writing something that will make people think in the way it made me think.

What are some of the questions you think you’ve asked?

I suppose, what is nationality? What is that, really? The Tibetian [player Karma Samdup] said: “It’s just a passport and you travel on that passport.” Or the Greenlanders. To them, [Greenland] is a place, [it’s] a country. It’s almost the same as the Faroes, who are in FIFA. There are certainly anomalies and there’s so much madness. It’s all about politics at the end of the day as much as anything else. There’s that idea that sport and politics shouldn’t mix. But clearly, they’re tightly intertwined.

Would you like to see the countries you profiled get into FIFA?

When I started telling people I was doing the book, they all kind of thought I was writing some kind of manifesto. I was never doing that. You couldn’t conceivably have the Falklands playing against Argentina even if [FIFA] let them in, which they never would. It would be ludicrous.

I think some of the places need more help than others. Certainly, Greenland deserves more sympathy than others because it’s been practically abandoned. They couldn’t go [to the Island Games last year] because they didn’t have the money to send the men’s and the women’s team and they thought it was about time the women got to go. They had played in every Island Games since 1989, but they had no money so they said, “Right, let’s let the women go” and [the men] stayed home. That seems madness really.

Greenland (in red) and Zanzibar face off in the 2006 FIFI Wild Cup (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

I don’t think they can all go in, but some of them, like Greenland and Gibraltar, they only want to play amateur football. They don’t want to play in the World Cup qualifiers; they don’t want to play in the Champions League. That was never really their ambition. I think they just wanted some help with the football they were organizing and they weren’t getting any.

Did you ever feel like you were ever covering teams that were too amateurish to warrant your covering them?

Some of the things with the NF Board were more about making a statement. A Lapland journalist, for example, told me that, in his opinion, a West Papuan team had no intention of ever turning up [to the 2006 Viva World Cup]. That was a bit amateurish.

And the Sami team that went out there murdered everyone because they had a lot of good players. They had people who had played international football at the under-21 level. So yeah, some of those teams, you feel, there’s got to be a real team, there’s got to be some basis to it rather than just a political stunt. Some of the teams didn’t have enough substance, but maybe if they got going long enough, they would have some substance.

Clearly, these teams aren’t going to win the World Cup. What, then, do you see as the value of your book?

They’re not going to win the World Cup, that’s true. But if you take some of the teams that are in FIFA, say Luxembourg. It’s 300,000 people, they’re not going to win the World Cup. I think they won a competitive match last year for the first time in 10 years. But they’ve been playing a long, long time. Luxembroug played in the early Olympic games. I think in the mid-1960s they knocked Holland out of the European Championships when it was a two-legged tie. Every dog has its day.

The nature of competition is that someone’s going to win and someone’s going to be last. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing golf or if you’re playing football. Someone’s got to be Arsenal and someone’s got to be Derby, and that’s just the nature of it. But you can’t go around and say, “Derby are really crap so let’s drop them” because maybe next year Derby will be better.

I think if you give people a chance, there’s a chance they’ll improve. I think if you cut them off, which is what’s been done to some of these places, then [the level of play] will just dissipate.

Who were some of the most interesting people you met while working on Outcasts?

I think some of the NF Board people. They’re very interesting. [President] Jean-Luc [Kit] is a very interesting guy. The Sami guy, Leif Isak Nilut, too, when he’s up on stage doing one of his yoiks.

President of the Sami FA, Leif Isak Nilut, in traditional clothing (photo: NRK.no)

And some of the Greenlandic people, too. It’s quite a harsh world out there. There are 15 kilometers of road in the capital and none of them go anywhere.

Probably the best thing about the book was that I met a lot of really interesting people and everyone was really interested in talking to [me]. That was one of the joys of doing the book. [I’d] ring someone up and they’d say, “Yeah, I’d love to speak to you.” The response from people was fantastic.

Do you see potential for change on FIFA’s part in terms of which countries they’ll let in?

UEFA have taken a reasonable stance and said, “You’ve got to be in the UN.” Whereas FIFA have just said, “You’ve got to be in the international community.” They don’t say what international community. It’s whatever international community they want it to be.

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

It has become fashion to use 70-551, MB3-528 product and pmi dumps study guide. So don’t be shy while preparing from 640-864 dumps and 642-982 dumps.

The Tibetan national team (photo: Kaos Pilot)

FIFA likes to promote the fact that it has more members than the UN. The international governing body of soccer got to its current level of 208 members (compared to 192 who belong to the UN) by various means, as Menary explains. Being the birthplace of soccer gives England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland separate teams. Chinese Taipei represents the island of Taiwan, and has since 1954 (the mainland Chinese team, like the country itself, was, for many years, an international pariah, and only joined FIFA in 1979). More recently, there has been a boom in FIFA membership, as some regional confederations with, as Menary dryly puts it, a “far looser idea of what constitutes a ‘nation’ than others” brought new members into the fold in a bid to boost their influence in the world governing body. CONCACAF has used this strategy most often, adding Arbua, the Turks & Caicos Island, and Anguilla among others to their ranks. Oceania boasts such powers as New Caledonia, Tahiti, and American Samoa. These three “countries” are not in fact independent. The first two are French territories, the latter an American possession. But they were let into FIFA in an earlier era. Today, becoming a new member of the club is a far more difficult proposition (only newly-independent countries such as Montenegro have achieved this goal in the past few years). But the fact that FIFA’s many non-independent nations have maintained their membership makes a mockery of the current argument that new members must be members of the international community (how exactly FIFA defined this is unclear, as Menary points out). Some of the teams have been rebuffed because they are technically parts of other countries that do have FIFA membership. In this category are Greenland, the Channel Islands, the Falklands, and Zanzibar, and the Sapmi people of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. For some countries, their entry into FIFA is too politically sensitive for the supposedly apolitical governing body to countenance. The national teams of Tibet, Northern Cyprus and Gibraltar have seen their progress hampered by larger countries with a political interest in the territories. When Greenland scheduled a match with Tibet, the Chinese government threatened to put an embargo on the Danish territory’s exports of shrimp to China. The match was called off. (In reality, FIFA is hardly apolitical. Menary describes their 1994 decision to give membership to Palestine as “a blatantly political act for a non-political organization.”) Then there are teams that Menary covers whose existence is an oddity at best. The Occitànian team is made up of speakers of the language of the same name, most of whom live in France, Spain, and Italy. The players who represent the Northern Marianas Islands, and whom Menary describes as “football missionaries” are mostly American expat “soccer dads.” In a game against neighbor Guam, the Northern Marianas team put out a team with a14 year-old and a teammate who, at 48 years old, could have been his grandfather. It’s easy to laugh off players and teams whose sole ambition is not to win, nor even qualify for the World Cup, but instead just to play in officially sanctioned matches. But all share the same dedication and work ethic as the players who lift the World Cup trophy every four years. Menary’s empathetic writing draws us into the world of Niklas Kreutzmann, Greenland’s captain and a dental student who would not let down his coach by missing a tournament that occurred just before his exams, and spent all his free time in between matches and training in his hotel room studying. Or Zanzibar goalkeeper Salum Ali Salum, who “has to be carried from the pitch crying uncontrollably” after his team loses a match in a penalty shootout. For these two players, as with nearly everyone Menary documents in Outcasts, the struggle to play international soccer is a task to which they have dedicated extraordinary effort.

Greenland (in red) and Zanzibar face off in the FIFI Wild Cup (photo: FIFI/Corbis)

The book is not without its faults. Many of the chapters were written as stand-alone pieces, and the book has a slightly pasted-together feel. And Menary’s decision to write about so many teams means that some of the more compelling stories are given short shrift. But overall, Outcasts is a wonderful addition to the increasingly homogenized diet of soccer writing being produced today. In an era in which so much soccer journalism simply repeats the latest result, transfer rumor, or Joey Barton arrest, the unique stories that Steve Menary writes about in Outcasts are a rare treat. Outcasts: The Lands That FIFA Forgot is published by Know the Score Books and is available from their website or Amazon.

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

Whether you want to take 70-511 or looking for MB3-209, our cissp dumps can provide guaranteed success in real exam. 350-050 braindumps and 70-648 dumps also have unique sense. Find here best usmle books.

Students involved with Grassroot Soccer (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Leah Bellow-Handelman grew up in New York City. It was a bit of a shock for her, then, when she went to college in rural Ohio at Oberlin College. That shock, though, was nowhere near what she experienced when she graduated and headed off to South Africa to begin working at Grassroot Soccer. Grassroot Soccer (GRS) was founded in 2002 by Tommy Clark, son of Bobby Clark, current Notre Dame men’s coach and former Scotland international. Tommy had played professionally in Zimbabwe before returning to the US to get his medical degree. But Africa one of Africa’s most vexing problems – HIV/AIDS – drew him back, determined to use the sport he loved to fight the disease. He gave GRS its motto: “using the power of soccer in the fight against AIDS.” Since its founding, Grassroot Soccer has grown enormously in stature. On a recent visit to Africa, Bill Clinton visited a GRS program in Zambia.

Slick Willie in Zambia (photo: WinMcNamee / Getty Images / Grassroot Soccer)

Leah Bellow-Handelman first heard about GRS from a friend of a friend who had worked for the organization. A player at Oberlin who majored in Politics and African-American Studies, she had become interested in public health in Africa. What better way, Bellow-Handelman thought, to combine her interests than to work for GRS?

Since arriving in South Africa in September, she has been participating in various aspects of GRS’ work. The primary goal of GRS is to provide education and awareness about HIV/AIDS and how to prevent the disease. It is a massive task. Bellow-Handelman says that, when asked on a quiz if they can avoid getting HIV/AIDS, many children in South Africa believe they cannot. Her job, then, is to show them how they can avoid the deadly diseases. And her entrée into their lives is something they love: soccer. “Anytime [kids] see a soccer ball,” she says, “they want to play, they want to talk to you.”

Bellow-Handelman works on various projects at Grassroot Soccer. She spends a lot of time in schools, playing games that incorporate soccer and HIV/AIDS awareness. One game called “Risk Field” has students dribble a ball around cones, each of which represent a risk of exposure to HIV/AIDS. Another game is called “Find the Ball” and it involves students standing in a line and hiding tennis balls behind their backs while a classmate has to guess which players are holding balls. The balls are intended to represent HIV/AIDS and the premise behind the game, Bellow-Handelman says, is “you can’t tell who has HIV/AIDS by looking” at them.

South African students participate in a Grassroot Soccer game (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Recently, she has begun organizing a “Street Football League.” Bellow-Handelman says that this project takes advantage of South African’s children natural proclivity to play soccer everywhere possible (“driving through the townships,” she says, there are “kids playing on every street corner”). Right now, it happens once a week and begins with 45 minutes of Grassroot Soccer HIV/AIDS awareness games and then a street soccer game with whoever has shown up. The project has been quite successful, Bellow-Handelman says. “It’s really incredible to see. We show up and there are ten kids. Within ten minutes, they see cones and a soccer ball and there are swarms of sixty, seventy, eighty kids.”

Soccer, Bellow-Handelman has found out, is her way to connect with South African children. When they get over their initial shock of seeing a white woman playing soccer (something she says is “fairly shocking” to South African kids), many come to talk with her. “There are constantly kids coming to the office to borrow a soccer ball. They don’t really speak English and we just juggle with them for hours. There’s a way to communicate with them through soccer and through sport.”

Children play street soccer (photo: Grassroot Soccer)

Of course, the soccer is the tool that GRS uses to promote its message of HIV/AIDS prevention. That work can be difficult in many ways. Bellow-Handelman is well aware of the statistics on the rates of infection in South Africa and knows that many of the students she works with already have HIV/AIDS. And she worries at times that GRS’ message of empowering students to prevent themselves from getting the disease is impractical for some. “It’s hard for me because I know we have these messages about the positive aspects of prevention: ‘you can make a choice’ and ‘you can avoid getting HIV.’ But the reality is a lot of these kids, unfortunately, can’t.” Belllow-Handelman notes that many children got HIV/AIDS at birth or through sexual abuse.

Another difficulty is being around children when they find out that they have HIV/AIDS. Attending a recent GRS event in Lesotho that had on-site testing, Bellow-Handelman says, “It’s not easy to tell a group of kids to get tested when it’s likely that they might test positive, but part of my job is getting them to understand that it’s better to know your status, regardless of what it may be.”

Even though she knows it is better for kids to know their status, the process of testing is emotionally taxing. To encourage kids to get tested, Bellow-Handelman decided to get tested herself.

As I watched so many kids go for testing, and told so many how important it was to know their status, it felt strangely hypocritical not to do so myself. I felt compelled to share the unpredictable emotions, fears, and potentially life-changing experience that so many kids had just gone through, so toward the end of the day, I walked into one of the tents to be tested myself. Even though I knew my status, there is something about walking into a testing and counseling tent, in the middle of rural Africa, that makes your heart beat just a little bit faster.

Leah Bellow-Handelman left the event knowing that she did not have HIV/AIDS. Not everyone was so fortunate: of the nearly 500 children tested at the event, 23 tested positive.

Children at the Lesotho at the “Test Your Team” tournament wait to get tested for HIV/AIDS (photo: Leah Bellow-Handelman)

Over a decade after the end of apartheid, Bellow-Handelman says that some people she’s met maintain views reminiscent of past eras. Some white people, she says, “laugh at us and tell us that our work is in vain and that ‘these people won’t change’.”

This is, fortunately, a minority view. Most people Bellow-Handelman has met support GRS’ work. “When people find out what we do, there are so many people who want to be trained in our program,” she says. Training locals to implement the GRS curriculum is an important goal of the organization. They don’t want to be seen as just the latest group of foreigners coming in telling Africans how to live their lives. And in the long term, GRS wants to make its program self-sustaining. “Our main goal is to come here, deliver this program, and train enough people so that when we leave, it won’t disappear,” Bellow-Handelman tells me.

GRS has been quite successful in getting locals trained in their program out to work in the community. This makes Bellow-Handelman quite proud. “It’s really easy to see … that our trainers, even if they started out as just people in the community, become community role models. Kids know them as Grassroot Soccer coaches and know that they’re a resource they can go to.”

Nearly all talk of soccer in South Africa these days is focused on the 2010 World Cup. Grassroot Soccer hopes to be involved with the tournament, using the high profile event to get out its message of HIV/AIDS prevention. Leah Bellow-Handelman has her own ideas about how she’d like to see the GRS model used at the tournament. She tells me excitedly that her dream is to do “Find the Ball” at halftime of a World Cup game. “That,” she says, “would be awesome.”

More information about Leah Bellow-Handelman’s work with Grassroot Soccer is available at her personal blog.

This agreement is the latest example of labor policies having a particularly marked effect in the world of soccer. Soccer often seems disconnected from the real world; the effect of labor policies on the sport is one of the ways in which we are reminded that soccer is very much a part of the world we have created.

The effect of this little-noticed decision could be dramatic. The high number of African players in France is due, in no small part, to their being from former French colonies and thus able to qualify easily for work permits (this stands in marked contrast to the England, where there is a fairly strict work permit process by which non-EU players have to prove their exceptional talent). If African players are no longer counted in the non-EU quota, they will likely flock to Spain.

A similar situation to that seen in Spain today arose in Italy in 2000. Then, Andriy Shevchenko was playing and scoring (yes, it was a long time ago) for AC Milan. But, the striker complained that he was still counted as a foreign player despite the fact that Ukraine and Italy had previously signed a labor agreement. After Shevchenko’s repeated complaints that he was being treated as a “second-class citizen” and appeals by AC Milan, he was finally granted EU status.

Andriy Shevchenko (photo: BBC)

These two examples affect only a limited number of players in two countries, but other labor decisions have affected the whole of European football. The EU decision in 1993 to allow free movement of workers throughout its member countries has dramatically affected European leagues. Leagues that previously had quotas of non-Spanish, non-Italian, etc. players were forced to reshape their limits so they only applied to non-EU players. The result has been a dramatic increase in the number of players moving across borders. The heated debates on the number of foreign players in the Premier League, for example, have come about because of the EU decision to allow free movement of its workers.The changes above have been forced by larger labor policies that end up affecting soccer dramatically. There has also been one major decision recently which came directly from the world of soccer. In 1990, Belgian player Jean Bosman sued because he was not permitted to leave his club RFC Liege when his contract had ended. Difficult as it is to believe now, players at the time were still considered property of the team they played for, even when their contract was up. Bosman won his suit and from 1995 on, players were permitted to leave their clubs at the end of their contract.

Jean Bosman surrounded by judges (photo: La Galaxia de Estrellas)

The so-called Bosman ruling had a dramatic effect on European soccer. Clubs such as Ajax, which developed young players received no compensation when their protégés were poached by bigger teams. Players and their agents began to negotiate for contract extensions far before their deals were up, using the threat of leaving for free to pressure the club. Opinions about the effects of the Bosman ruling are mixed, but it is fairly incredible that it was not until 1995 that soccer players gained the right to leave at the end of their contracts. I cannot imagine that other workers would have persisted under this system nearly so long.

A large part of the reason soccer players didn’t complain was because, even before the Bosman ruling, they were, for the most part, making good money. Even if things were exactly as they would have liked, they weren’t that bad.

Since 1995, salaries have increased dramatically. Several players in England make over 100,000 pounds per week. As a result, it’s difficult for many fans to consider them in the same class as themselves. Were a soccer player to complain about labor conditions, he would become the object of scorn among the fans who spend an increasingly high percentage of their earnings following their teams (witness the treatment Rio Ferdinand receiving when renegotiating his most recent contract).

In 2001, the Professional Footballers Association in England threatened to strike over revenue-sharing before striking a deal with the Premier League at the last minute. Given the lack of patience fans in England have shown with big earners complaining about their salaries, I doubt a strike would have earned the players much sympathy. (Union power may be on the decline in the US compared with Europe, but ironically American athletes are much more apt to strike than their European counterparts; see baseball in 1994, American football in 1987, and even the US national team’s threatened strike in 2005.)

Strikes in soccer-playing countries where players are not getting as rich as the Premier League are more common. Latin American leagues are notorious for not paying their players on time, or at all. It was over unpaid salaries and paltry pay that players in Argentina struck in 2001, followed by their Chilean counterparts in 2002 (a union leader there said at the time, “At the moment here in Chile there are players who earn only a hundred dollars a month, and that’s not enough to live decently on”).

In the eyes of some, sports have overtaken religion to become the opiate of the masses. As providers of this opiate, it is often difficult to remember that professional athletes are workers as well. They may be fabulously wealthy, but labor policies designed for all workers affect them just the same.

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

Like usmle help book, 70-632 guide and MB5-554, SY0-201 dumps, 220-702 dumps, and 70-290 dumps is our wonderful product of IT certification world.

In recent years, several I the ranks of these converts to Islam have come from the world of soccer. Most have come from France, the country with the largest Muslim population in Europe.

The two most well-known French converts to Islam are Bolton’s Nicolas Anelka and Bayern Munich’s Franck Ribery. In 2004, Anelka spoke of his growing interest in Islam.

The Muslim religion interests me. When I’m in Trappes (the neighborhood where he grew up), I hang out with Muslims and we discuss it a lot. In the summer we’re outdoors until 4am, so we have the time to talk. I listen to them in order to understand and learn, just like Roberto Baggio on Buddhism. It opens your mind and the subject fascinates me, just like astronomy does.

Anelka did eventually convert, taking the name Abdul-Salam Bilal (though he is rarely referred to as such).

Nicolas Anelka during his time at Manchester City (photo: BBC)

Anelka’s teammate on the national team Franck Ribery has made headlines this year due to his stellar play with new club Bayern Munich. The French winger, whose former clubs include Galatasaray and Olympique Marseille, is as gifted as he is shy. Though he rarely talks to the media, he did say in 2006 of his conversion, “[a]s a kid, I spent all my time with Muslims. It is my choice. No one told me to do it. I prefer to keep my reasons to myself.”It is known that Ribery’s wife, who is French of Moroccan descent, played a role in his conversion to Islam. Since converting, Ribery has often displayed his piety on the field, as John Lichfield wrote in the Independent in 2006: “He raises his hands to Allah before every match: something that goes down fine in Istanbul or Marseilles but was less appreciated during his brief periods in Metz and Brest.”

Franck Ribery (photo: Tiscali)

Anelka and Ribery are not alone. Graham Spiers wrote in The (Glasgow) Herald in 2005 that “Ribery joined a trend in young French society by converting to Islam. Jacques Faty and Julien Faubert, two other prominent young French footballers, have done the same.

Two French coaches have also become Muslims. Perhaps not surprisingly, they are men who have spent much of their careers traveling the world to ply their trade, including in mainly Muslim countries. Fabio-look alike Bruno Metsu rose to fame by leading Senegal to success at the 2002 World Cup. During his time coaching in West Africa, “Metsu had to convert to Islam to marry Rokhaya ‘Daba’ Ndiaye, and a fair part of the Senegalese press now calls him Abdul Karim.”

The manager with the loveliest hair, Bruno Metsu (photo: Asian Football Confederation)

Philippe Troussier is known by his nickname “The White Witch Doctor” due to his success managing several teams in Africa. After a stint coaching Japan at the 2002 World Cup, Troussier returned to Africa as manager of Morocco. He was fired from this job after only two months, but decided to remain in the country with his wife. In 2006, both Troussier and his wife converted to Islam, taking the new names Omar and Amina (hers had been Dominique). The currently unemployed manager recently spoke to a TV station about his conversion (they term it a reversion), but your French will have to be better than mine if you want to understand exactly what he had to say.

Brought to you by www.mytestking.biz

Time is money and money is everything. So save money and time by using our 70-515 study guide, MB3-215 material, cwna dumps product, 642-617 dumps, and 000-118 dumps for respective exams