Real Madrid clinches 32nd spanish title

 SPORT

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Football season's near the end in most european leagues. FC Porto and Ajax assured national titles in Portugal and Netherlands, but at the moment the strongest european league is the Spanish, where Real Madrid has just conquered its record-extending 32nd Spanish soccer league title with a 3-0 win over Athletic Bilbao. Barcelona’s Lionel Messi settled with a European goal-scoring record.

Gonzalo Higuain, Mesut Ozil and Cristiano Ronaldo scored - as the "merengues" pushed their single-season Spanish scoring record to 115 goals - to give Real its first La Liga title since 2008 and end Barcelona’s three-year reign as champion. New champion has 94 points, seven more than its arch rival with two matches left. “The league is even harder when you fight for it with a team like Barcelona,” Ronaldo, who missed a penalty kick, said in comments on Real’s website. “We were better than them.”

The victory gives Real manager Jose Mourinho (seven) championships in four different countries, following titles with Porto, in his native Portugal, Chelsea, in England, and Inter Milan. 




“I won the league title in Portugal, Italy and England, but this one has been the toughest,” Mourinho told RealmadridTV. “I’ve won seven league titles overall and I know what it feels like.”

Ronaldo lifted his league tally to 44 goals, two fewer than Messi, who scored three times last night in a 4-1 win over Malaga to break the record for goals in a European season.





Hilarious political boycott on Euro'2012

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Austria, Belgium and the Netherlands announced this week they would not send government ministers to the Euro 2012 soccer tournament because of the way that co-host nation Ukraine has treated imprisoned former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko. 

It is a laughable statement considering they have not been selected to play. However, meant as political signal to Kiev this move has been the only media decision they could think of in order to get some sort of reaction. As it was in the past, governments are still using sport as a political instrument to do their job. 









This statements are even more silly considering that none of the European soccer federations involved in the tournament have boycotted the event and UEFA chief Michel Platini said in an interview last week that the European Championships would continue on as planned.

Calls for the snub first came from two German ministers and EU justice commissioner Viviane Reding at the weekend. In recent days Austria, Belgium and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said they will not go. The Netherlands has also threatened to stay away.

The President of Poland - which is co-hosting Euro2012 with Ukraine - has accused EU politicians planning to boycott Ukrainian matches of ulterior motives. Bronislaw Komorowski said the crackdown on opposition in Ukraine is not comparable to events which prompted previous Western boycotts - of the Moscow Olympics in 1980 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008. "These were the effects of war which Russia launched against Afghanistan or the bloody repression of Tibetans' aspirations for freedom, where blood was spilt, where there were mass arrests, jailings and so on. But the situation in Ukraine is not like that. We all understand this perfectly. So it is possible to speculate there are some other calculations being made."

Komorowski's remark on "other calculations" is an allusion to concerns that some EU countries are using human rights as a pretext for harming EU-Ukraine integration.The countries on the boycott list have in the past opposed moves to give Ukraine a promise of future EU accession.

The man made his point.