Cristiano Will Always Be CR7: Boring Euro Qualifiers...Part Two; Italy vs Serbia...World War III

I am not a fan of international weeks, because my beloved Reds are farmed out to NTs, where they could be hurt. Fortunately we have made it through the week of madness unscathed. My other reason for despising these weeks is because I love United and I love our players when they're playing with each other...not against each other. It's unnatural.
So...for today

ICELAND VS PORTUGAL
Paulo Bento's boys traveled to Reykjavik (I would do anything to hear Cristiano and company try to pronounce that with their zha zha zha Portuguese) to take on a pesky Icelandic side. I hooted when I saw some of the names (and if you're reading from anywhere in Iceland I don't mean this as a slur). To start with, they played in Laugardalsvollur Stadium...say that fast five times.
I was following the match on soccernet because I didn't have an adequate internet connection to watch the match on ESPN3. When the live commentary was rolling up I thought maybe the author was making a mistake with the names, but NOPE...here we go... Gunnleifur Gunnleifsson, Birkir Mar Saevarsson, Helgi Danielsson (I think his sister Helga plays for the women's team...haha), Hermann Hreidarsson, the Sigurdsson triplets...Ragnar, Indridi, and Kristjan Orn, and of course Eidur Gudjohnsen...now I know him because he plays for Stoke!
I imagine that the match official had to really check his spellings for the post-match writeup. :) It's probably a good thing that it wasn't held in Portugal. Could you imagine the PA announcer trying to pronounce those names?
"Number 18...uh...Number 19..."
I guess I can't say anything...we have Oguchi Onyewu and Josmer Altidore on our USA team... :)

Anyway...back to the match...Ronny scored in the 3', Helgi Danielsson in the 18', Raul Meireles in the 27', and Helder Postiga in the 72'. 1-3 Portugal.

ENGLAND VS MONTENEGRO
0-0
The only thing positive that England can take away from this is the other team didn't score. So you could say it was a defensive night for the Three Lions. The Sun was not so kind..."ROObish" Of course in reference to new boo-boy Wayne Rooney.
To Montenegro...congratulations on not giving up a goal. To England...Dudes...you invented footy...GET IN THERE!

FRANCE VS LUXEMBOURG
I hate to be the one to say "I told you so..." but...I did. I knew that Laurent Blanc would get Les Bleus back on track and he has done just that.
Karim Benzema seems to think that he only plays for the NT because he never plays this well for RM. I'm sure his bosses, Dumb and Dumber, and I'm So Special will be having a few words with him on his return to Madrid.
For the second match in a row he was on fire and scored the first goal (honestly, I think the keeper should have had it, but I will give the Benz some credit here as I normally slate him vigorously). And my lovely Lashes Gourcuff scored for the second-straight match to secure a 2-0 win for Blanc's Bleus.
Giving the 'Bourgs some credit, they were playing a man down shortly after the half when Rene Peters decided to hack at Lashes and was given his second yellow. Au Revoir. So the score could have been much worse had they not bolstered their defense a bit.

I won't comment on other matches of the day because I can't be bothered...except for one:

SERBIA VS ITALY
Here is the entire match commentary on soccernet:
0'-- Game on!
3'--Slobodan Rajkovic is awarded a yellow card. Reason: dissent
3'--Match suspended
3'--Match abandoned

WHAT? I was first alerted to this match as I scrolled the scores from other matches. When I saw "0-0 aban" I was perplexed as to what "aban" stood for. ABANDONED. My first thought was that there was an electrical mishap. Or that a tornado swept through the stadium.
The reason? Everything involving a match that is played with Serbia is a police state. The match had started late because some yobs (see photo) used wire cutters to cut through fencing around the stadium, attacked their own team's bus (forcing the keeper to take his name off the sheet), and clashed with police outside the stadium. It wasn't even being played in Belgrade or Kosovo...it was being played in Genoa, Italy!! Now I am no fan of the Italians (WC..Zizou...Materazzi...Enough said), but this kind of ridiculousness should never happen in a footy match.
So my question is...after years of this behavior...Why is Serbia allowed to play in any international event?
I would hope that FIFA and UEFA would come down hard on them (but then I realize who runs FIFA...Septic Bladder). When United's Nemanja Vidic announced his retirement from international play (he played for Serbia) this year I wondered why...now I know.

Here is a newspaper's account as to why the Serbian yobs show up at all:

Serbian supporters fired flares at rival Italian fans and the Italian goalkeeper. This followed clashes between the police and Serbs outside the stadium before the match. Reports claimed that Serbian hooligans attacked their own team's bus prompting the team's goalkeeper to withdraw his name from the starting line-up out of fear for his life. Serbian nationalists in the crowd unfurled banners - "Kosovo is Serbia." The Balkans conflict continues to smolder.
Serbian soccer hooliganism's role in the Balkans War of the nineties was profound and deadly. In May 1990, with Communism falling across Europe, the internal pressure inside Yugoslavia imploded after the Serbian team, Red Star Belgrade, traveled to the Croatian capital to play Dynamo Zagreb. What followed is considered to be the most atrocious hooligan riot in living memory. Thousands of Red Star hooligans, known as the "Delije" - the "heroes", battled with thousands of tooled up "Bad Blue Boys," the Zagreb mob. The stadium burned. The fuse was lit. The kick off for the genocidal Balkans War drew closer.
The supporters of Belgrade's two soccer teams, Red Star and Partizan (possessed of its own mob called the "Gravediggers,") became the recruiting office for a feared Serbian paramilitary unit that brought havoc to Croatia and Bosnia. "The Tigers" were a disciplined and lethal brigade under the Commander "Arkan", a nom de guerre that struck fear into the populations seeking to break away from the Serb dominated Yugoslavia.
Under socialism, soccer club allegiances became the vehicle for protest against the unified ideology of the Yugoslav regime. Nationalism cauterized inside the stadiums from the seventies onwards. Soccer power was organized and choreographed, the colors of Partizan and Red Star welded to the hearts of the Belgrade population, the hammer and sickle less so. The iron fist of mass hooliganism could not be denied when socialism was finally sent off.
With the political status of Kosovo still unsettled today - many Serbs see Kosovo as the spiritual home of their people - the protest in Italy suggests that the fire in the belly of Serbian nationalism still lies on the football terracing. How far Serbia is willing to go to deny Kosovo as independent remains to be seen.