They suspect foul play of Paraguay
Who’s the baddest World Cup team of them all? A software company says Paraguay ranks at the bottom when it comes to misbehavior at the global soccer tournament.
Staff at the British office of Information Builders (IBI) tracked a string of alternative statistics during the World Cup in Germany, including dives, feigned injuries, referee intimidation, and tantrums – even players who didn’t sing their national anthem.
According to their findings from watching TV broadcasts of the games, Italy leads in dives (32), France in tantrums (28), Paraguay in fake injuries (12), and Serbia and Montenegro in players not singing the anthem (31).
To create an even playing field to compare teams, Information Builders devised the “IBI Foul Play Index,” which awards points for yellow and red cards, bullying the referee, dives, fake injuries and tantrums. The total is then divided by the number of games played.
Paraguay leads the tournament with a Foul Play Index of 45, followed by Italy (40) and the Netherlands, Ivory Coast and Portugal (37).
Trinidad and Tobago was the goody two-shoes of the tournament, according to Information Builders, with a Foul Play Index of just 14. Next were Brazil, Costa Rica and Sweden (all 15) and the United States (16).
New path to inner peace
At Tibet’s holiest shrine, young monks are getting up at 3 a.m. Not to pray, but to watch the World Cup.
Lights flickered in the windows of the Potala Palace, former home of Tibet’s exiled ruler, the Dalai Lama, as France beat Portugal this week to set up a final showdown today against Italy.
Monks watched on a 21-inch color TV, drinking Coca-Cola and eating instant noodles, said Lobsang, a 27-year-old monk with a gapped-toothed smile and a closely shorn head.
But is it acceptable for monks to become so attached to a sport when their goal is to let go of worldly pleasures? Lobsang thinks so.
“This activity brings a kind of happiness,” he said. “It doesn’t harm anybody and it brings people together.”
What’s that noise?
Maria Sharapova may be something to look at, writes Robert Kitson in London’s Guardian newspaper, but “a walrus giving birth would sound more ladylike than the Russian in full screech mode.”
New book out soon
Peter Schmuck of the Baltimore Sun tuned into the Tour de France the other day, but the recent doping scandal that stole the headlines early on was all he could think about:
“I half-expected to see Jose Canseco trundling by on a 10-speed,” he wrote.
Where’s Lance?
From Bernie Lincicome of the Rocky Mountain News: “The Tour de France without Lance Armstrong is like ‘Where’s Waldo’ without Waldo.”