All Finnish-ed for Zambian match-fixers?
It's not every day that a nation's footballers get barred from playing in a country but that's precisely the fate awaiting Zambians in Finland - albeit unofficially.
For last Tuesday, Rovaniemi Palloseura - popularly known as RoPS - as gambling-related match-fixing plunged yet another league into abject despair.
"We will never take any Zambians again - and I don't think any other Finnish club will ever take a Zambian player (again)," RoPS chairman Risto Niva told the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ.
For the dented image of Finland's game, with 24 games judged to have been fixed, means that sponsorship and advertising revenues have already dropped, angering the clubs as financial insult adds to the injury of realising the corrupt nature of their league.
Born in Wimbledon, my enthusiasm for the global game was already sizeable before the tragic demise of the boys from SW19. Having covered football in over 50 countries, I've been working in the ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ's African sports section since the early noughties, recently spending three years in Africa to report on the run-up to the continent's first World Cup.
