Old rivalries will be revisited today when Real Madrid hosts Deportivo La Coruna and midfielder David Beckham has an opportunity to avenge previous encounters with Argentines Lionel Scaloni and Aldo Duscher.
"There's a lot of Argentine players in the Spanish league so I meet with them every week, nearly," Beckham told AP in an interview Friday.
PHOTO: EPA
"There's a few of them in the Deportivo team on Sunday, but I haven't thought about it too much."
In April 2002, Duscher broke a bone in Beckham's left foot in Deportivo's Champions League game against Manchester United and almost caused the England captain to miss the 2002 World Cup finals.
Even Prime Minister Tony Blair expressed concern over Beckham's foot on that occasion.
"With Duscher, I spoke with him I a few weeks after I broke my foot and it's not a problem, it's all in the past," Beckham said, adding that he was really looking forward to the clash.
"You live for these great matches and this is one of the biggest," Beckham said.
In December, Beckham and Scaloni clashed during the final minutes of Madrid's 2-1 league victory at the Santiago Bernabeu stadium as the Deportivo midfielder reacted furiously to a foul by the English midfielder.
Beckham offered to shake hands after the match but Scaloni spurned it, telling sports daily As that it would have been insincere to do so.
"The referee asked us to shake hands, but I didn't want to. It didn't seem right as we wanted to kill each other 10 seconds earlier," Scaloni said.
"It seemed false to offer him my hand because we couldn't stand the sight of each other."
Beckham also has bad memories of other Argentine players.
At the 1998 World Cup, Beckham lashed out at midfielder Diego Simeoni and was ejected.
England lost the match on penalties and Beckham was subsequently pilloried by the British press and many English supporters, who blamed him for England's elimination from the tournament.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier