ONE EL OF A STORY
Europeans may just be making their very first shaky steps on the long and gilded road to Russia 2018, but elsewhere, like a line of Martin Skrtels defending a string of set pieces, push has very much come to shove. In the North and Central American region snappily rechristened Concacaf in football circles, Tuesday night is decision night, the last round of matches in the fourth and antepenultimate stage of qualifying. Mexico’s place in stage five is assured, Costa Rica and Panama have sailed through Group B and USA! USA!! USA!!! will emerge from Group C with Trinidad & Tobago unless they lose to the Soca Warriors and Guatemala go goal-crazy against a St Vincent & Grenadines side whose defence is less impressive than a Sports Direct shelf-stacker’s benefits package. Which leaves only the vexed question of who will come second in Group A.
Honduras hold a shaky advantage, being as they are three points and a goal differential of five ahead of third-place Canada, who they beat in San Pedro Sula last Friday. But they must still visit Mexico City’s Aztec Stadium, where – for all their happy memories of winning there in 2013 – they will almost certainly lose, while Canada’s final game is at home to group whipping boys, El Salvador. To be fair, Canada emphatically failed to whip them when they met last November, labouring instead to a goalless draw, but matters will surely be different in Vancouver. After all, the Canucks go into the game knowing they will probably need to win by at least a couple of goals, and what motivation do El Salvador have?
This last question appears to have particularly troubled a mysterious deep-pocketed Honduras-supporting lair-dwelling cat-stroking semi-villain. A businessman, named by Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica as Ricardo Padilla, met some of the Salvadorian side over the weekend on behalf of “a friend” whose name he was “not authorised to say”, offering them a complicated incentivised cash-making scheme: $30 per player per minute played if they win in Canada (that’s a maximum of $2,700, maths fans), $20 if they draw, $15 if they lose by a single goal, and not a dime if they let themselves suffer a thorough pasting. “Listen, match-fixing is when you get paid to lose, but there’s none of that here,” Padilla said, although there was a bit of that, kind of. “Look, it’s not my offer. If you don’t want it, no problem. I came to see if you were interested. I am sure that you are interested in money. But if you don’t accept, no problem. What I’m doing is legal. Where’s the harm?”
He was, essentially, encouraging the El Salvador side to play well, or at least not terribly badly, which doesn’t sound particularly scandalous on the face of it. But if you’re going to wave cash in the face of a footballer, it’s probably wise not to pick those from a nation which handed life bans to 14 players for match-fixing less than three years ago. That kind of thing can make a player nervous. “We thank you for the time you took to come and make this proposal,” one of them told Padilla at the end of the meeting, “but no one has accepted it. Tell your friend not to worry. We’ll do our best to win.”
We know precisely what was said, because the players recorded the conversation, called a press conference, and played it. “We want to make clear that we’re against anything like this,” declared the striker Nelson Bonilla. “We want to be very transparent about anything happening with the national team and want to disassociate ourselves from whatever bad impression this could cause.” Of course, there’s only one way for the Salvadorians to prove that this nefarious persuasion has totally failed. And thus, our anonymous Honduran anti-hero might come to look upon this whole business as a bit of an own goal. Of which there may be a few in Vancouver …
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QUOTE OF THE DAY
“We consider Cyprus one of the dirtiest leagues in the world. We also consider Cyprus as a sort of ‘school’ of match fixing with a lot of players exporting the virus when they move to another league … In places like Cyprus it is no longer a football competition but more an exercise in match fixing and I would say that, definitely, referees are part of the problem” – Francesco Baranca, secretary general of Belgian-based anti-match fixing organisation, Federbet, talks to Helena Smith in her remarkable piece about how Cypriot football spiralled out of control.
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FIVER LETTERS
“To be fair to England manager Sam Allardyce, he’s probably a bit taken aback by the reaction to his giving a fading Wayne Rooney freedom to just run about the pitch wherever he feels like, since his predecessors did that with $tevie Mbe and his long diagonals into touch for the better part of a decade ,while receiving nothing like this level of opprobrium from the nation’s sporting press. The way the press is talking about it, you’d almost think he’d taken over a decent team and turned them into, well, 2016 England” – Jason Tew.
“The USA! USA!! USA!!! sports concept of ‘franchise player’ was adopted by the American owners of Manchester United. Rooney is that player and will always be in the starting XI. Mourinho cannot drop him nor can England for the same reason. A franchise player is also paid more than anyone else. The new England manager simply reaffirmed Rooney’s position as his franchise player” – Tony Jovevski.
• Send your letters to the.boss@theguardian.com. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet The Fiver. Today’s winner of our prizeless letter o’the day is … Jason Tew.
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BITS AND BOBS
Praise the lord! Fiver favourite Nicklas Bendtner is back in the news and it appears that he is about to join Nottingham Forest, presumably as a tribute to Brian Clough, who was renowned for the vicarious joy he took in oversleeping, underdressing and general fancy-dannery.
Thanks too to Luís Figo for doing his best to defibrillate a slow day by discussing the likelihood of Him moving from Real Madrid to Barcelona. “We are in a free market,” he noted sagely. “If there is a termination clause, anything can happen.”
The absolute state of some people.
Wales boss Chris Coleman expects Gareth Bale to break Ian Rush’s national scoring record imminently, following their 4-0 romp against Moldova. “Knowing Bale-o, he won’t even know about that record,” he blared. “He comes along and he just fits in with the furniture and gets on with the job.”
A 2-2 draw in Serbia seems to be just what the doctor ordered for Republic O’Ireland’s Martin O’Neill. “You would have taken a point before the game started,” he tooted.
Harry Kane has come in for some criticism lately, what with him not scoring goals and what with his job being to score goals. Luckily, though, he’s can reassure himself by recalling the start of last season. “I think I didn’t score in my first seven or eight games,” he parped of a miserable run that helped cost his team the title. “To go on and win the Golden Boot proves that it was just a matter of time.”
Two days after England played, poor Wayne Rooney is still getting it in the neck. “I don’t think he’s a striker anymore,” said Peter Shilton of a position in which José Mourinho is happy to select him. “I thought he should have retired after the Euros. It’s not because he could break my record. Far from it.” Of course not, Peter.
And Utrecht and France U-21 striker Sébastien Haller has been flapping his gums. “I expect to jump to the next level and play at a top league,” he said, following a summer in which he was linked with both Newcastle and Sunderland. “I’m not afraid of anything.” A happy chance.
STILL WANT MORE?
“My power cells didn’t once deplete to critically low levels” – David Squires’ latest: a definitive verdict on the first England match under Sam Allardyce, “a no-nonsense, pounds-and-ounces, up-your-Delors” kind of manager.
The sad story of Omar Orestes Corbatta, scorer of Argentina’s second greatest goal. By Jonathan Wilson.
If we can’t laugh at our neighbours, who can we laugh at? Dundee fan Alan Patullo on the joys of relegating your nearest rivals.
Never mind the breathless hype that habitually accompanies Big Cup, the most compelling football on the planet is the South American World Cup qualifiers, reckons Luis Miguel Echegaray.
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