Politicians seem to have an uncanny knack for knowing precious little about sports. We need more than our fingers and toes to count the number of times one of the elected elite have mispronounced a player’s name, placed a team in the wrong sport or speculated on how many touchdowns it would take to get a penalty kick in the tie game rivalry.
Wait, that last part was a Postal Service lyric.
In any event, a pair of Russian lawmakers are pretty ticked off with a pair of American lawmakers, who are pretty ticked off at Russia for its actions in the turmoil of Ukraine.
Last week, US Republican senators Mark Kirk and Dan Coats sent a letter to FIFA president Sepp Blatter asking that soccer’s governing body kick Russia out of the 2014 World Cup and take the rights to host the 2018 tournament away from them.
So then Russia was all like, “No. YOU should be out of the World Cup, jerks.”
From the AFP:“We ask you to call an extraordinary FIFA meeting and suspend USA’s FIFA membership and to expel their national side from playing in the 2014 World Cup,” said the letter by the two State Duma deputies from President Vladimir Putin’s ruling United Russia party.
The letter said action was needed after the US “aggression against several sovereign states like Yugoslavia, Iraq and Libya” and attempts “to occupy Syria.”
I’m sure Blatter is going to spend loads of time with the letters. And by spend loads of time, I mean go watch Netflix.
We here at Pro Soccer Talk have a great solution: a 2v2 match between teams comprised of Kirk and Coats, as well as the two Russian MPs: Alexander Sidyakin and Mikhail Markelov. Or they could just make one of those awesome political bets where if Russia gets kicked out of the World Cup, the United States gets 50 bowls of Okroshka, while if the States get kicked out, Russia gets 83 pounds of chicken wings.
