Flour Power

(image from Times Online)

Ahh, what would be of an important football game without some controversy? And to make it even more disgusting, it had to involve, and be in favor of, France…

The Irish team had lost 0-1 at Croke Park and travelled to France in a very difficult position. After 33 minutes at the Stade de France, Robbie Keane got the goal (and qualification equalizer) for Ireland , which they kept until the 90 minutes were over. And then, 14 minutes into extra time, Gallas scored the goal that got France in the World Cup, after an assist from Thierry Henry. Small detail: Henry controlled the ball with his hand. Wait, there’s more. Henry controlled the ball with his hand… twice!

I'm not even going to comment on the game itself, because that's of little importance and there's plenty of sites discussing it. The real issue here is that it was proven again that soccer desperately needs to adopt what today's technology has to offer. It's outrageous that a game of such importance gets decided in a clearly illegal play, one that would be easily detected by watching a replay. And any replay would be enough, as it was so obvious that you could almost see it from the other side of the pitch…

Tennis has Hawk-Eye. Quite a lot of sports use instant-replay to help decide on controversial situations. But football remains in the dark ages, leading to situations like this one over and over again. Maradona’s “God’s Hand” was 23 years ago, I think we should have evolved enough avoid these mistakes…

I’m not blaming Henry, because most players would do the same. Although he’s still a sneaky bastard.

I’m not blaming the referees, because it is possible that they really didn’t see the (did I say it was double?) handball. Although this was France.

But things like these make me sick.

In related news, Portugal got the qualification after defeating Bosnia and Herzegovina by 1 goal in Zenica (aggregate 2-0).

As if World of Warcraft wasn't enough, I got myself dragged into another game that has the potential to waste quite a bit of my very precious time - Fantasy Premier League.

The rules are quite simple. You are given a budget of €100 million to create a team of 15 players (11 + 4 substitutes) from the English Premier League. Every week, each player is awarded points depending on his performance that week. The "manager" with the most points in the end of gameweek 40 is the winner.

As simple as it this may seem, there are a lot of variables at work here, which turn it into quite a complex, and thus intriguing, game. For starters, €100 million may seem like a lot, but after Lampard, Gerrard (the obvious choices), a big gunner and a good defender, it's easy to realise that the remaining euros must be spent carefully. Then there's the matter of looking at the fixtures. Having the poor defender (the one chosen as filler, because the budget was already low) playing against one of the big four is not desirable, just like having the substitute forward/midfielder against a solid defense is not likely to bring any points from goals and assists. Add the injuries, transfers, the variations in players' value and, of course, the unpredictability of football (of the "soccer" kind, because I don't know a lot about the other one), and this Fantasy Premier League promises to be quite fun.

With the help I've been getting from people that know a lot more about this than myself at the FISO forum, here's the team I've built so far:

This will probably still suffer some changes before the season start on Sunday, so any suggestions are welcome.

I'm guessing there will be a lot of talk about this little game at work, and some of it might transpire here to the blog. I apologise in advance to the girls that read it (all 3 of them), as well as to those who happen to stumble upon this...

Apart from that, who wants to start a private league?