The S&ST team has also gone LIN-sane!

It's the end of an awesome sporting month and the S&ST team decided to honour this month's biggest sports star, Jeremy Lin, creator of the worldwide phenomenon, LINSANITY! Don't know what Linsanity is? Where have you been?
Basically, Jeremy Lin came out of nowhere, after being bounced from team to team and landed up at the New York Knicks where he became the NBA and the world's biggest sporting sensation.
Keep your eyes open, you're probably gonna be seeing a lot more of him!

The Sad Reality Is...

 Mawande says:

International football is not the pinnacle of the game anymore. Professional players don’t value it as much as they used to. This is a fact. You would only need to look at the number of professionals opting out of the international arena in order to prolong their domestic club careers in order to confirm this.



Ghana Anthem: Damn, I don't know the words to this song. 



There hasn’t been a retirement quite as contentious as Kevin-Prince Boateng’s from international football in recent memory. The German-born star opted to play for Ghana in the 2010 Fifa World Cup and went on to represent the Black Stars on 9 occasions. Why the fuss, you ask?

Well, the AC Milan striker is only 24 years old and rumblings around the game suggest that he used the Ghana national team as a platform to further his own career. Prior to the 2010 World Cup, Boateng signed for Italian club Genoa having previously turned out in the colours of hapless Portsmouth FC in the preceding season. Sterling performances at the World Cup saw AC Milan take an interest in him and the rest as they say is history!

Maybe I'd look better in stripes. White isn't my colour.



 So you kinda can see what the storm in this teacup is about right? Truth is Boateng opted for Ghana instead of Germany because he didn’t stand a chance of making the German world cup squad, good as he is. Boateng himself says he made the decision because he’s already had 6 knee surgeries in his short career and that AC Milan are involved in 4 competitions this year; he wants to be fit for the season’s duration. I just wonder if he would have made the same decision if he had represented Germany.



Hell Yeah! I'm the shit. Stripes are definitely my thang!

I was one of those who were unhappy when Prince announced his retirement from international football. I like him as a player and I thought he would be fantastic for Ghana. But the reality of it all is that international football in the professional age doesn’t have the same pull that it used to, Champions League football trumps the African Cup of Nations. But at the same time, disconcerting as this state of play may be, we cannot fault footballers from making a living and prolonging their careers in any way possible and if quitting international football to add 3 more years to that lucrative contract, so be it. Just that it’s a bit difficult to accept as a fan.

Was Andrey Arshavin ever as good as he pretended to be?

I found myself asking this question after watching yet another poor showing from the Russian I-don’t-know-what-to-call-him. When he arrived at Arsenal in 2009, I knew very little about him, never seen him play before but we were assured that he was a fantastic player and sure enough he seemed to be just that. The game where he, arguably, made his name was the Liverpool versus Arsenal game at Anfield where he scored all four of Arsenal’s goals in an enthralling four all draw.

Maybe that performance was above what he could produce on the day to day, but since he produced that performance early on in his Arsenal career, the underachieving club’s desperate fans placed the weight of their expectations on him. Quite frankly though, since that game, Arshavin has threatened to become something but hasn’t produced a performance of substance in my mind.

Says it all, doesn't it?

What disappoints me the most about Arshavin though is by far his seeming lack of character. Looking at his stature, one would reckon that he’d be the smallest man on the field of play every game and envisage THAT small, courageous, determined player who has to fight that much harder for every ball to compensate for his lack of physical presence much like Craig Bellamy. But that isn’t what Arshavin is about at all. He is average on most days, a lazy defender and doesn’t fight for the ball when he loses it and often doesn’t seem interested in being where he is.

Arshavin promised a lot but delivered nothing for Arsenal and their fans. I don’t see anything special about him. I’m not sure if he was ever as good as most of us thought. Simply, everyone got caught up in the moment of that Liverpool game.