Reuters Soccer Blog

Premature move for Swiss prodigy Ben Khalifa?

The Swiss Super League is certainly not the strongest in the world but it’s a fairly safe bet to say that it beats the German fourth division. So why has 18-year-old Nassim Ben Khalifa, one of Switzerland’s most exciting prospects, swapped the former for the latter?

Last year, Ben Khalifa hit the headlines when he led the attack in the Swiss team which surprised everyone by winning the world under-17 championship in Nigeria.

He was runner-up in the vote for the best player of the tournament and also scored four goals. Back home, he was a regular first-team player in his debut professional season for Grasshoppers, scoring eight goals as he helped them finish third in the table.

In the midst of all this, German Bundesliga outfit VfL Wolfsburg stepped him and snapped him up for the 2010-2011 season. Yet they appear to have little intention of fielding him any time soon. Ben Khalifa told Swiss media this week that he is fifth or sixth in the strikers’ pecking order and would have to fight for his place with Edin Dzeko and Grafite, the two players who have topped the Bundesliga scoring charts in the last two seasons.

For the time being, this means that Ben Khalifa is turning out for the reserve team VfL Wolfsburg II, who play in Regional League North, the fourth tier of German professional football. This has also had a knock-on effect with his Switzerland career — having made his full international debut against Austria in August, Ben Khalifa will be with the under-21 team this weekend rather than travelling with the seniors for the Euro 2012 qualifier in Montenegro.

Switzerland coach Ottmar Hitzfeld says he made the decision due to Ben Khalifa’s lack of match practice.

It hardly seems like a move forward. Yet the story is typical of many promising young players from Latin America, Africa and the smaller European nations. They move abroad to a bigger league in their late teens, get shunted into the reserves and are barely heard of again.

Tougher action needed on soccer ‘simulation’

Chile’s Group H game against Switzerland was wrecked as a spectacle by the dismissal of Swiss midfielder Valon Behrami for what the referee saw as a serious foul on Chile’s Arturo Vidal — to the disbelief of Swiss coach Ottmar Hitzfeld and his players.

It was an incident that changed the game from a nicely balanced encounter into one where Switzerland were forced to defend with 10 men for the best part of an hour eventually losing 1-0.

It would be interesting to see what FIFA make of the incident if they take a look at the TV pictures, which appear to show Vidal making a couple of hand swipes to the side of his opponent and then dropping to the floor, hands over face, as if he had been struck hard in the face – when it looked like he had barely been brushed.

“Vidal fell down with a lot of drama. It was quite a performance,” Hitzfeld said after the game. “It clearly wasn’t a red card — it wasn’t even a yellow card. It was unfair of Vidal to roll around on the floor and simply ask for a red card.”

I have some sympathy with Mitch Phillip’s point below that we should blame the players not the referees for rule-breaking but if there are cases when refs are confusing serious fouls with playacting then perhaps they need some help.

Soccer has a large infrastructure set up to deal with testing for performance enhancing drugs, a clear case of cheating, but has next to nothing in place to deal with what FIFA refers to as “simulation”.

Any player guilty of “simulating” a foul or an assault is not just conning the referee and cheating an opponent – he is cheating the spectators at the stadium and the watching millions around the world. It is apparently easy to trick a referee by a sudden movement in a fast-paced game but the rest of us watching slow motion replays aren’t so easily hoodwinked. And who wants to be taken for a ride like that?

Swiss breathe much-needed life into World Cup

Who would have thought it would fall to Switzerland to rescue the World Cup from drowning in a sea of tedium?

Until the nation that voted against giving itself an extra day’s public holiday stunned European champions Spain 1-0 in Durban on Wednesday, the first week of the World Cup had been desperately disappointing.

It seems like sacrilege to say it, particularly as some of us have the privilege of watching much of it live, but the sad truth is that it has been boring.

Tentative, cagey, tactical, solid, cautious, safe – but most of all, boring.

This is the culmination of years of hard work. For many players and managers it will be the only time they ever appear in the World Cup finals.

Of course no team owes it to the public to deliver entertaining football and every fan would take a boring win over an entertaining defeat.

Hiddink factor should give Spain pause for thought

Spain are trying to keep the lid on the euphoria after their breaking their quarter-final curse with a penalty shoot-out victory over world champions Italy.

Because of the vagaries of the draw for Euro 2008, “la furia roja” now face Russia in the semi-finals, the team they beat 4-1 in their opening match of the tournament.

On paper, Spain have everything running in their favour. Psychologically they have the upper hand given the result of the group game, team morale has been boosted because of the win over Italy, they have no injuries and the first choice players remain fresh after being rested in the final group game against Greece.

Spain triumphed in both their previous semi-final appearances in the competition, over Hungary in 1964 and Denmark in 1984.

But with Guus Hiddink in the opposition dug-out, Spain would do well to be on their guard. The Dutchman was, of course, the coach of South Korea when they knocked Spain out of the 2002 World Cup. He also took an unrated Australia to the last 16 of the 2006 World Cup where they were desperately unlucky not to derail Italy and led the Netherlands to the semis of France 1998.

Hiddink is an expert on Spanish football having coached Real Madrid, Valencia and Betis and he is sure to have a few aces up his sleeve ready for Thursday’s showdown. With Andrei Arshavin in sparkling form following his return from his ban and Roman Pavlyuchenko on form up front, Russia could go all the way.

Great train journeys of Euro 2008

As a reporter at Euro 2008 you’re only as good as the team or teams you are covering and after Sweden and Romania’s elimination from the finals, I was the first of the Reuters team to pack my bags and go home.

It was disappointment tinged with relief as the call came after Sweden’s defeat by Russia. Exhaustion was beginning to catch up with me, so my own bed in Brussels was a very attractive offer.

So what did I think about Euro 2008? It was very enjoyable. I met lots of people, learned a lot and crated many memories … oh yes, the soccer was ok too.

Two of the most interesting, but bizarre, lessons I learned were:

Firstly, if you leave the electronic key to your hotel bedroom next to your mobile phone in your pocket, it won’t work when you get back to your hotel at 1am and you have to wake up the owner to let you in.

The second thing is that first class and business class mean two very different things in Austria and Switzerland when you travel.

Let me explain.

Hey UEFA, leave them finals alone!

As someone once famously said, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

They were not talking about the finals of the European Championship at the time, but the phrase certianly applies. UEFA, under pressure it must be said from some of their 53 member associations, are weighing up the pros and cons of expanding the Euros to either a 20 or 24-team tournament.

I think that would be totally wrong.

The current 16-team championship is the perfect size and the perfect format. And 31 matches in three weeks should be enough to satiate the appetite of even the most desperate of fans.

As we all know, the competition format is simple and logical and because just the top two advance teams have to come and attack.

Add another four or eight teams and we get into the complicated nonsense we had to endure in the 24-team World Cups from 1982 to 1994 because it’s not easy to reduce 24 teams to a 16-team knockout stage. Defensive, cagey football, from teams who shouldn’t be in the finals in the first place will damage the event.

Ronaldo’s heart set on Madrid. Time for United to cash in?

Cristiano Ronaldo told Real Madrid what they wanted to hear when he reacted to Portugal’s Euro 2008 exit with a clear indication of what he has in mind for his future.

Ronaldo was careful never to mention the words Real or Madrid when he spoke to reporters in Spanish at the end of the match in Basel but his words still did not leave much to the imagination.

“Everyone knows what I want,” Ronaldo said. “But in the next two or three days you’ll have something new. (I made this decision) some time ago, before this competition. I didn’t want to say anything because we were in competition and these are important decisions.”

Asked about the likelihood of a move, he added: “The possibilities are big but it doesn’t depend on me and because of that I don’t want to talk about it.”

His comments came on the same day a senior Real Madrid figure called on Ronaldo to come out in public and give them an opportunity to start negotiations with the Premier League champions.

If Ronaldo really does want to leave, United may have to accept that the canniest move now would be to get the best deal possible from Real.

The 23-year-old winger’s ineffective performance in Portugal’s 3-2 defeat by Germany might just persuade Alex Ferguson that he is by no means irreplaceable and that 100 million euros or so might give him the chance to build an even better team.

Germans incensed by another harsh penalty

UEFA’s decision to banish mild-mannered coach Joachim Loew from the touchline for Thursday’s quarter-final against Portugal is being put down to anti-German feeling by a lot of people here, a suspicion fanned by the angry response from German FA bosses.

It’s not the first time Germany have been hit with what neutral observers (I’d like to consider myself one of those) might view as a rather harsh penalty just before a critical match.

It recalled the suspension of Torsten Frings on the eve of the World Cup semi-final against Italy two years ago, for his relatively minor role in a post-match scuffle with Argentina players. Germans also remember that they had to do without Michael Ballack for the World Cup final in 2002, although that was a more straightforward decision.

Is it a general dislike of Germans? Are there influential people that don’t want to see the country that has won three European Championships (1972, 1980 and 1996) and three World Cups (1954, 1974, 1990) succeed again?

Bierhoff was quick to dismiss such an idea at an eve-of-match press conference in Basel but he was annoyed in the extreme.

“These are isolated cases,” he said. “I don’t think there is a special story going on here. But in this case perhaps a fine would have been sufficient.”

Germany’s political football

Germany’s general election may still be a year away, but the challengers are already battling it out for the big political prize on unlikely territory — at Euro 2008.

Both conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Social Democratic rival, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, are going to great lengths to associate themselves with the German team.

Steinmeier surprised journalists during a trip to China last week when he converted an ordinary fuel stop in Helsinki into a soccer-watching party.

Eager to catch Germany’s match against Croatia, Steinmeier had his China-bound plane roll to the door of a VIP lounge at Helsinki Airport immediately upon landing just before half-time, where a giant TV screen was set up for the ambitious foreign minister, his accompanying aides and journalists.

Cringing when Croatia went ahead 2-0, Steinmeier jumped up from his front row seat and headed for the door, grumbling: ‘The fuel tank must be full by now.’ But it turned out he was only joking. He sat back down in time to see Germany pull one back before ultimately losing 2-1.

Just days later, Merkel, Steinmeier (wearing a tacky tie with the red, black and gold German colours) and four other equally ambitious ministers from Merkel’s cabinet flew to Vienna to watch Germany’s next match against Austria. 

From underdogs to champions, fun is a banned word with Greece

From a tiny second division Portuguese stadium to the luxurious surroundings and facilities of an Alpine sports centre, Greece are feeling like true defending champions at the Euro 2008.

The atmosphere, however, is not nearly as happy as it was in Portugal.

Four years ago when Greece settled in Vila do Conde, a sleepy seaside town in the estuary of the Ave river north of Porto, noone, including myself would have ever dreamt that a few weeks later coach Otto Rehhagel’s men would be crowned champions of Europe.

The surroundings certainly did not point to that.

The early morning training sessions were attended by only a handful of reporters, security was almost non-existent and there was seemingly no pressure on the players.

We would park our cars metres from the stadium entrance, wait there for the team bus to arrive, chat to the players as they got off and as they signed autographs with the few security guards, and then we would make our way to the concrete stands to watch the training.