Everton star in kidnapping hell

If you ever travel to Nigeria, there is approximately a 98 per cent chance that you will be kidnapped. Accordingly, Norum Yobo, brother of Everton defender Joseph, has been held by an armed gang since Saturday:

The 27-year-old defender’s sibling Norum was grabbed with two pals leaving a nightclub in Nigeria at the weekend.
On Wednesday a group called Motive sent an email to a newspaper demanding a £5,500 ransom.

And they warned Yobo’s family not to involve cops “if you want him alive”.

£5,500 may sound like the kind of amount that Cristiano Ronaldo would nonchalantly spend on a pair of swimming shorts, but is a huge amount by local standards. While Yobo could undoubtedly afford to pay up, these situations can take time to resolve - Wilson Palacios’ 15-year-old brother was kidnapped last year and is still being held for ransom.

[More info here and here]

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