What better way to warm up for the World Cup than joining Sport.co.uk in celebrating some of the competition’s most bizarre by-products from over the years? You can stop pensively picking your nose with your pen now, because there isn’t one. Unless you’re one of the players, in which case the best way to warm up for the World Cup would be, you know, warming up and that. So, without further ado - or indeed Freddy Adu - here is Sport.co.uk’s 5th weirdest World Cup fact for your delectation…
Sheikh tells off referee, Sean Connery commentates
Kuwait’s one and only appearance at the World Cup finals came in Spain ’82 and they started well, with a 1-1 draw against Czechoslovakia.
Their second match, however, would prove to be much more memorable, if not as happy from a Kuwaiti perspective. 3-0 down to France, Abdullah Al-Bouloushi pulled one back from a quickly taken free-kick before Alain Giresse broke away and put the French 4-1 up.
The Kuwaiti players surrounded Soviet referee Miroslav Stupar, claiming that they had heard a whistle in the crowd that caused them to stop playing in the lead-up to France’s fourth. The referee refused to change his mind and the Kuwait team looked set to walk off the pitch until Sheikh Fahid Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, president of the Kuwaiti Football Association and brother of the Kuwaiti Emir, made his way down from the royal box in order to berate the referee on the touchline.
Lo and behold, Stupar reversed his decision and disallowed the goal - one of five France goals that he ruled out that day (!) - but it made little difference as Maxime Bossis restored France’s three-goal advantage soon afterwards and the game ended 4-1.
Would you like to see a video of these events narrated by Sean Connery? We bet you would. (Although quite why the person who uploaded the video decided to label Connery’s summary as “racist”, we don’t know…)
Other points of interest:
Sheikh al-Sabah was later killed in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990.
Bernard Genghini, who played midfield for France that day,
is in fact a cartoon character.
Watch this space for more weird World Cup facts!