A miscellany of football

Norman still quite some shark

GREG NORMAN may not feature in the business end of golf tournaments these days but the one-time world number one – and winner of two Majors in his career – has shown he still possesses a shark’s bite off the course.

In fact, Norman – who this year was named Australia’s highest-earning sportsman for a 15th straight year, despite the fact he hardly swings a club in anger these days – has proven to possess a sharp business acumen that has served him well despite a couple of high-profile divorces in recent years.

Norman’s money these days comes from a range of business ventures which include a thriving golf course design company (which was responsible for the acclaimed Doonbeg links in Co Clare among other creations) and owning a company that is at the cutting edge in developing new types of grass seeds for use on golf courses.

The Aussie has proven adept at moving with these recessionary times. When the impact of the economic downturn hit golf course design in the United States, Norman deftly moved many of his start-up design concepts to Asia and especially China, a playing market which he estimates will see a 50 per cent year-on-year rise in players that will hit 26 million golfers in the country in 2020.

Another sign that the Great White Shark’s eye for a good business venture remains came this week with the news that Jaime Ortiz Patino, the creator of Valderrama in the south of Spain which is widely considered the top golf course on mainland Europe, has agreed in principle to sell the course to a company owned by Norman in a deal worth in the region of €35 million.

Patino developed the golf course at Valderrama in 1974 – some 14 years after acquiring the land – and cultivated it into a course which traditionally played host to the season-ending Volvo Masters on the European Tour until the advent of the Dubai World Championship.

The new owners of Valderrama when all the is are dotted and the ts crossed will be The Stripe Group – the company Norman has dedicated to the high-end commercial exploitation of the game and tourism throughout the world and which, ironically, includes the now season-ending Dubai World Championship – who plan to further develop the course which played host to the 1997 Ryder Cup.

The Patino connection, though, won’t be lost entirely for the foreseeable future: Patino’s son, Felipe Ortiz, owns the Club de Golf Valderrama which will remain in his hands for the next 40 years.

Pacquiao packs a political punch

THE CREDIT for US Senate leader Harry Reid retaining his seat in the mid-term elections in midweek apparently is being attributed to world champion boxer Manny Pacquiao, who showed his own political acumen earlier this year when elected in a landslide to represent the province of Sarangani in his native Philippines.

In the run-up to the mid-term elections where Democrat Reid was expected to lose out to Republican Sharron Angle in Nevada, the Senate leader was given a huge fillip by the appearance of Congressman Pacquiao at a Reid rally in Las Vegas which many believe provided the difference in the US politician winning a fifth term.

It is almost 12 years since he won his first world title – the WBC flyweight title in December 1998 – and next week he will move up weight for an eighth time in challenging Antonio Margarito for the WBC super-welterweight title. As the only seven-division champion, Pacquiao will be out to break his own record . . . but Pacquiao is no ordinary boxer: apart from getting Reid over the line, he found time to appear on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live TV show where he sang a duet with Will Ferrell. Within days, the song had over 413,000 complete views on YouTube.

Prices that make IRFU's look like a snip

THE IRISH Rugby Football Union back-tracked, moved sideways and basically did back-flips to get out of their ill-thought-out ticket pricing schemes for the autumn international series of matches which get under way today with the visit of world champions South Africa.

In some ways, the error of the IRFU’s ways in these tough economic times was highlighted by the crowd of over 60,000 which turned up at Croke Park last Saturday night for the second of the International Rules matches where adult tickets were priced at a mere €25 and children could get tickets for €5 – a big contrast to the €100 tickets for the rugby game against the depleted Springboks at the Aviva!

Yet, the rugby blazers might believe they weren’t as far off the mark with their much criticised pricing structures when they compare ticket prices with top-end sporting events in the United States.

Whilst average prices for the NFL (American football) for 2010 were $76 (€54) and for the NHL (ice hockey) were $54 (€38), it should be noted that a family of four attending the Dallas Cowboys could expect to part with $617 (€434) for their day out.

In American football, the highest priced non-premium seats are for the New England Patriots ($117, €82), followed by the New York Jets ($114, €80) and the New York Giants ($111, €78).

And, at the real top-end of things, the upcoming Christmas Day NBA with the LA Lakers and the Miami Heat which brings together two of the hottest names in basketball – Kobe Bryant and LeBron James – is set to be the highest-priced ticket of the regular season at an asking price of $893 (€628).

Now, that’s a ticket price that makes the IRFU’s prices seem close, ahem, to a bargain?

Rovers can look to Europe with optimism

IN THE long, barren spell since Shamrock Rovers were last crowned League of Ireland champions, a lot has changed in terms of club football in Europe. So, 16 years on from their last taste of top European competition, it will be a bright and wonderful world the Hoops return to next year when they get to compete in the qualifying rounds of the Champions League and aspire to the pots of money which clubs who manage to get into the group stages will pull in as their reward.

And even a cursory examination of the current eight groups should give Michael O’Neill and his team – which should be further strengthened in the close season – hope that the adopted Tallaght club can become the first from the league to actually make it through to the group stages.

The reason for such optimism? Well, they could hardly be any worse than the likes of Zilina (who have shipped 15 goals in four matches) or Cluj who are very, very ordinary sides indeed.

Rovers might not have the fire-power to match the Chelseas, Real Madrids and Inter Milans of the Champions League . . . but surely they couldn’t be any worse than some of the eastern European teams who have come through the qualifiers.

Whistle blowers and howlers

THIS HASN’T been a good year for referees – in soccer, Gaelic football, any sport – and the old observation that there’s nothing better than “a good, blind referee” would seem to have some credence. But, then, it’s a thankless job at the best of times; and, well, at the worst of times, it is quite simply the worst of all sporting activities where you become a moving target for verbal attacks and, increasingly, for physical pot shots.

My own return to officiating, doing the role of good Samaritan after the scheduled referee failed to materialise for an under-13 Gaelic match in Sandyford last Saturday afternoon, passed off without any stress – if you discount a pulled calf muscle (me) and the realisation some of those entering their teenage years should have their mouths washed out – fell on the same day as Mark Clattenberg’s clanger in the Manchester United-Spurs match.

There are two ways of looking at the Old Trafford incident: either the visiting goalkeeper, Gomes, is the biggest eejit to wear a jersey or the victim of an outrageously bad piece of refereeing in Clattenberg allowing Nani’s goal to stand. It’s not a black and white area, so the crossover to grey would probably give a bit of right and a bit of wrong to both goalkeeper and referee.

Still, the incident again highlighted how referees – who apparently are paid in the region of €40,000 a year in the Premier League as retainers in a world where overpaid players and most managers wouldn’t leave the dressingroom any given week for such an amount – can become easy targets for critics.

Of course, sport needs referees and, unfortunately, it seems regardless of the code, many of them leave themselves open to deserved criticism at times.

If you look at it, this has been a particularly bad year for soccer referees: the World Cup in South Africa only served to make some of the refereeing in the qualifying look decent. I’m not returning to the Thierry Henry handball in the France-Ireland play-off – that’s been consigned to history, mainly because the officialdom at the actual finals was so singularly bad, while Gaelic games this year wasn’t short of its own share of mistakes from officialdom.

A quick checklist of refereeing howlers during the soccer year to date shows just how incompetent some whistlers are when it comes to high-profile matches: in the World Cup alone, we had, (1) Mali’s Koman Couilbaly disallowed a goal that would have given the US a late lead against Slovenia, and infuriated US players by not explaining his decision; (2) Saudi Arabian ref Khalil Al Ghamdi handed a red card to Swiss midfielder Valon Behrami for brushing the cheek of Chile’s Arturo Vidal, who was behind him, with his arm; (3) Carlos Tevez was clearly offside when he headed in Argentina’s opening goal against Mexico. Despite Mexican protests, the goal stood, even though stadium replays showed it should have been ruled out; (4) the Tevez controversy came a day after a shot by England midfielder Frank Lampard bounced off the underside of the German crossbar and landed over the goal-line, but it was missed by Uruguayan referee Jorge Larrionda and his assistant; (5) In the final, English ref Howard Webb showed Dutch midfielder Nigel de Jong only yellow for doing a kung fu kick and embedding his studs in Xabi Alonso’s chest – a clear red card.

In our own GAA championship, we had an incident-packed series of refereeing errors. The most high profile of all, of course, concerned Joe Sheridan’s “goal” in the Leinster final when he carried the ball over the goal line and referee Martin Sludden allowed it to stand, while the ugliest incident concerned an attack on referee Willie Barrett earlier this year during a Tipperary club hurling match.

Such attacks on referees aren’t limited to Gaelic games, where the authorities, it must be said, strongly condemn any such actions. In the US, there was a high-profile court case in American football when referee Pete McCabe Jnr was attacked with a helmet which broke nearly every bone in his face and left him without the ability to taste or smell food. His assailant, Leon Woods, was recently sentenced to 10 years in jail for the attack.

And there was the case in the Olympic Games in Beijing in 2008 which resulted in a Cuba’s Angel Valodia Matos landing a life ban from Taekwondo for delivering a kick to the face of the referee after he was disqualified for exceeding the injury-time limit.

At least Clattenberg’s clanger resulted in nothing more than Spurs manager Harry Redknapp getting into a huff.

As the saying goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” and, apart from being blind, maybe the real attribute for anyone aspiring to refereeing is to be thick-skinned. After all, even when a referee is wrong, he (or she) is always right!