Bye Bye Blatter, Blatter Bye Bye!

As widely predicted, Sepp Blatter has at last resigned - the day after my blog entry and I'd like to think that it was the Werewolf of Hampshire that gave him the final shove!

So no more mention of FIFA for the time being.

It’s now over a month since we returned from our latest visit to Fuseta. As always, we had a most relaxing, laid back three weeks in a stunning front-line penthouse apartment. There are only three main apartment blocks in Fuseta but the quality of the apartments that are available for rental is first class.

Our apartment was no exception. It was far too big for just two people but having walked past and admired it so many times we just had to try it out. The falling euro rate helped soften the financial implications!

The owner, a charming Dutch lady named Elly van Hulst, provided the transport from and to the airport and told us all about her amazing career as a world class middle distance athlete.

Her achievements (reproduced here from Wikipedia) are impressive:

Elisa ("Elly") Maria van Hulst is a former middle distance runner from the Netherlands. During her career she set one world record, on 4 March 1989 at the European Indoor Championships in the 3000 m event, a record that she held for 12 years, as well as three national records.

In 1989 she was named Dutch Sportswoman of the Year.

Elly van Hulst's career would last for almost twenty years and bring her 65 national, three European and two world titles. She participated in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.

At the end of the 1980s Van Hulst showed that she was among the best athletes in the world and in 1988 she defeated Mary Decker, favourite for the 3000 m victory in Zurich.

During her successful years, Van Hulst trained in the Algarve in Portugal. She loved this place and later, when her career had ended, moved there. Nowadays she and her husband run a real estate business, Elly van Hulst Real Estate Lda.

Since our return we have been alternating our time between maintaining the allotment & garden and relaxing in Selsey. The caravan is planted up and the verandah re-painted - bring on the sun!

Last week my plan for a morning’s beach fishing was scuppered by this story:

http://www.westsussextoday.co.uk/news/county-news/bomb-found-at-selsey-beach-1-6782672

Fortunately the bomb was found to be safe and transported back to Aldershot to be dismantled.

Back at Prospect Road, "the plot" is looking really good this year, much more advanced than 2014 when we were in Sri Lanka for most of June.

All the hard work is beginning to reap rewards and the first potatoes plus strawberries, beetroot and salad were all picked yesterday and the first broad beans will be ready this week.

I’ll leave you with this tribute to B.B. King, “The King of the Blues”, who sadly passed away on May 14^th .

RIP B.B. King 

On your Marks ..........

Get Sepp

Go

Last week world football was once again plunged into total farce.

No doubt spurred on by their unsuccessful bid to host the 2022 World Cup, it has taken a nation where football is ranked fifth in popularity behind basketball, baseball, American football and hockey to instigate proceedings to attempt to bring down what is clearly the most corrupt and powerful sporting body of all time.

Armed with evidence from former FIFA executive Chuck Blazer and the two sons of arrested former FIFA regional director Jack Warner, backed up with a mass of evidence collected over a ten year period by Scottish investigative journalist Andrew Jennings, plain clothed Swiss police acting on behalf of the FBI burst into the Baur au Lac hotel in Zurich at dawn to arrest seven Fifa officials and reveal charges against seven further defendants.

Three days later Sepp Blatter was re-elected as the Godfather of World Footballs governing body FIFA.

But, “Slow down Mr Blatter, this is may be your fifth, but will it be your unfinished”!

Blatter has been nicknamed the ‘Teflon Man’ (nothing sticks and he gets away with everything) by the European sports media but US Attorney General Loretta Lynch is not known for “letting go”.

Whilst any possible further charges by U.S. officials will depend on prosecutors finding evidence of criminal conduct which, however slightly, involves the U.S. legal or financial/banking system hopefully successful prosecution will encourage other countries to expose the widespread corruption that has taken place in all of the world cup bids for decades. Switzerland is supposedly investigating FIFA to see if any bribes were paid by Russia and Qatar to get the 2018 and 2022 World Cup competitions – that shouldn’t take long!

England wasted 19 million pounds of FA and tax payers’ money that would have been much better invested in grass roots non-league football, on a bid that was doomed from the start.

All infrastructure in place =

No new stadiums needed =

No tenders for construction work =

No back handers

Investigative journalist Andrew Jennings has spent over 10 years hounding Sepp Blatter and amassing evidence of widespread corruption at FIFA. His accusations are clear, naming dates, amounts and names, yet strangely no one has dared prosecute and he has never been sued, but at last someone, the FBI, is taking him seriously.

Here’s part of a documentary he did for Panarama in 2010:

This article by Simon Jenkins for the Guardian sums up this unbelievable situation:

This week’s Fifa exposé is widely credited to the FBI and the tough US attorney general, Loretta Lynch. That they have brought about this crunch is welcome. It is also humiliating for the Swiss police, who know full well what such global agencies get up to on their turf, and for Britain’s Scotland Yard.

Institutional corruption at Fifa has been public knowledge for a decade.

Much of the credit in this saga should go to the dogged obsession of a single reporter, Andrew Jennings, 71, who has traced Sepp Blatter’s footsteps for more than a decade. Jennings worked for the Sunday Times and BBC’s Panorama. His BBC film about Fifa corruption, The Beautiful Bung, appeared as long ago as 2006.

Since then he, and subsequently the Sunday Times, have been merciless in pursuit of the story.

Yet such is the potency of football money that Blatter’s cronies have been able to pocket millions over the years, shielded from accountability by Fifa’s arcane constitution. Occasional frowns from big sponsors, such as Visa and Coca-Cola, have triggered spasmodic “ethics inquiries”. Grandees such as Henry Kissinger, Lord Coe and Lord Goldsmith have been summoned to provide a veneer of respectability to Blatter’s regime. They joined the ranks of his patsies. Sports journalists, high on the Fifa hog, would just laugh when Fifa excused stories about $40,000 in envelopes to voting members as “intended for distribution to the poor”.

Serious trouble for Fifa began only with Sunday Times revelations of a whistleblower in 2011, after the dubious awarding of the 2018 and 2020 World Cups to Russia and Qatar. So frantic were David Cameron and his team to “win the cup for Britain” that they ignored all warnings of what was to come and were duly humiliated. Sport sends politicians mad.

In 2012 the Sunday Times revelations sparked a genuinely independent inquiry by a former US attorney general, Michael Garcia. This report was delivered to Blatter, but he has refused to publish it in full. It contains criticisms of dealings between England’s Football Association and the ex-Fifa personality Jack Warner. International sports bodies play on the celebrity, spurious patriotism, and vast revenues from media and sponsorship rights to terrorise governments into silence. That one of these governments should be Britain’s is a disgrace. The FA should now have nothing to do with Fifa as long as Blatter is in charge. If the European football union, Uefa, continues to cringe before that man, the FA should withdraw from it, too.

©The Guardian

How much longer can Blatter and FIFA remain unaccountable and above the law?

A Welsh Bard, who prefers to remain anonymous for fear of having the front door of his Cardiff residence kicked in by the Bluebird Mafia, has this take on it all:

There’s nothing the matter with Blatter,

It’s silly to criticise Sepp;

Though everything’s starting to shatter,

As long as his wallet is fatter,

He’s unlikely to take a false step!

Though FIFA’s finances are funny,

And have been for many a year,

For Blatter the future is sunny –

The Feds, who have followed the money,

Have kept the old fraud in the clear!

Though madder than hundreds of hatters,

I’m glad he’s in charge, cos I know

That his fraudulent management matters,

As footy would soon be in tatters

If someone like Tan ran the show!

Here’s Andrew Jennings comments following the arrests:

Hopefully all this is just the start and Sepp Blatter will disappear down a black hole forever:

And finally, a puzzle for you - what is the next name in this sequence:

BLATTER – BLAZER – xxxxxxx

A bit too close to comfort for my liking!

Hey Ho!