Suspicious party discovered during Champions League Final

Those who believe that illegal activity could not possibly occur in a £1.3m mock Tudor mansion purchased by a footballer are in for a shock. While watching her son Ryan Giggs lose the Champions League Final in Rome on Wednesday night, police raided Lynne Johnson’s home and discovered a drugs party, which may have in fact been a sexy drugs party.

The Sun reports:

The Premier League star was said to be “hit for six” by the “unauthorised” bash at the £1.3million six-bed mansion.Lynne and Giggs’s half-sister Bethany, 17, had travelled to watch United’s defeat on Wednesday.

Cops were alerted after Lynne’s 91-year-old next-door neighbour spotted men pull up in two cars at the pad in Worsley, Greater Manchester.

A cop arrived to see two or three men and a woman run to the rear of the house

Mark Ward makes good use of his time behind bars

During a career that spanned through the eighties and nineties, Mark Ward notched up an enviable list of achievements: he played in Wembley cup finals, scored in Merseyside derbies for his hometown club Everton, and came within a few points of winning the league with the lauded West Ham team of 1986. Stuart Pearce once singled him out as the trickiest opponent he ever face, and after a game at Nottingham Forest, Brian Clough declared: “Take Ward to the [1986] World Cup.”

After being relieved of his duties as Altrincham player/manager in 2001, however, Ward’s fortunes took a turn for the worse. Playing in an era where professionals weren’t set up for life with ridiculous pay packages (his biggest contract earned him £2,000 per week), Ward was getting by on handouts and income support. After accepting an offer to rent out a house in his name and hand over the keys to a third party who would pay him a weekly wage, Ward found himself on the wrong side of the police, who raided the property

Man City’s inconsistent star accused of taking cocaine

Brazil is famous for many things - beautiful beaches, colourful street parades, slightly gay-looking currency - but if the claims of Pele are to be believed, the South American nation may soon gain a reputation for footballers who dabble with naughty substances.

During a private tourism event, the legendary erectile dysfunction solution advocate claimed (Fat) Ronaldo and Robinho had been on the cocaine while attending a private party in Sao Paolo:

“It is unfair to talk about drugs in football because of just one or two cases, like Ronaldo and Robinho, who have that problem.”

Pele may have been caught out revealing an unspoken truth about Brazilian football, but it is more likely he was trying to divert attention away from the curious case of his son Edinho, who was a known cocaine user and suspected drug trafficker.

After Robinho’s hilariously bad penalty kick yesterday (3.15 above), a spokesman for the Brazilian pooh-poohed his accusation:

“We strenuously refute any such suggestions. The notion of him taking drugs is absurd and we completely deny it.”We are trying at this moment to get Pele to clarify the situation.

“We think these comments have been genuinely misunderstood or got lost in translation.”

North London proves a little bit too edgy for troubled footballers…

People who survive North London are cut from a different cloth to the average gent. That’s probably why Hleb can’t take it, but the likes of Lehmann, Bergkamp and Amy Winehouse can. They’re just a little bit edgier, and don’t seem to mind that one minute the pavements will be littered with drugs paraphernalia, and the next you’ll be diving out of the way of a speeding Range Rover on a gorgeous cobbled street. It is, in short, testing.

Hence, you’d be hard pushed to find an area in the world that football players seem so eager to escape from - and that includes Wigan.