This is rather a difficult question to hurriedly give an answer. But if you take out time to ponder longer, you may come along so many defining issues and events that in your view, defined 2007.
I started watching football at the age of 8 years. Well that was rather late but you can not blame me because, when i was younger my parents wouldn't buy a television set. And so while i have developed love for the round leather game earlier it wasn't until i was eight years old before i could have the luxuary of watching football matches. As a matter of fact it wouldn't have been if not that i became increasingly obnoxious at home and will never stay put in the house as long as a football match was going on. The only reason my father yielded to buying a TV set was to get me to stop going to other people's house to watch matches. He felt it was embarassing to him, so he agreed with my mother if there was a TV set at home I would stop going to people's houses- And it worked!
Since then my interest in football has grown into some colossal sort that i may claim to be an unrecognized football comentator. I did not play football because my father wouldn't have it. That one was not negotiable but i'm sure he would have seen things differently if it was to be now. Apart from that i don't like getting injured. For me football is a game of injuries.
This is not a story of my life but to say that i have never been worried about an issue like i am currently about the policies Michel Platini is about to introduce or has introduced which is about to destroy this beautiful game that i have loved with all my life.. Most disagreeable is the quota system bruhaha.
I have more than the one reason opponents of the policy are fronting.
Let me be a little selfish here. Starting from home,
1. I think Eyimba wouldn't have achieved the fit they achieved if the team was made up of only indigenes of Abia State.
2. A quota system will take world football backwards and worse than the pre Joe Havalanche Era when football development was lopsided and African and Asian teams were minnows. I know that the only reason why FIFA tries to make the hosting of the World Cup go round is to give these countries and their neighbours the opportunity to grow football.
4. It will take away genuine competition and what will be left is a boring talentless football all over the world.
I think that Platini is not trying to save football but unkowing killing it because of a myopic attempt to make European teams always have the better of African teams. In my view it is selfish and improper.
Africans currently have talented players who can not be absorbed by the level of football at home. While European players shall have their homes to fall back to, African players shall either have to become bench warmers in their various clubs or retire. In the long term, the effect will lead to a widened gap between Europe and Africa in World Championship. African teams are increasingly becoming strong enough to beat these world football powers showing that football has moved to a different level in the continent. Platini despises this and is bent on reversing the trend.
The Players Union in England recently in a release called 'Meltdown' declares their support to Platini's stance on this matter.
I see this as a declaration that African players who have help to developed European Leagues (despite the Peanuts paid to them as wages) are now being considered parasites who deserve only to be trampled upon. We are supposed to be living in a global world where national boundaries are of little or no importance. Have we been deceived again? I think this though very recent will define sports in 2007.
What in your view has defined sports in 2007? Join the Debate Here!
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