32 games live on FIFA.com

If you cannot make it to Marseille for the FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup, then logging on to FIFA.com will be the best way of making sure you miss none of the action.

FIFA is giving fans free access to webcasts of the 32 matches in the competition via FIFA.com TV - an interactive service provided by the official site of world football's governing body.

The 32 matches will be broadcast in full in the following European territories:
Albania, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Israel, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, FYR Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Ireland, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom.

Each of the matches will be available with commentary in English at a download speed of 400 kbps.

These live webcasts are just one part of FIFA.com's comprehensive coverage of Marseille 2008, which includes:
• Background articles on the 16 teams with news, columns and interviews.
• Live match coverage on the FIFA.com MatchCast with statistics from the official FIFA database.
• Two-minute video highlights available around the world right after the final whistle.
• The chance for FIFA.com users to vote for the goal of the tournament.
• Special 'Have your say!' section where fans can exchange opinions on Marseille 2008 and more topics besides.

For access to the live webcasts, all you have to do is click on the FIFA.com TV link on the home page.

This article was taken from: FIFA.com

Arshavin fears the worst

Arshavin fears the worst

Russia international Andrei Arshavin is still keen to sign for Barcelona even though the Catalan giants have snapped up Alex Hleb from Arsenal.

However, the 27-year-old, one of the stars of last month's Euro 2008, is concerned that his current club, Zenit St Petersburg, have set his transfer fee too high.

Arshavin said: "As they have signed Hleb, I do not know if they will want me too. We are different players, I know that, but does Barca have more money to spend on me?

"I really hope that they call and can sign me, but Zenit is asking for so much money. I know nothing more than that Barca offered £12million and Zenit said £24million, which is a lot.

"I have made my decision and Dick Advocaat knows clearly that I will go. I do not know if it will be to London, but my desire is well known.

"Now I do not want to not play or train for weeks. I agreed with the coach, with the club's permission, that I would only play if necessary while a transfer is sorted out.

"I was not in London negotiating anything. My club let me have a holiday after the European Championships, but I did not go to London."

This article was taken from: Football.co.uk

The best soccer Web sites and books to read during the Euro 2008 tournament.

The Ball Is Round

By Jody Rosen

On Saturday, the curtain lifts on the UEFA European Soccer Championship, a quadrennial rite that sublimates centuries of murderous nationalism into three weeks of slide tackles and corner kicks. Euro 2008 will feature 16 teams, including first-time participant Austria, which is co-hosting the competition with neighboring Switzerland. There is a notable absence: England, whose pitiful performance in the qualifying rounds has spared authorities in Innsbruck and Geneva the hassle of deploying storm troopers to prevent the pillaging of its tree-lined squares by visiting British fans.

Euro 2008 promises familiar spectacles—tactical brilliance by the Italians, athleticism from the Germans, forceful attacking by perennially underachieving Spain, and South American-style flair from Euro 2004 runner-up Portugal, whose 23-year-old winger Cristiano Ronaldo may be the world's best player. In the early round-robin group stage, all eyes will be on the "group of death," Group C, which includes three of the competition's powerhouses: Italy, France, and the Netherlands. Not to be missed is the Italy-France showdown on June 17, a rematch of the 2006 World Cup final—this time, presumably, with less head-butting.

News wonks can get their Euro 2008 fix by clicking refresh on Reuters Soccer Blog and the online edition of the popular glossy FourFourTwo. A livelier read is When Saturday Comes, a British publication that launched in the mid-1980s as a zine and has maintained a funny, frisky outsider's perspective on soccer's on- and off-field circuses. (Its tag line: "The Half-Decent Football Magazine.") When Saturday Comes' worldview is tinged by England's footballing inferiority complex. The introduction to its Euro 2008 blog poses the question: "Will Euro 2008 live up to the claim we made during World Cup 94 that major championships are better when England aren't involved?"

More English wit can be found in the Guardian's online Euro 2008 coverage, including a daily podcast hosted by James Richardson, a likable wag and an expert on continental soccer. But the highlights of the Guardian's coverage are its minute-by-minute match reports, which have elevated live-blogging to a gonzo literary art. Barry Glendenning's report of the Greece-Portugal Euro 2004 final typifies the glories of the form: a mix of lyrical play-by-play ("A Maniche snap-shot from the edge of the penalty area fizzes inches wide of Nikopolidis's right upright"); cheeky asides ("The camera focuses on the Prime Minister of Portugal. A woman beside him, who could well be his wife, is frantically waving a Portugal flag. I was going to write that I couldn't imagine Cherie Blair doing that, but I suppose I can"); cries of exasperation ("The Greek fans are making all the noise, while the Portuguese, who are obviously in the majority, appear to have succumbed to narcolepsy. I'm not far off it myself—a goal would be nice"); and lots of snippy real-time e-mail interactions with readers at home.

For colorful local perspective on the Euro 2008 drama, there's no substitute for the fulminations of sports dailies like Italy's La Gazzetta dello Sport, France's L'Équipe, and Germany's SportBild. Those of us whose Portuguese isn't quite up to a breezy skim of O Jogo may instead wish to consult Socceranto, a book published online in 2006 that proposes a universal language for the world's game, combining soccer slang and words culled from "the official languages spoken by each of the countries to have won the World Cup to date." I'm not sure I can imagine anyone actually speaking a sentence like: "Didier Drogba is a natural müller but has been accused by some tifosi in England of betraying the jogo bonito with klinsmanns in the mixer and even maradonas." Still, I'm happy to have learned the word Fliegenfanger—German for flycatcher, Socceranto for useless goalkeeper. It'll come in handy, I'm sure, as Euro 2008 progresses.

A more serious read is Soccer in Sun and Shadow by Uruguayan novelist Eduardo Galeano. Originally published in 1998, it is an eloquent, occasionally bombastic love letter to the game, comprising dozens of short essays with titles like "The Language of Soccer Doctors" and "The Perfect Kiss Would Like To Be Unique." Galeano has a fatalistic, purist take on the sport: "The history of soccer is a sad voyage from beauty to duty. When the sport became an industry, the beauty that blossoms from the joy of play got torn out by its very roots." But there is joyful play in Galeano's writing about great players and great goals, even in these fallen times. Of Italian striker Roberto Baggio, a star of the 1980s and '90s, Galeano says, "His legs have a mind of their own, his foot shoots by itself. … Baggio is a big horsetail that flicks away opponents as he flows forward in an elegant wave."

Perhaps the finest—certainly the stoutest—soccer history ever written is David Goldblatt's 974-page The Ball Is Round: A Global History of Soccer (2006), which crams it all in, from the game's ancient prehistory in Tan dynasty China to Zinedine Zidane. Goldblatt thinks and writes lucidly, offering insights on the social and economic aspects of soccer in the globalized age. He makes big claims for the sport, arguing that "no single world religion can match its geographical scope" and pointing out that almost half the planet watched the 2006 World Cup Final: "Three billion humans have never done anything simultaneously before," he writes. The book takes its title from a famous saying by German soccer legend Sepp Herberger. It nicely sums up the pleasures awaiting the millions of armchair coaches who will settle in this weekend for 22 straight days of matches: "The ball is round. The game lasts ninety minutes. Everything else is theory."

This article was taken from: Slate.com

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Capture Perfect Digital Sports and Action Shots - Digital Photography Tips Complementary Guide

by: Yvonne Grubb

What gets you all excited about your favourite sport? ... the thrill of the chase in horse racing or maybe the atmosphere and tension of a ball game, maybe your favourite player? ... Well if you were to capture some of these scenes how would you do it best? For some digital photography tips, let’s take a look at a few ideas right now to capture that realism ...

Get Familiar

It’s worth getting familiar with the sport before you start shooting, for example, how points are scored, what causes penalties etc, as this will give you an advantage over others … you will learn to expect where the best action is likely to be, and you can then capture those glorious moments.

Another great tip, as well as aiming to catch the action, capture the ‘emotion’ too. Be ready to shoot players’ faces on triumph of a goal, or any other emotive action in the game and you will bring your photos alive!

Be Prepared

Cold and bad weather conditions can quickly rob the life of your digital camera’s battery, so it’s important to always carry an extra charged battery especially for outdoor sports.

Action Techniques

Stop Action … you’ll very quickly be able to shoot an action shot and ‘freeze’ your subject practically in mid air. Imagine the wheels of a drag car on a dirt road, bouncing off the many bumps … for those few seconds while the car is in mid air, snap away to capture the action.

Lighting is not too much of an issue if you’re outside on a sunny or partially sunny day say at a car race, dog track, or horse race etc, but you’ll maybe need to make adjustments if you’re inside a gymnasium shooting a basketball game, for example. If the lighting is bright, then you’ll probably be okay, but depending on the type of lighting, you may need to activate your fill flash if you shoot players in action and you find your photo colorisation shifting to ‘yellow’.

Also bear in mind the distance, as your flash will not carry too far … it might be worth sitting near the basket hoop to catch the action!

Blurred Action … a couple of ideas behind blurred action is, firstly … if you look back at your photos you have taken using Stop Action, you may find one or two shots that did not freeze the action, which means your camera did not catch the action at the right moment … so you end up with an interestingly blurry effect to your subject.

Secondly, if you’re shooting a ball game, for example, you may get blurring if your player moves just as you click your shutter. If you did not intend for this to happen, you might be pleasantly surprised with the effect!

Panned Action … the most difficult to accomplish, but probably the most effective shooting technique, once mastered. The advantage using your digital camera is that you can delete unwanted frames and start again, so here’s how panning basically works...

Using your digital camera in automatic mode press the shutter half way down to focus on your subject, moving your camera sideways following the action, then pressing the shutter fully while still moving your camera. The effect created is the front of your subject should remain in fairly strong focus, while the back of your subject should start to blur, and as it blurs a long trail should appear, giving a feeling of movement like no other effect could possibly achieve.

Experiment

By knowing what your digital camera can do, experiment with different methods to get the best shots. You could try shooting in continuous mode, then try panning the camera along with your subject, whilst he/she or it is in motion.

I hope these digital photography tips are helpful. If you can get to grips with panning, as I have described above, you’re on a winner!

About The Author

Yvonne Grubb owns http://www.www.digital-photo-tutorial.com which offers people information on digital photography tips