Dirty little secret: they showed the replay on the big screen…the linesman saw the replay 
. and after his screw up in the 6th minute that allowed france to score the ref showed some level of partiulaity towards italy. make what you want of it.
Ohh. The Commentator said that they didn’t show it… May be he was caught up in the action. Then why were crowed booing Italy all the way to the end?! If they saw it on the big screen they would rather boo france… I thought no one really saw much of it.
Maybe it should be posted in the Fun Stuff Tread. But it fits in the context.
The Zizou game:
http://foobar.sytes.net/zidane/zidane.htm
LOL
By Ulf Laessing
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - German sports goods firm Puma sponsored a soccer World Cup winner for the first time when its top team Italy beat rival Adidas’s partner France, giving a boost to sales prospects for replica shirts.
The stakes were high in the competition, with the industry spending millions of euros in sponsoring teams to bolster brands and lift sales of products such as jerseys and soccer boots.
Italy beat France in the final on Sunday in a penalty shootout.
In the past, industry giants Adidas and Nike dominated final matches. Nike’s top partner Brazil beat Germany, another Adidas team, in 2002 after France won against Brazil in 1998.
Nike saw sales of Brazil shirts surging after the nation became World Cup champion four years ago, while Adidas’s Greece jerseys were sold out for days after the country won the European Championships in 2004.
Puma was top supplier at the start of this World Cup, but except for Italy, its 12 teams – mostly Asian and African – dropped out early.
Last week, the firm said sales of soccer products could have risen 40 percent in the first half of 2006, compared with a year ago, thanks to the event.
Adidas, which claims to be global market leader for soccer boots, had pinned hopes on its two top teams France and Germany, but both were beaten by Italy in the tournament.
A spokesman for Adidas, which also provided the match balls and kits for referees, reiterated on Monday it expected to sell more than 3 million jerseys this year.
The largest chunk would come from more than 1.5 million German shirts, in addition to some 500,000 from France and 300,000 from Argentina, its third major sponsorship partner.
U.S. firm Nike had bad luck this time when its top partner Brazil was beaten by France in the quarter final. Its last team in the tournament, Portugal, lost to Germany in the third place playoff.
Industry sources say a deal with a top nation costs a double-digit million euro amount annually, while small teams such as Trinidad & Tobago are almost free.
Teams underperforming risk losing their contracts. Adidas ended its cooperation with Saudi Arabia after it dropped out early in 2002 and suffered an embarrassing 8-0 defeat to Germany.
With 10 African teams under contract, Puma looks well positioned for the next World Cup in South Africa in 2010. The host nation is sponsored by Adidas.
© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.
He did a very stupid action that’s all.And he did similar actions many times(if you know Zizou carrier).
ROTFL about leaving head high…
We are in the 2006…you think we still have to use violence to react to provocation??
Not at all.
Sometimes the human being demonstrate to be very irrational being: how can you, in the last match of the carrier, in the final of the World Championship, 10 minutes at the end of the match,when you are playing better,fall in a similar action(considering palying soccer from a long time you would be used to provocations)?
if they 'd have played well they should have scored because the italians were exausted and if they didn’t means they weren’t AT LEAST any better.
You guys forgot what did ZZ in the past (France vs. Saudi Arabia he walked on a player down or in Juventus Hamburg he acted very closed to what he did on Sunday) so I believe is FAR AWAY to be considered a champion,although this I heard about Maradona when he admitted to have personal problems.But the big scandal is that hte F.I.F.A. consideed him the best player of the World cup but,be serious consider Cannavaro,Pirlo,Zambrotta 4 example they showed to be good players ALL the game and not part of the last 2/3 matches!!!
The french player must consider 1 Important thing:they’re not invincible and sometimes they loose and to be considered a champion you must accept the verdict (in Italy we called “sciovinismo” very similar to the french mean)
Have omebody seen what happened in Rome yesterday when all the fans were cheering the Champions of the world??? 
Some more info on the Zizou-Materazzi affair. Now lip readers come into play 
The Sun has the facts of course 8-I
Ummm…2006 you say? whats that got to do with how ppl react to situations? YOu even answered this yourself by saying humans can demonstrate irrational behavior…regardless of what year it is. I didnt say before, but i do agree it was a stupid action on Zidanes part (just not that Zidane is stupid in general). Obviously, there was an easier solution to this problem than resorting to a headbut. But the media is taking it out of control, spreading rumours, dramatizing it, making it appear a lot worse than it actually was…what would you expect though :rolleyes:
Sometimes the human being demonstrate to be very irrational being: how can you, in the last match of the carrier, in the final of the World Championship, 10 minutes at the end of the match,when you are playing better,fall in a similar action(considering palying soccer from a long time you would be used to provocations)?
good point, but if someone ruined that last match for me, ruined my last few minutes to play for my country, ruined the last game of the final match in the world cup by insulting me in such a vulger manner, I just might turn around and deck someone in the face as well, or headbut em’ for that matter. It could happen to anyone, and it did. And like I said before, there is clearly a more rational path to be taken, but like you said, were just humans, irrational and all, no matter how professional.
He was voted player of the tournament by a group of journalist at half time. He zidane bets Canavaro to top spot and i believe those who voted for him wouldn’t have if the incident happened in the first half.
Yep no doubt… same thing with Chris, he was in the running for player of the tournament nevermind young player :rolleyes:
Not making excuses for Zizou but Materazzi is known for winding players up. He’s been headbutted on the pitch before.
I’ve been close to tears that it ended this way for him, Zidane is the one I will tell my kids was the greatest ever… I’ll miss him 
If only he’d made that header…
SeanJos
Zidane was the best player of the tournament - the red card doesn’t change that at all
And for me he would come next to Maradona
I totally agree with this… Although I’m still happy that Italy won.
I completely disagree with you buddy!!Look what ZZ did on the first game of the tournament and you’ll notice that he was far away from the good days!!Instead analize what the italian player (above mentioned)did during the tournament and you’ll find outstanding performances (Just because I’m italian doesn’t means I’m not objective,after all I’m “not french !!!”).personally ZZ was a disappointment and he only had some “good moments” against Brazil and maybe Portugal;so I wouldn’t compare him to Maradona (I had the pleasure to watch him live and I’m still excited about)
The whole French team played lousy during the first round (against mediocre or bad teams in the weakest group of all) and the first better performance was when Viera took over becaus Zidane could not play.
Coming back he had 2 GREAT games. But I do not know if 2 games can make you player of the tournament.
But who cares. I like him and he deserved a better end to his great career.
Germany soccer supporters were sad when national men’s head coach Jürgen Klinsmann took his hat after the World Cup. During a video conference with other coaches, he dropped a hint that he may be back soon.
Once a soccer player gets a taste of coaching, it can be difficult for him to leave it behind. When Jürgen Klinsmann resigned this summer as Germany’s head coach after a better-than-expected third-place performance, speculation immediately started that he would take a seat on a bench somewhere else.
Two months after the end of the World Cup, he has made his first public appearance during a video conference at the end of a meeting of World Cup managers organized by FIFA in Berlin and alluded to his desires none too clearly.
“Who knows, perhaps I’ll be a coach once again at the 2010 World Cup (in South Africa),” he said.
Klinsmann, calling in to the conference from his home in California, still enjoys “taking (his) kids to school,” something he has more than ample time to do, having retired four days after guiding Germany into third at this year’s World Cup finals.
Coach for USA? Or possibly an African country?
Klinsmann’s logical new employer would be the United States Soccer Federation, which separated paths from Bruce Arena who had coached the American men’s team for eight years. It would also be sensible for him considering that the team has its training quarters in southern California.
Klinsmann has consistently denied the connection with the US team and Theo Zwanziger, the newly elected president of the German Football Federation, raised another possible scenario for the 42-year-old who has always had a penchant for travel.
Zwanziger suggested recently that Klinsmann “might take charge of a team in Africa.”
Coaching just any old team on the sometimes times chaotic African continent, however, would be a risky undertaking considering that only the hosts South Africa have a guaranteed ticket to the finals in four years. At the 2006 tournament, all four sub-Saharan teams – Ivory Coast, Angola, Ghana and Togo – made their debuts, knocking out regular African favorites like Cameroon, Nigeria and South Africa during qualifications.
For the time being, Klinsmann can continue to take his kids to school, and savor the fact that, as he said at the conference, “Germany practically rediscovered itself” at the World Cup this summer.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,2173600,00.html?maca=en-rss-en-all-1573-rdf
Friday, September 22, 2006
By Marie Valla, The Wall Street Journal
PARIS – Zinedine Zidane’s head butt of an opponent in the World Cup finals this summer capped the soccer hero’s career on a less-than-glorious note. But the world-wide attention it received has only enhanced the Frenchman’s allure as an advertising pitchman.
“It just added one more layer to his personality,” says Lucien Boyer, head of Havas Sports, a unit of advertising company Havas SA here. “It made him profoundly human.”
As one of the world’s greatest soccer players, the now-retired Mr. Zidane, who earned some $11 million in endorsements last year, has long been popular with advertisers. But in the two months since he rammed his bald head into the chest of Italian defender Marco Materazzi and was ignominiously sent off the field, his public appeal has soared.
“From an advertising point of view, Zidane’s emotional charge is twice as big today as it was before the World Cup,” says Frederic Raillard of Publicis’ affiliate Marcel and the creator of a television ad for telecom company Orange SA starring Mr. Zidane that ran before the incident and continued after. “No sponsor would have any interest in dropping him.”
Though France ended up losing the match, Mr. Zidane was voted the country’s favorite personality in a recent annual newspaper poll. The head-butt sequence has been recycled into a hit song and printed on T-shirts. Sponsors like German sports apparel company Adidas AG and French dairy giant Danone SA have unconditionally stood by Mr. Zidane.
Advertisers have avoided any allusion to the head butt in their campaigns, instead sticking to positive or whimsical messages, like the Orange spot. In it, Mr. Zidane is seen opening a container that unleashes a river of soccer balls to the delight of people downstream. “Soccer is a source of joy for many people,” says Mr. Raillard. “We wanted to show that Zidane is at the origin of it.”
The transformation of what could have been a black mark into a golden marketing opportunity is partly due to the immense reserve of goodwill the 34-year-old Mr. Zidane earned over the years as one of the world’s most talented and graceful players.
But what helped Mr. Zidane’s marketing appeal is that the head-butt incident, which was watched repeatedly as an Internet video clip and became the subject of cocktail conversations around the world, dramatically increased the exposure of a person who was already a household name in France and with international soccer cognoscenti. Media speculation over what actually prompted Mr. Zidane to blow his top – and in doing so perhaps foil France’s chances of winning the World Cup – also helped raise his visibility.
For example, beer company Brasseries Kronenbourg Canada Inc., which is owned by Scottish & Newcastle PLC, published an ad this summer in a Montreal newspaper picturing a man who looked like Mr. Zidane leaning his head against a wall and resting a bottle of chilled beer against his temple. The slogan: “Cool off.”
Mr. Zidane has never said exactly what caused him to see red in the July 9 world championship, and Mr. Zidane’s agent didn’t return several phone calls seeking comment. Around 10 minutes from the end of the match’s 30-minute overtime – televised live around the world – Mr. Materazzi tugged on Mr. Zidane’s shirt. Millions of spectators saw the two men saying something to each other, before Mr. Zidane walked away, then turned back and slammed his head into Mr. Materazzi’s chest. A few days after, Mr. Zidane said in a television interview that Mr. Materazzi’s words had “touched the deepest part of me.” The Italian has since said he insulted the Frenchman’s sister.
The day after the match, Adidas, a long-time partner of Mr. Zidane and official sponsor of the 2006 World Cup, went ahead as planned with a full-page newspaper ad that featured Zidane’s golden soccer cleats with a bold-faced message: “Thank you.” The ad was also placed on a Web site that has registered 8,700 postings since the match.
Adidas said it never considered pulling the ad. “We’ve been in the sport-sponsoring business for 50 years, and we know that an athlete’s career has peaks and lows,” says Jan Runau, head of communication for the company.
The French division of Mattel, which doesn’t have an endorsement deal with Mr. Zidane, also went ahead with a tribute ad after the head butt. Before the match, Mattel had planned a full-page newspaper ad for its Scrabble game with the letter tile “Z” – which is worth 10 points, echoing Mr. Zidane’s jersey number – and the slogan: “Now you can play with your head.” After last-minute changes, the motto became: “There will always be only one.”
Danone named Mr. Zidane one of their “ambassadors” in 2004. Now that he has retired, company officials plan to use him more aggressively, taking the former three time world player of the year with them on marketing trips around the world. They recently rolled him out for an international junior soccer tournament Danone sponsored earlier this month.
At the tournament, Mr. Zidane, who is a father of four, shook hands with the children and signed autographs. He didn’t revel in the source of his heightened popularity, however.
“I hope that none of these kids will ever do something like I did” Mr. Zidane told journalists at the event. “I’ll be there to tell them not to do it, just like I tell my kids.”
Materazzi breaks Zidane silence
Marco Materazzi has finally explained what he said to Zinedine Zidane before he was headbutted by the Frenchman during Italy’s World Cup final victory.
Zidane was sent off for the attack and later claimed he was provoked after Materazzi had insulted his mother.
But Materazzi told Gazzetta dello Sport that Zidane’s sister was the subject.
He said: “I was tugging his shirt, he said to me ‘if you want my shirt so much I’ll give it to you afterwards,’ I answered that I’d prefer his sister.”
Materazzi added: "It’s not a particularly nice thing to say, I recognise that. But loads of players say worse things.
“I didn’t even know he had a sister before all this happened.”
Materazzi was later handed a two-match ban from world governing body Fifa, while Zidane was banned for three games and fined £3,260.
Zidane, who has since retired from football, has never specified what Materazzi said to him and has refused to apologise to his opponent.
Asked on 12 July exactly Materazzi had said, Zidane would only offer that it was “very personal” and concerned his mother and his sister.
“You hear those things once and you try to walk away,” added Zidane. “That’s what I wanted to do because I am retiring. You hear it a second time and then a third time…”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/internationals/5315618.stm