Nasri teria brigado com Frimpong

Nasri e Frimpong se desentendendo no jogo de ontem.

Ontem, Nasri fez seu primeiro jogo contra o Arsenal depois de sua saída, a maioria dos jogadores do time londrino cumprimentou Nasri, mas Frimpong(que criticou a saída de Nasri do Arsenal) não foi muito simpático com o frânces.

Nasri e Frimpong começaram a discutir no final do jogo,e teriam trocado socos no túnel que leva ao vestiário.O Arsenal por sua parte nega que os dois teriam brigado, mas segundo informações de um jornal britânico houve sim o confronto entre eles.


C'mon City!

Christmas Decorations

Hey y'all. I'm linking up today to share my Christmas decor! Visit their blogs to see others or link up yourself!

My tree

My fireplace

Closeup of the mantle

Clear block with lights that my Mom made.

Leftover ornaments from my tree.

 Lit jar and my new block

 Light up snowman

 Wooden spindle snowman

 Side table in Dining Room

 Snowman sign on my mantle

 By the front door (any ideas on how to hide the cord?)

 Front door wreath

 I love pillows.

 Snowman made from a burlap sack

 Happy Holidays!

'Mid-major' not a term when it comes to college soccer

When Creighton hired Elmar Bolowich last February to be its men's soccer coach, this school of 4,000 undergraduates in Omaha, Neb., didn't just manage to land a respectable steward for its program. It basically upended the entire space-time continuum of college sports.

Not only did Bolowich win a 2001 national title, he was also the winningest men's soccer coach in the history of the school he came from. Even more surprisingly, the school he came from wasn't a small fry—it was powerhouse North Carolina.

The idea of a small school nabbing a top coach from a major sports factory would be unthinkable in most other forms of college sports. But in the context of men's soccer, the Bolowich theft was actually a bit of a yawner. "When you look at it deeply," said Charlotte soccer coach Jeremy Gunn, "it makes perfect sense."

Small schools act like big fish in soccer, winning titles, throwing around money and slapping around bigger-name schools on the pitch. More than half of the teams in this season's final top-25 poll were "mid-majors"—schools that are not members of the six major conferences. The list includes Old Dominion, Monmouth and No. 1-ranked New Mexico. The eight teams left in the NCAA tournament, who are vying this weekend for a spot in the College Cup, include Charlotte, St. Mary's and Creighton, the No. 2 seed.

Other college sports have had brushes with little-guy greatness. Boise State comes to mind in football. There's also Rice in baseball and Butler in men's basketball. But soccer is in a lilliputian class all by itself.

The sport's reigning men's champion, Akron, has had the last two winners of the Hermann Trophy—the sport's Heisman Trophy equivalent. Men's soccer was one of five Division-I sports in the 2010-2011 school year that had a champion from a small conference. The others were men's golf, men's ice hockey (which isn't played nationally), and rowing and bowling, two niche sports.

Some of these soccer mid-majors are prospering in front of crowds that would be impressive by basketball standards. In 2010, UC Santa Barbara had the country's highest attendance for the second straight year, averaging 5,873 per game. The crowd of 15,896 that saw the Gauchos beat UCLA in September 2010 was the season's biggest. "You want to be involved with a program where you're taken seriously and given the opportunity to compete at a national level," said New Mexico coach Jeremy Fishbein. "It doesn't really matter whether that's a Big Ten or ACC school—or a Missouri Valley or Big West school."

Never was that more apparent than when Bolowich left North Carolina, where he'd been coach for 22 years. In Chapel Hill, men's soccer takes a backseat in autumn to football and even women's soccer, which has 20 NCAA titles. Last year, according to government data, North Carolina spent about $75,000 in game-day expenses for men's soccer while Creighton allocated about $160,000. Other mid-majors like UCSB, Southern Methodist and the College of Charleston have ranked in the top 20 recently in soccer spending. "Football is an arms race," Bolowich said. "It's not only killing the smaller schools that do have football but it's putting a lot of pressure on the bigger schools with football programs to keep up with the Joneses."

That's not a problem at Creighton. In 2003, the school built a 6,000-seat stadium for soccer, which is the only fall game in town. "Before basketball starts, there is very little going on," Bolowich said. St. Mary's and Charlotte don't have varsity football yet, either.

College soccer still has its bluebloods. Indiana, Virginia and Maryland have dominated the College Cup, the sport's final four, in past years and Connecticut, UCLA and Louisville are in the hunt this year. Even North Carolina hasn't suffered from losing Bolowich. The Tar Heels are the tournament's top seed.

If the bracket holds, they'll face Creighton for the title.

Zahide'nin Mesajı

Tim Tebow

I've seen this floating around Pinterest that past few days, and love it. Tim Tebow is hot anyway (I love athletes....swoon), but his personality and profession of love of his faith makes me melt. You don't see many people that will stand up for their faith like he does, which makes him even more admirable.

Source: a1.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net via Melanie on Pinterest

How does MLS stack up?

How does MLS stack up against the other top leagues in the world?

This is a question that is often debated among Major League Soccer supporters and detractors, and Leander Schaerlaeckens of ESPN.com takes a crack at the debate. Where he finds that it doesn't necessarily hold up against the likes of the English Premier League or the German Bundesliga, it's grown steadily to reach that group below the top tier leagues in the world.

It's an oft-asked question. Just how good is Major League Soccer?

With 16 seasons in the books, the league has risen to 10th in the world in attendance for all soccer leagues, with 17,872 fans per game, recently passing the second tier of English football, the Championship (17,388). There is no argument to be had over whether MLS has gotten better. It unequivocally has. The quality of play has improved; high-quality foreign talent has started arriving; serious international prospects are steadily emerging.

But where exactly does the league rank in the hierarchy of the world's biggest leagues? I set out to answer that question.

First, I asked English Premier League veteran and recent Los Angeles Galaxy recruit Robbie Keane. "It's very different to compare this league and especially the Premiership, which is obviously the best league in the world," said the Liverpool and Tottenham veteran. "So it would be silly of me to compare the two."

"You can't compare this," echoed New York Red Bulls goalkeeper and German Bundesliga alumnus Frank Rost, before adding with a grin: "It's not good if I make a comparison."

I asked several other experienced foreign players. The answer was the same.

But if they were dodging the question, it dawned on me, they were nevertheless making a valid point: You really can't compare.

For one, MLS is a total outlier. In most leagues, clubs pay players what they can afford to pay them -- and oftentimes more -- spreading the wealth relatively evenly among the squad. In MLS, because of arrangements like the salary cap and the designated player (three of which are the only players allowed to earn over $335,000 annually on each team, counting only partially toward the salary cap), there is a wild disparity between what the best- and worst-earning players on each team earn. This distorts the talent curve.

Secondly, because there is no free agency, those homegrown players who aren't among the few designated players often earn less than they're worth while the DPs are often wildly overpaid relative to their value, further corrupting the mean. Players aren't paid their market value, because there is no market.

In their seminal book "Soccernomics," Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski prove that there is a very reliable correlation between a team's payroll and how well it places in the standings, that unequivocal measure of quality. They found that among 40 English professional clubs between 1978 and 1997, the salary expenditure explained 92 percent of the variation in league position. From 1998 to 2007, it was 89 percent. What this means is you can more or less tally what a club spends on player salaries and, by comparing it to others, rank where it ought to place in the standings at the end of the season. Logically, the same goes for leagues as a whole, given that players are free to move to the highest bidder in the rest of the soccer world. Salaries are highest in England, Spain, Italy and Germany, and therefore those are the leagues where the level of play is highest.

In MLS, which has an outlandish appetite for big foreign names but no free market, there is no correlation between expenditure and quality -- not until 2011 did a team that employed a designated player, first allowed in 2007, even win the league. This means you can't rank MLS among other leagues around the world based on the salaries paid to its players.

The band of talent is wider in MLS than in any other league that comes to mind. The difference between those making $30,000 and the ones making $6.5 million is enormous. David Beckham can still hang with the best of Europe, as he proved in two loan stints to AC Milan. So can several others. But a late-round draft pick out of a local college is lucky not to be embarrassed in MLS. And in no other league in the world is the disparity between the best and worst players so large. This is partly to blame on the lack of promotion or relegation to a second tier or easy movement of players between different American leagues, preventing the natural selection of talent. Yet at the same time, the talent difference between a player who makes $50,000 and $500,000 is often quite small, much smaller than the difference between one player and another making 10 times as much would be anywhere else in the world.

Houston Dynamo goalkeeper Tally Hall, who never came off the bench in two seasons at Danish club Esbjerg, exposes this in his following comment: "I think people discredit the league quite a bit," he said. "I think the Dynamo beats my Danish team more times than not." Yet why have American MLS players for years flocked to Scandinavia? Because salaries are high -- even if, according to Hall, the talent level on certain teams is lower.

Is Major League Soccer just another entity whose quirks will have to be filed away under the uniqueness of American sports? Because how do you even begin to objectively measure MLS against any other league if you can't follow the money?

Roy Rees (1937-2011)

Roy Rees coached the USA at four U-17 World Cups, from 1987 through 1993, a tenure during which the young Americans celebrated historic victories over Brazil and Italy. Rees also co-founded the Houston Texans in 1983 and helped create the Dallas Texans in 1993. He died on Saturday at age 74.

Mike Woitalla of Soccer America writes of 'one of the pioneers of the modern period of US Soccer'.


"Roy Rees was one of the pioneers of what might be called the ‘modern’ (post-1984 Olympics) period of U.S. Soccer,” said U.S. Soccer President Sunil Gulati. “He was a terrific leader of our U-17 national team program for many years in taking the team to four FIFA World Cups. He was, at heart, very much a teacher.

“My first trips with U.S. national teams were with Roy in Honduras and I well remember his capable guidance of that team. He had a great sense of humor and I enjoyed working with and learning from him."

Rees, who was born on New Year's Day 1937 in South Wales, coached lower division teams in England, coached Britain’s University Games team, and served as an English FA staff coach for two decades. He came to the USA in the early 1980s to give soccer clinics sponsored by Umbro, and eventually settled in Texas, where he co-founded the Houston Texans, from which spawned the Dallas Texans.

At his second U-17 World Cup with the USA, the Americans beat Brazil for the first time in history.

“The United States deserved to win today,” Brazil’s coach Homero Cavalheiro said after the game. “They were better as a team; they were better individually.”

Rees’ 1989 team included Claudio Reyna, who would go on to represent the USA at four senior World Cups, captaining the 2002 and 2006 teams. Reyna is currently U.S. Soccer Youth Technical Director. Also on the 1989 team was current UCLA coach, Jorge Salcedo.

Rees’ squad at the 1991 U-17 World Cup that defeated host Italy included Albertin Montoya, coach of the 2010 WPS champion Gold Pride and currently coach of the U.S. U-17 girls national team.

Mike Burns and John O'Brien, who played for Rees in the 1987 and 1993 tournaments, went on to star for the full national team.

After his stint as U.S. U-17 coach, Rees continued to serve as a U.S Soccer coaching instructor through 1997 and before his retirement directed youth clubs in Oklahoma (Tulsa Thunder) and Southern California (Southwest SC and Santa Anita). He was a board member of U.S. Club Soccer when it was founded in 2001.

“He was a good soccer man,” said Gulati.

Roy Rees is survived by his wife, Ann, his sons Stephen and Philip, and his daughter Sian.

Cameron Ocasio on Law and Order Special Victims Unit Tonight!

IMTA alum Cameron Ocasio is guest-starring on the hit drama Law and Order Special Victims Unit airing tonight. According to Bing : "Cameron Ocasio plays Nico Gray, a gypsy boy who goes missing after going to school alone for the first time. 'Law & Order: SVU'."

Cameron competed at IMTA in New York in 2008. When he competed at IMTA, he won TV Beauty for his talent division. He was 1st Runner Up for both Male Child Model of the Year and Actor of the Year, Talent Division 11. He signed with Shirley Grant Management. Since competing at IMTA, Cameron has appeared on Saturday Night Live, Gossip Girls, When In Rome and Sesame Street as well as in several national commercials. He recently appeared on Broadway in "Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson". He has also appeared in the films Sinister and Love Magic.

Be sure to tune into Law and Order tonight to see Cameron!

Victoria's Secret Fashion Show: 10 Years of 'Fantasy Bras

Australian model Miranda Kerr donned the Fantasy Treasure Bra - worth $2.5 million - for the event. The aqua push-up bra reportedly features nearly 3,400 hand-set precious gems, including white and yellow diamonds, pearls, citrines and aquamarines, all set in white and yellow gold.

Adriana Lima, Doutzen Kroes, Chanel Iman and Candice Swanepoel are among the other models featured in the show, wearing bras and panties accessorized with lace-up stilettos, tutus, flamenco skirts and leg warmers.

The lingeries isn't the only reason to tune in - there are also performances from Kanye West, Nicki Minaj and Maroon 5. Jay-Z also made a surprise appearance, performing a song with West from their "Watch the Throne" album.

Last year, the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show had the most viewers in its timeslot: about 9 million in the U.S., according to Nielsen. The show airs in more than 90 countries.

View more Photos of Victoria's Secret Fashion Show

Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show 2011:Jay-Z Kanye West, Maroon 5, Nicki Minaj Photos

NEW YORK - The first thing you need to know about successful insanity Victoria Secret fashion show is that it is a fashion show at all. There is nothing fashionable about it. Girls are not angry or pout off the runway, high fashion models. These creatures dream come smile. And a nod, wave, dance and blow kisses while wearing next-to-no underwear. VS models are impossible leggy, rail-thin yet voluptuous curves with pretty faces and big smiles, wide. All senior and made taller by 8-inch heels. (Seriously, and it made me extremely nervous and extremely respectful of them -. if none of them even staggered)

For women, the show is a powerful motivator to swear solids. For men, well, they can only dream of. Not sure of the demographics, but last year the fair attracted nearly 9 million viewers in the United States (and which will air in about 100 countries), and I suppose most are men ogling.

The 2011 show, which airs at 9 pm Tuesday on WBBM-Channel 2, was recorded in early November at the Lexington Avenue Armory in New York before a capacity crowd of about 2,000 people. The show is an annual heat bill there are men who were out to offer hundreds of dollars for a pink pass.

It took about 30 minutes on the treadmill, but opted to an hour for as long as you see it, and there are many things to see, and a group of lingeries models with wings: A smiling Kanye West performed at a stunned crowd, then carries out its partner Jay-Z tour the crowd Giddi and a standing ovation throughout the song. Maroon 5 arrives on stage and in a happy coincidence, vocalist Adam Levine happens to be dating Russian model Anne Vyalitsyna, who sings "moves like Jagger" and plants a kiss on her as it slides down the track. Nicki Minaj rap goddess, adorned with an explosion of confetti dress and a look of annoyance, also performed.

Of special interest is Erin Heatherton own Skokie, 22, an angel of true supermodel who won their wings at the fair last year. "It's the most exciting day of the year for me," he said, adding that his parents had flown to see the show.

Of the 38 angels that walked, the best known are those of Chanel Iman, Miranda Kerr (who had the honor of carrying the $ 2.5 million "Fantasy Treasure bra", and her husband, actor Orlando Bloom, sat in the front row and stood up every time I walked down the runway), Alessandra Ambrosio, Adriana Lima, Lily Aldridge and Lindsey Ellingson. 

 

It gets bigger every year, and 2011 was no exception. Enjoy this photo gallery of photos from the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in New York City, featuring performances by Jay-Z and Kanye West, Maroon 5, Nicki Minaj and more.