Club Football… EURO… Club Football… EURO… Hmmm…

By: Greg | June 13th, 2008

Over the past week my beloved New Jersey has been hit by a hell of a heat wave. I’m an air conditioning and refrigeration salesman. Care to guess who’s been busy the past week? The company’s so busy that I was on a roof in Newark yesterday in my “sales garb” helping a technician change out a refrigeration unit from noon till six.

And with the dearth of league news (basically worldwide) I’ve had to take whatever time I can to put all my effort into the second most important international tournament that also only comes along every four years. I hope the six of you who actually read this blog on a regular basis understand that without any real club/league content, it’s hard to balance work and putting a great deal of effort into the Portuguese National Team’s run for the Euro2008 championship.

Luckily for me, it’s Friday and while I play catch up from the rest of the week’s work I have piled up, I have managed to have two fantastic things for me at this moment: a lull in the action and a decent story worth discussing.

Now, Rob has already touched on this earlier today but since we’re a blog collective and not a newsroom stepping over one another to break a story, I’m sure he can appreciate my desire to put my two cents in here. Enough bullshit, on to the show…

UEFA’s appeals board have decided that Porto’s ban from Champions League play deserves another look see. Essentially, and if I have this fucked up I apologize, the appeals board has overturned the disciplinary board’s decision and asked the SAME board to reevaluate Porto’s case. I may be missing something here but, why send the case back to the same people who already banned the cheaters?

Unless the appeals board reviewed the decision and gave the disciplinary heads notes as to why and a different angle to consider, shouldn’t we expect the same result once the SAME people evaluate the SAME case? As Rob intimated in his conclusion, this bullshit wouldn’t even be considered if it weren’t Porto. If Champions League newcomers Vitória Guimarães (who stand to go straight to the group stages should Porto’s ban be upheld) were in the same predicament, the appeals board would use their case as a coaster rather than give it any real consideration.

On the other hand, I understand Porto’s argument that their infractions took place before the rule currently in question was actually on UEFA’s books. For me, Porto deserve this punishment simply because the Portuguese Football powers that be gave them a joke of a slap on the wrist with their six point deduction (to be applied to THIS year’s final point total when they were ahead by seven hundred points) and a fine that I could have paid for them with a month’s worth of change from my couch. UEFA is hopefully considering the FPF’s joke of a punishment and deciding they need to ban Porto this year and deny them the millions of Euros that come along with participating in such a tournament.

I hope you all enjoy your weekend and are enjoying watching Portugal march on. As the philosopher Winston Zeddemore has said regarding Big Phil’s side: “We’ve got the tools, we got the talent!” Força Portugal!!!