Valladolid's pineapple crush
Friday 4 April 2008
e-mail
Print
Digg
Save
In more successful times, enterprising Valladolid players used to sell on surplus pineapples (©Getty Images)
What with it having been April Fool's Day, we reckon we could pretty much have gone with any old nonsense this week, but the slogan on this column until the last uefa.com redesign – "A veritable passion for positive veracity" – shows that the truth is not so much a close friend of it as practically an extra limb.
Fruitful victory
So we have no compunctions in reporting that finally on Monday, after more than a month's waiting, the Real Valladolid CF squad were the proud owners of a set of pineapples. Julio Benavente, the fruiterer, is a good friend of the Valladolid squad and has promised each player a bit of the old Ananas comosus every time they win a game. As it happened, after the 24 February success at Real Murcia CF, Valladolid went on a bit of a lull, bad news for both their league position and their Vitamin C intake. But on Sunday a 2-1 victory against Real Zaragoza ended their pineappleless spell, however we still wonder if maybe the bromeliad fruit is not the prime motivational tool Valladolid need to avoid relegation. How about some sweeties?
Tall tale
What's the first thing one does when purchasing a new car? Obviously, getting it made-to-measure. On a footballer's salary certainly, for goodness sake get a tailored vehicle, not one of those off-the-peg ones. Well, West Ham United FC defender Matthew Upson thought he was being clever when he paid €127,000 for a new Lamborghini Gallardo, without getting pins put in it and having it taken up. Now Upson has had to sell it, as he is too tall to drive it. "I only did about 400 miles [640km] in it before I had to sell," he said. "It was killing my back. My family seemed to think it was hilarious." A source told the Daily Star: "Footballers aren't generally known for their intelligence but this has to take the biscuit. Matthew is usually quite bright, but we don't know what possessed him to buy a sports car which he was struggling to climb into. I don't think he will ever live it down." Upson now has a BMW X5 into which he apparently can squeeze into, but Lamborghini's United Kingdom dealers hit back: "We've had a lot of customers who are over 6ft [1.83m] tall. [Famed British motoring journalist and putative giant] Jeremy Clarkson had a Lamborghini Spyder and he's well over 6ft."
Stag plight
Those for who there is just not enough football in the world were for a good decade, in Britain at least, entertained by the serial drama Dream Team, following the fictional exploits of troubled Harchester United FC. Well, one fan no doubt bereft at the soap opera's demise last year is businessman John Batchelor, now bidding to buy troubled English fourth-tier club Mansfield Town FC with the intent of renaming the troubled Stags after troubled Harchester. Batchelor said: "Football supporters in general have to understand that if they want professional football in their town, they have to accept it has to be done on a commercial basis. Harchester is more promotable than Mansfield. That's not any form of insult to Mansfield at all because it's a club with a long tradition but it's just a fact of life. One club has been on the television for ten years and the other one hasn't." Mansfield fans have not necessarily unanimously rallied behind the proposed bid, but might a few conciliatory pineapples in the right direction soften the blow of the loss of their 98-year-old name?
©uefa.com 1998-2008. All rights reserved.
