Playboy model who is currently enjoying a ‘cyber-romance’ with fugly Barcelona star
Leo Messi isn’t the most handsome sportsman in the world, but that hasn’t stopped him pursuing Playboy model and popular Argentinean media figure Luciana Salazar. The 27-year-old blonde is currently based in Buenos Aires, so with the exception of one phone call, their relationship has thus far blossomed exclusively online.
Apparently, Leo was planning dedicate a goal to her against Brazil last week with an ‘L for Luciana/loser’ hand salute. Unfortunately, that goal never happened, and Luciana and her ginormous chest remain un-saluted.
Pneumatic beauty cruelly snatched from these shores
When Rafa Benitez let Mark Gonzalez move to Real Betis last year, the city of Liverpool didn’t just lose a tricky winger, but a splendid example of Waggery. Gonzalez’s fiancé Gisela Molinero battled for months to quit Chile for Merseyside, but she was denied by the Home Office. By the time she made it over to Blighty, she barely had a chance to pose in the Liverpool strip before being carted off to Spain. So sad.
Dutch ace adds strange tale to an already murky history
Until now, it had widely been assumed that Johan Cruyff, in spite of being the most exciting player in the world at the time, missed the 1978 World Cup in Argentina as a protest against that country’s odious torture-happy dictatorship. Speaking on Catalan radio this morning, however, he revealed that a strange incident in 1978 helped make his mind up.
He said that a number of men broke into his home in Barcelona, where he was playing at the time, threatened him and his wife with shotguns in front of their children and tied them to chairs. His wife, however, managed to escape, as did Cruyff before the clearly incompetent kidnappers
For years, Alex Ferguson has moved hell and high water to make sure his players don’t get sent out around the globe for menial friendlies. Kettleheaded Liverpool boss Rafa Benitez, however, has chosen an alternative route for expressing his dismay at meaningless games. That’s right, Rafa done got his sarcasm on:
“I am really, really happy that Mascherano must go to Egypt to play a friendly. Things like that you just cannot understand. There is nothing you can do. The rules are the rules and the players must go.”
Javier Mascherano is being sent off to Egypt just four days before the Pool face Everton, and Rafa will undoubtedly want a full strength
As I learnt the hard way when Jennie Smith went out with Tom Stevenson instead of me just because he could drive, produce facial hair and speak without cracking into a high-pitched squeal, most girls of a school age aspire to go out with older chaps. In bad news for the hopes of schoolboys the world over, but good news for wealthy old goats, this tradition is being carried on by Argentinean Romanela Amato and her 26-year-old Real Madrid striker-type Javier Saviola. Romanela turns seventeen this month. Yikes.
Yet another Sports Illustrated beauty destroys a nuclear family
The Argentinean tabloids have got themselves all worked up over Boca Juniors midfielder Juan Roman Riquelme and his 21-year-old girlfriend Yésica Toscanini. On the surface, it’s a perfectly normal footballer-model partnership, but the South American rags seem to be picking up on a troubling fact: Riquelme has a wife and three kids, and he has been secretly putting away his new lady since they met during the World Cup in Germany. There are even rumours circulating that he wanted to take Yésica, rather than his spouse, to Villarreal during his spell there. Tsk.
In the UK, Diego Simeone is known mainly for getting David Beckham sent off in France 98. How ironic, then, that he and his former wife Carolina Baldini were considered the Posh and Becks of Argentina. Like Mr B and RoboSpice, they had three children, a lavish lifestyle and a tendency to get snapped in public. It all came to an end recently, however, as the River Plate manager traded in his model wife for a younger, er, model - 21-year-old Julieta Spina.
Fans of the hilarity that stems from innocent verbal stumblings briefly had their needs met in the early nineties by the Ronnie Corbett-hosted vehicle Small Talk. This show featured celebrities trying to guess what small children were describing with their limited yet winning vocabularies.
Paul Wilson, writing his excellent column in the Observer yesterday, has stumbled across a potential solution for this long-neglected gap in the entertainment schedule. You wouldn’t even need the panel of celebrity guessers, just footballers thrashing around in search of an escape from the most basic enquiries should provide comedy enough.
Over to Paul: “There’s something satisfyingly old-fashioned about footballers liking steak, though. It reminds you of all those questionnaires in all those old match programmes, when every week the answer to ‘Favourite meal?’ would always be the same. I thought that tradition had died - the format, not the favourite meal - but it resurfaced last week when Richard Chaplow, two-goal hero of Preston’s win against Stoke, allowed his finishing prowess to be undermined by an interview in the programme. To the innocent question: ‘Which team will you be supporting in Euro 2008?’, Chaplow replied: ‘England.’ When the unfortunate facts about England and Euro 2008 were pointed out to him and he was invited to change his mind, Chaplow plumped instead for Argentina.”
This Argentinian model is definitely not on the game
Evangelina Anderson isn’t the first WAG to face negative press - just ask Danielle Lloyd. Unlike Mrs Defoe, however, Evangelina has not been vilified for bullying a Bollywood queen live on television. Instead, her former boyfriend, one time Barcelona flop Maxi Lopez called an Argentinian chat show to blab, “You know how this girl is, she’s got a parallel profession.” When the host asked if he meant she was a “gato” (a cat, or high class hooker), the ungallant Lopez said “nooo…I mean one day she goes with one, another day she goes with someone else…”
First recorded sighting of extremely rare event a bit of a disappointment
Spectators at the friendly between Boca Juniors and River Plate in Argentina this weekend can count themselves amongst the fortunate few to have ever witnessed a “batgoal”, in which the scorer knocks the ball over the line while hanging from the crossbar.
An event as rare as a sighting of a rothschildianum orchid in the wild, this batgoal, while not much to look at, was clearly too much for the referee to take in. He swiftly parped his
