Remember like four years ago when everybody was all "George Allen is probably the next president, he is like awesome and his dad was a football coach and maybe because of that he has this undying reservoir of football metaphors for politics and life and most of them don't make sense but who cares he is from Virginia and a regular guy and that is good enough for us"? And then of course a bunch of stuff happened in American politics and that didn't work out. And/but/so also remember when he was running for reelection to his senate seat and called one of his opponent's (now-senator jim webb, by all accounts a man of the not-to-be-F'd-with sort) staffers "macaca" and thereby doomed his reelection bid, lost his seat, and forfeited any real consideration as a presidential nominee?
Ex River Plate/Ex Barcelona/Ex perennial loan boy/Ex next-big-thing Maxi Lopez just did the same thing! Sort of! The Argentine striker has fallen off most people's radar by now but after flopping at a few European clubs he went back to South America. Not even Argentina, but across the border to Brazilian club Gremio. During last week's Copa Libertadores semi-final first leg against Cruzeiro he is accused of calling a black opponent "macaca". With the George Allen fiasco the media spent weeks and weeks trying to determine if he meant it in that way, if it was really that offensive, if Jim Webb ever picked on black people, if it mattered that George Allen was maybe an ethnic minority himself in some distant way. In this instance things were much different. After police boarded the Gremio team bus and Maxi Lopez was detained for several hours. He was released after giving a statement and will be the subject of an investigation with possible repercussions. There is a clip of the incident here. It is tough to tell what he said but the Cruzeiro players around him react in a very different way than players usually do to standard trash talk. Who knows?
Race-based taunting is a crime in Brazil and there is precedent for this kind of thing. Grafite, the top scorer in Germany last season accused another Argentine player of the same thing back in 2005 in a Copa Lib match. He too was detained and forced to pay a 5,000 dollar fine. Then Grafite withdrew the accusation. Sorry dude, my bad, didn't mean it. With that in mind I think we should be skeptical about the veracity of Elicarlos' claim. Although if proven Lopez should be punished, I think it is easy and convenient to make that kind of charge in the first leg of a two legged semi-final. We will see.
But seriously, what happened to Maxi Lopez?
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