PLANET SOCCER: ROMANCE OF the month? No contest: Ronaldinho and Swedish footballer Johanna Almgren, who met at the Olympic Games where Brazil and Sweden shared the same hotel.
"He ignored all the Chinese and walked straight towards me. He looked me deep in the eyes, took my hand and kissed it. I almost fainted," she said of their first meeting. An hour later. "An interpreter said that Ronaldinho asked if I would like to marry him. I was shocked and replied immediately: No!"
An auld smoothie, that lad.
Quotes of the week
"I can't read novels. If you have to use your imagination and set the scenes in your own head then you are doing half of the author's work."
- England goalkeeper David James reckoning John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen and Co were just plain lazy.
"Thank God everyone is not like me, the world's a better place for it."
- There's only one Roy Keane, apparently, and that's a relief to him.
"He was a genius, an absolute genius, and certainly the best manager I played under, without a shadow of a doubt."
- Keane again, this time talking about Brian Clough. "Ahem," muttered Keane's old boss at Manchester United, Alex Ferguson.
"I won't involve myself in that, crikey - it's four years away and I may not be alive then. That's why I say my prayers."
- Ferguson, meanwhile, thinks talk of him managing a British team at the 2012 Olympics is a touch premature.
"It got so bad that some started smuggling supplies of chocolate and crisps into their rooms behind Capello's back."
- An "insider" reveals that Fabio has his England boys starving when they're on international duty.
Liverpool players get a bit shirty
LIKE A group of starstruck fans, three Standard Liege players, including their American defender Oguchi Onyewu and forward Dieudonne Mbokani, knocked on the door of the Liverpool dressing-room on Wednesday night after the Champions League qualifying game between the teams and asked the kitman, who came to the door, if they could swap their shirts with three Liverpool players.
The trio handed their shirts to the kitman, who disappeared back in to the dressing-room, and waited in the corridor. Five minutes later he reappeared and handed their shirts back to them, informing them that none of the Liverpool players wanted them, so there'd be no swapping.
The three walked away, with a less than impressed Onyewu noting a certain lack of respect from their hosts.
Touchy on the touchline
SETANTA MIGHT have to review their fondness for interviewing players live on the touchline after they're substituted in lower league games. Having scored a fine goal for Wrexham in the Blue Square Premier match against Oxford, Jefferson Louis was taken off in the dying moments, to be met by a Setanta microphone.
Reporter: "Why did you want to come off in the end?"
Louis: "I was a bit ****ed."
Cue a flood of Setanta apologies.
Price digs a hole for himself
SPEAKING OF unfortunate encounters with microphones - in one of the great "please tell me he didn't say that" moments of our time Chris Price, doing a live update on BBC Radio Manchester, declared that Rochdale "were making more holes in the Bradford defence than in a Spanish aircraft". Lest you forget, 154 people died the week before in the plane crash at Madrid airport.
Naturally enough the complaints poured in, forcing the BBC to issue an apology. "I honestly thought I was being descriptive," said Price, "it wasn't meant to be funny. If people are offended by what I said, then of course I apologise."
All he was trying to do, he said, was inject a bit of "colour" to his report.
His future updates, we're guessing, will be in black and white.
More quotes of the week
"Kevin Doyle will never get an easier hat-trick than that . . . it's a good job that they sold Ibrahima Sonko to Stoke otherwise they could have had 10. But if you defend like that you'll get beaten by Bodmin and Saltash - never mind a team like Reading."
- Crystal Palace manager Neil Warnock graciously accepting Saturday's 4-2 defeat at Reading.
"If a player didn't want to play for me I'd drive him myself to wherever he wants to go, just to get rid of him. I had a player two years ago who I heard had been speaking to another club . . . I said 'off you go' and off he popped."
- Roy Keane on handling less than committed players.
"I will never stay to live in England, that's for sure. You get only a brief glimpse of sunlight before it's all cloudy again . . . in summer the temperatures seldom go higher than 20 degrees. And it rains, rains, rains."
- Nemanja Vidic, in an interview with Russian magazine Football Weekly, on life under an umbrella in Manchester.
"In England they say that Manchester is the city of rain. Its main attraction is considered to be the timetable at the railway station, where trains leave for other less rainy cities."
- Vidic again. Do you think he's a bit unsettled in the English north-west?
"It's not only the weather that I'm not happy about here . . . here they just don't have time to feel the joy of life . . . "
- Vidic again. He later insisted his comments had been taken out of context. Right.
