On The Sidelines

There is little sign that the Australian media will treat the Olympic Games with kid gloves simply because the event is being staged in their country for the second time in its history. Already they have poured scorn on many aspects of the 2000 games in Sydney. Journalist John McDonald of the Australian has provided a taste of what's to come.

"Amazing - Juan Antonio Samaranch can now be recognised as the greatest architect since Frank Lloyd Wright. The Olympic boss is a true visionary in gold medal class. He must be. Samaranch goes out to Homebush (the Olympic site), surveys what is still a pile of dirt surrounded by piles of concrete, and pronounces the site the greatest stadium he has ever seen. We grovel in gratitude. A seer, an architect, engineer, diplomat, financial wizard, aesthete, sports lover - what a guy?"

If Romania do not qualify for the second round of the soccer World Cup this summer they face financial ruin. The tournament is costing the bankrupt Romanian FA £700,000 and their only hope of meeting the bill is if the team can get past the first round.

FIFA offer £450,000 for each match after the group games, but three quarters of that cash will go on player bonuses. Administrators are seeking sponsorship for everything, including the flight which will take the team to France. Many of the backroom staff, however, will be left behind. They are not inclined to go if they are not paid their £55,000 bonuses for reaching the tournament.

Tennis stars last week experienced what most mortals have to go through every time they attend Wimbledon or any other of the Grand Slam events. World number one Martina Hingis was forced to sit it in her hotel room in Berlin for over 10 minutes as the security surrounding the visit of US president Bill Clinton prevented her from leaving the building. As a result she was held up for her third-round match.

Players involved in the German Open shared the same hotel as the president, who astonished even this most pampered group of athletes by taking over four floors of the building for himself and his entourage.

And why was the Leinster Cup final between Lansdowne and Skerries played at Lansdowne Road last weekend rather than branch HQ at Donnybrook where the atmosphere would have been a trillion times better? Because the pitch at Donnybrook was being seeded. It is always seeded in May. That's the way it has always been. No need to change just for a cup final. The rules are the rules. Tradition is tradition. We have our ways and we're sticking to them. Progress, Irish rugby style.

Thousands of football haters have joined forces to ridicule and resist the football fever which is sweeping France at the moment. The group are printing T-shirts and posters designed to deliver an anti-football message to the thousands of fans who will flood into the country three weeks from now.

Slogans such as Football Free Zone and I'm free tonight, there's football on the telly are aimed primarily at women abandoned by their men folk for the four weeks.

But men are also in on the scheme with posters such as Exploit an idiot: rent a room to a football fan making an appearance.

"We need to fight the corner for an oppressed minority - all those who detest the game," said Franck Slama, an artist and founder of the group "No Foot." No joke !

The predator boot - favoured by David Beckham of Manchester United fame and anyone else who regularly curls and bends a football for a living - has become the source of a court action. Doesn't every decent idea? The former Liverpool skipper Craig `Skippy' Johnston, part of the double winning team of 1986, is being sued by a fellow Australian for allegedly ripping off his mould-breaking idea of glueing a piece of treaded rubber to the nose of the boot, thus providing greater traction on the ball.

Johnston will be remembered in these parts for his part in a documentary on the making and developing of the boot by the sports clothing company adidas. David Miers, however, claims it was he who thought of the idea and is seeking unspecified damages in an Australian court. Miers has his own `revolutionary' boot, `The Blade', which apparently has striking similarities to the Predator. Fancy that, two people with exactly the same idea at the same time.

Coming into the French Open tennis championships, the favourite to win is 17-year-old Swiss prodigy Martina Hingis. She is looking over her shoulder at 16year-old Russian prodigy Anna Kournikova and American prodigy Venus Williams. They, in turn, are worried about Williams' younger sister Serena and all will want to avoid Croatian teenage prodigy Mirjana Lucic. Former prodigy Jennifer Capriati, now ranked around 150 in the world, is past it at 21 years of age and they don't think that they have a problem in tennis.

The information highway. If you want to find out what's going on just jump on. So we did. We gripped the mouse and braced ourselves for a white knuckle ride around the FAI home page (httt//www.fai.ie). And what did we find? A reasonable site ?

Well, yes, but did we really want to know the results of the FAI Senior Cup second round played on February 8th? No, we wanted to know who won the cup and the web site couldn't tell us.

The last senior international listed was the World Cup play-off against Belgium in King Badouin Stadium, Brussels, on November 15th, 1997.

What about the friendlies? What about Paul McGrath's testimonial? If 39,000 people pay money to turn up at Lansdowne Road they may also be interested in reading about it on the official FAI web site. They might also be interested in some up-to-date news. Perish the thought. That, apparently, is expecting too much.

It is an established fact that all goalkeepers are crazy. Some are more crazy than others. Rene Higuita's scorpion kick at Wembley in 1995 was wondrously crazy. But there is another goalkeeper who has knocked Higuita off the top of the Crazy Premiership. Paraguay's Jose Luis Chilavert is loco crazy. And we don't just mean running up for the odd corner kick. Chilavert scored the only goal for his team in their highly creditable 1-1 draw with Argentina in the South American qualifier with an explosive free kick which he bent around the defensive wall. Chilavert also takes penalties and is likely to become the first goalkeeper to score in a World Cup finals.

Chilavert also received a fourgame suspension after punching Faustino Asprilla in a game against Colombia. He also walked out on the national side in 1993, hurling abuse about the team's incompetence as he left.

He was persuaded to come back in 1995 and has since been an enormous influence on the team. His trademark is a bulldog emblazoned on his chest.

Chilavert a mad dog? Maybe, but with a bite as well as a bark.