From El Tiempo.Com

Greens chairman Juan Carlos de la Cuesta revealed that the former Colombia, Ecuador and Guatemala national teams coach Hernán Darío Gómez is in contact the executives of the Colombian Football Federation for a return to the national team coaching post.

de la Cuesta said that Gomez’s main priority is to coach the national team again.

It is now known that Gómez met with Luis Bedoya, president of the Colombian Federation, in order to define the terms of his appointment with the Colombia NT and confirmation of such appointment could arrive after the next executive committee meeting at the Federation’s headquarters.

That meeting is scheduled for the second week of April in Bogotá.

“We are free as well to seek the services of another coach who might be Colombian or foreign,” said de la Cuesta.

The purpose of Nacional’s Executive Board is to have the new coach appointment ready in order to make the necessary arrangements on how to work from June, the 1st when the contract of the current coach Ramón Cabrero expires. Cabrero previously expressed that he will return to his native Argentina at the end of his contract due to health reasons.

(Well if you already checked the WAGs blog you’d already knew that… Never mind, you were probably too busy drooling anyway)

Anyway i’ve made my first new year’s resolution and it is to be around here as much as I can after the stimulus that Daryl has given us all here at the offside. Here’s the deal: daily posts as much as possible. One post in English, the next one in Spanish and so on. We’ll build this blog up as much as we have to.

A Christmas wish that was granted was sponsorship for the Colombian League, since the Colombian anti-tobacco law that banned Mustang, the previous sponsor, the league now has Postobon, a soda company as its main sponsor. (see pic)

The good thing about it is that the sponsor actually gave the league (and, therefore, the teams) a huge first payment in advance which helped a lot ot them to get out of many of their debt. So with that huge relief, now some of the FPC teams want the following christmas presents:

Deportivo Independiente Medellin: The champions (congratulations!) want a striker to replace Korea-bound Jackson Martinez who will sign for Ulsan Hyunday. Other than that, they have a top-notch team already.

Deportivo Cali is getting most of its Christmas shopping done. After the high-profile arrival of Uruguayan NT keeper Juan Castillo and the almost-confirmed signing of Argentine midfielder Sebastian Nayar, they still need a quality attacking mi, a void they have yet to fill ever since Pablo Batalla left.

Atletico Junior: also got most of their gifts. They hired a good coach  and got a talented midfielder in Paulo Cesar Arango. They still need some upgrades in defense and a holding midfielder, but Santa has been kind to them.

Atletico Nacional: Their main wish is Dorlan Pabon, the NT midfielder, but apparently there is some European interest for him. They also want money, and lots of it in case somebody wants to take starlet Giovanni Moreno away from them.

Millonarios wants somebody to buy its new shares that are coming out this month to refinance the team that is in a dire economic crisis.

America de Cali wants to get out of the US list of frozen assets, also known as the “Clinton List” which prevents any company from sponsoring them amid fears of a blockade from the US government. This caused a serious financial crisis as well.

Santa Fe wants Paraguayan signing Cerman Centurón to beef up their defense, so they can make a title run next year.

The rest: Cucuta needs  to get out of relegation zone, Once Caldas wants to win another Libertadores, Pereira also needs money ASAP and Equidad needs to show some ambition from their front office because as one of the of the few teams with the backup of an industrial conglomerate, they’ve shown zero interest in upgrading the team.

We’ll see who gets what. Merry (past already) Christmas and happy New Year.

“All legal, reglamentary and dialogue instances with the hard core supporters in Colombian football have been exhausted with no positive results”: Dimayor

It all started years ago, in my teenage days in Bogotá where small groups of teenagers, all of them more audacious than I was, started forming Colombian versions of the Argentinean barras bravas, the hardcore supporters of every team that in the southern nation have powers and influence over teams way beyond just cheering their teams. The first one was the Comandos Azules (Blue Command) which started as a group of 10 or 20 kids just chanting and jumping on the eastern stands of El Campín, home of Millonarios and Santa Fe, Bogota’s oldest and most traditional rivals. The Comandos Azules support Millonarios and their rival fan base would quickly follow suit thus creating La Guardia Albirroja Sur (The Southern Red and White Guard). And so did the fans of the rest of the teams in the country including the fans of Nacional (pictured), authors of the latest offense. It was amazing to see how these small groups were evolving into bigger groups of 100s and 1000s and how finally they ended up covering whole sections in stadiums, normally the northern or southern curves, which are the ones with the cheapest tickets.

It was all fine and dandy when the kids just jumped and provided great visual entertainment, especially when the teams came out into the field. But that wouldn’t last long and these barras bravas started to become fully operational gangs and to have different gangs within themselves, which in turn into a phenomenon that it’s been seen only in Colombia when it comes to fan violence in football: violence among sets of supporters of the same team. This makes it even harder for the authorities as they now have to separate people wearing the same colors colors as it happened last Saturday went two factions of Nacional’s hardcore supporters squared off while their team was beating Quindío away in Armenia. Nowadays, in any of these barras bravas, you can find drugs, guns, grenades, knives and all sorts of things that have nothing to do in a football stadium.

Violence in football is a byproduct of the society we live in: low access to education, rampant unemployment and social recklessness on behalf of the government. While certainly the cures for these social illnesses cannot come from the fooballing establishment, they must, in turn, do better than the “solution” they are implementing starting next weekend: banning jerseys and gears from the visiting teams. I mean, they must think these are like schoolyard fights. And that just because they won’t wear the colors doesn’t they are not going to look for their next victims. It’s just sad and it shows that with this lack of competent leadership we can’t expect big changes. If the problem’s in the head, don’t expect the body to heal miraculously. They are also “considering” banning road trips for visiting fan groups. Give me a break. As if they don’t know that there have already been deaths because of football-related violence in this country.

But as much as I rant about the Dimayor (the entity that controls the league), they should also be recognized for the part of the decision that they got right: punishing Nacional’s fans because they were the one who caused the trouble even if their team was visiting. Their team will have to play two matches with no public because their fans’ misbehavior. But if it was up to me, I wouldn’t stop there. Here’s what I’d do:

1. Start legal actions against team owners who supported barrabravas. They often help them with buses for their trips, tickets or money for banners. But god knows what such support has been actually used for.

2. Ban footballing road trips permanently. Good that the police is considering it. I would cut it until there’s a drastic reduction in violence.

3. In Bogotá there’s a complex situation: there are big, hardcore fan groups of Medellin’s Atlético Nacional and Cali’s América de Cali. There haven’t been any clashes between them or between any of them and the fans of Santa Fe and Millonarios as of lately because it seems that the Bogotá police has beefed security measures up. Nevertheless, about a year ago there was a death because of a clash between Santa Fe and America’s supporters. I would encourage America’s and Nacional’s supporters in Bogotá to continue in the same line of conduct and warning them that any provocation to the fans of the local teams may wind up costing them their place at the stadium.

4. Along with continuing the security measures, we must have total identification of everyone who gets into a stadium by issuing fan IDs subject to electronic scanning. This has been discussed ad nauseum in Colombian press but still nobody takes action. This is a necessary investment in Colombian football and I hope that with Colombia hosting the Youth World Cup in 2011 it can be implemented.

5. Permanent video surveillance this is somewhat being implemented at El Campín where the whole stadium got to watch on big screen a full scale brawl between two factions of the Comandos at a Millonarios match last year. But it should be improved. The police must be able to have the names and faces of these criminals and throw them in jail, just like they did in England.

6. Start docking points for violence. This may be cause for an argument of “saints paying because of sinners” but I’m sure once it starts happening, violence will be greatly reduced.

7. Ban away fans and not just their clothing if such fan base shows precedents of violence. An option could be to ban them only in games that are “Class A” or high-risk games.

What would you do?