Ballgame *

Thanks to the Press Association's web site, we read about 50 Cent's interest in the beautiful game:

"Rapper 50 Cent has revealed how he fell in love with football - via
drug-dealing.
He told FourFourTwo magazine: "I was introduced to soccer in a roundabout way through my uncle Trevor who was dealing at that time.
"Trevor and Carlos, who was a Colombian, used to always hang around at my grandmother's. I'd listen to what they were talking about and it would be soccer and especially the World Cup.
"Ha, ha, well I soon clicked that when they were talking about the different teams they were actually using a code to talk about and negotiate various drug deals.
"So, if there was a lot of talk about about the progress of the Jamaican team trying to qualify and then I knew they'd be talking about selling weed.
"They mainly talked about the South American teams though and I started to understand that if they were excited about Mexico, for example, it meant that they'd be expecting a shipment of cocaine from there.
"So they'd follow certain teams depending on what deals were going down. I remember the Mexico and Argentina teams going on really good winning runs at one point, and it seemed that the more games they won the more money would be going around the house!"

*Kevin Devine