No gays in football

It all got a bit rowdy last night, watching the match and watching one foul after the other being perpetrated by each side. I got especially mad when seeing the face of "Bog Phil'Scolari, manager of Portugal and his lumbering body jumping up and down on the sidelines. I'd call out 'homo hater' to the screen, remembering his comments that "If I found out that one of my players was gay I would throw him off the team." during the 2002 when he was managing Brazil.

The irony of the quarter final is that England will be playing against a team whose manager was offered the management of the English side (subject to him, of course, apologising for his previous remarks). One has to remain hopeful that England can finally start playing well and can beat what will be a weakened Portuguese side to sneak into the semi finals. Unlikely actually to happen, but we have the rest of the week to dream.

In the meantime, England and Arsenal player Ashley Cole has received an apology and damages following a series of newspaper articles that wrongly claimed him to have been involved in a gay orgy.

The News of the World and the Sun published a series of articles between the 12th and 19th of February 2006 accompanied with pixelated photographs of Mr Cole and the radio DJ Masterstepz (Ian Thompson) although neither party were named.

The following week, PinkNews.co.uk published an unedited version of the photographs that confirmed that the newspapers were alleging that Mr Cole and Mr Thompson were the parties involved in the alleged orgy.

"The newspapers knew there was no basis to name Ashley but arranged the articles and pictures in such a way that readers would identify him. There is no truth whatever in these allegations. Ashley Cole will not tolerate this kind of cowardly journalism or let it go unchallenged."

Disgusting behaviour there by the Murdoch press. Really disgusting.

In a further interesting development, Ashley Cole was wondering what to do with the fact that when people typed in his name into google, google would prompt the users to look for ' ashley cole gay'. It doesn't do that now, so they must have amended their software.

He played very well last night for England and we hope he can do his best in stopping the Portuguese forwards on Saturday.

In the meantime, it is a strange thing indeed that out of the 32 squads of footballers in the World Cup, there are no openly gay footballers, likewise in the English Premiership. Fair enough that if people are gay that they can keep it to themselves, but for there to be no-one to be open about it just goes to show how people like Scolari make life difficult for those who are.