Santos Paid Alajuela to Win, Alajuela Players Say
By Rod Hughes
And other soccer tales. Two Alajuela stars spilled the beans on the Channel 7 TV sports section of the news program Telenoticias: Santos paid five million colones to the Alajuela club to beat Cartago in the final game of the regular season. They did handily, 2-0. For Santos, though,the money was wasted— Santos hoped to beat Liberia and avoid demotion to the Second Division, Santos only tied with the Guanacaste club. Bye-bye Santos.
Whatever the official ruling from FEDEFUT will be on the, shall we say, unique arrangement of bribing a club to help you avoid the cellar, it is bound to raise eyebrows. Of course if Santos had paid the club to lose, it would have raised an outcry that would have echoed throughout the rest of the century. But to Alajuela stopper Harold Wallace it was merely an “incentive” to win and to his teammate Pablo Herrera it was a “clean negotiation. Ummm…
But the Alajuela club directorate reacted like Pontius Pilate scrubbing his hands. In Guapiles, the Santos hierarchy also pleaded surpise. According to the daily paper La Nación, to receive such incentives to win carries no penalty.
UPDATE: Friday’s La Nacion published an interview with Guapiles businessman Mario Villaplana who admits he gave the Alajuela club a bribe to beat Cartago but now says he repents the gesture—especially since it did his beloved Santos no good at all. He said it was in a light-hearted spirit that he told the Alajuela players (in typical Tico diminuitive style) “Here, take this itty-bitty present from someone who loves his itty-bitty team and doesn’t want to see it drop into the Second Division.”
Villaplana says he paid up last Tuesday, the day after the telecast in which two Alajuela plaers revealed the “little gift.” The Guapiles loyalist said he visited the Alajuela players before the Sunday closing game and presented his proposal. He said they laughed and told him they would play to win, anyway, since they wanted to nail down their first place in the overall standings.
Meanwhile, the finish of the regular 2007-8 season claimed its first casualty. A disappointed Liberia directorate fired Colombian head coach Carlos Restrepo after the Guanacaste province club’s lackluster showing this year, in which Liberia won five, lost five and tied six. An unidentified source told La Nación that the directors are considering two Costa Rican and two foreign candidates to fill Restrepos’s shoes.
And finally, former Saprissa star Alvaro SaborÃo is having a fine time with the Swiss soccer club FC Sion, racking up 32 goals in two seasons, 17 of them this year alone. He ranks number three in Swiss league scorers and ranks with Paulo Cesar Wanchope’s best season when he played for Derby Country (England) in 1997-98 and not far behind Ronald Gómez for Crete in the Greek league in the 1999-2000 season. (FYI: Remember Shirley Cruz, the young lady who went with Olympique of Lyon in the French feminine league? Well, she has 10.