Tag: sports
6 Best FIFA World Cup Controversies of the Past 20 Years
by Ranju Chaudhary on Jun.16, 2010, under What's Happening?
For continuous World Cup coverage, check out Mashable’s2010 World Cup Hub, which will be updated throughout the games.
Sometimes watching sports can be just as dramatic as watching a soap opera. Every four years the drama plays out on the football field as the FIFA World Cup Championshipunleashes athletic chaos and rabid fans throughout the world.
Between the players, the refs, the fans and FIFA there are a lot of characters weaving a tangled net of controversy that some might say is at times more enthralling than the actual game. In 80 years, there have been many moments that brought fans to the edge of their seats, and subsequently left them shaking their heads in disbelief.
Here are the top six controversial moments.
1. 1990
2. 1994
During a qualifying match for the 1990 World Cup, goalie Roberto Rojas faked being hit and seriously injured by firecrackers hurled by Brazilian fans, and the team refused to play the rest of the match. Footage later showed the firework never hit Roberto Rojas after all. His lie lead to Chile being banned from the next World Cup, and Rojas was banned for life.
3. 1998
It’s considered to be one of football’s greatest mysteries. In the final match of the 1998 World Cup held in France, Brazilian superstar Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima’s name disappeared from the teamsheet, only to suddenly reappear in time for kick-off.
The strange lineup flux sparked rumors of discord, talk that he was poisoned, and rumblings about his tumultuous love life. It had been reported that the striker had been dealing with an ankle injury and he had an upset stomach. Finally the team’s doctor revealed the player had been rushed to a hospital after he suffered a convulsion in his sleep. After a slew of tests Ronaldo was cleared to play, which proved not to be the best idea in the world.
Unsurprisingly off his game, Ronaldo ended up injuring himself when he collided with French goalie Fabien Barthez, and Brazil lost the game 3-0 to France.
4. 2002
5. 2006
6. 2006
Sometimes the controversy is just silly, but Dutch fans were willing to grin and bare it. At the 2006 tournament held in Germany, FIFA decided to play fashion police. The organization effectively forced an estimated 1,000 Dutch fans to watch the match against the Ivory Coast in their underwear after they were ordered to remove the patriotic orange lederhosen that carried the name of a Dutch beer. Since the brewery wasn’t an official World Cup Sponsor, FIFA decided the orange pants had to go. The devotion of the Dutch fans paid off as they watched Holland take their 2-1 victory.
Samsung Tries Organizing the World’s Biggest Dodgeball Game
by neetika on May.04, 2010, under Gadgets, Top Gadgets
Ah, cellphones and dodgeball, they go together like… well… they don’t really go together at all, but that’s not stopping Samsung Mobile from organizing what will purportedly be the world’s largest dodgeball game on May 12.
The practice of launching a stunt to herald the advent of a new product is nothing new — remember when the Droid took over Times Square? And Samsung is no stranger to the record realm; it attempted to make the World Record for collecting the largest donation of mobile phones in one location in April at the Samsung Mobile 500 at Texas Motor Speedway in Fort Worth, TX (the company failed). And managed to set the World Record for the fastest text message sent using Swype technology on the Samsung Omnia II.
Still, the idea of marrying the most emotionally scarring childhood sport to a phone launch is admittedly pretty cool. According to Samsung, the event is meant to educate users on how the phone works. The Reality, which launched in April, is branded as a social networking phone — much like the Microsoft Kin, which also launched in April on Verizon. It boasts a Communities widget that lets users access and update sites like Facebook,MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, Photobucket and Flickr.
You can get on the action by RSVPing to the match — the company is shooting to get 1,500 dodgeball players from the New York Tri-State area involved — on Facebook and keep tabs on Twitter via the hash tag #dodgethis. Players will battle it out to win Samsung Reality phones and gift cards (natch).
Regardless of the merits of the phone (we have yet to try it out, so we don’t know how it stacks up against handsets like the Kin), we think this is a pretty novel way to get users acquainted with the sharing capabilities that it offers. To anyone who plans to participate, good luck… and make sure to post plenty of snaps of the demoralized losing team via your brand new celly.
