June 22: Samu in action for Nigeria

Samu Chukwueze passed up a chance to play for Nigeria’s youth side this summer, preferring to try his luck with the national side, and he’s in the starting lineup as the Super Eagles take on Burundi today. Hopefully he has better luck than Cedric Bakambu—his DR Congo side went down 2-0 to Uganda today.

I want to acknowledge the nice interview Villarreal did with me recently—if you’d like to read it and learn a bit about me, here it is.

Not much else to report as far as transfer rumors are concerned, but I did find this interesting article in Italian about Nicki Bille, who—well before Ruben Semedo—was a player whose off-the-field problems overshadowed any talent he may have had. (Nicki Bille does have the distinction of being the only Villarreal player I’ve ever unfollowed on twitter—I should have known then that his vulgarity and violent language foreshadowed the sort of problems he’s had). As the article notes, he’s had anger issues everywhere he’s been, and his career has ended—he was dismissed by a Danish second-division team after attacking people in a shop and he was shot in the arm in an attempted murder, apparently. So at age 31, he’s out of football, while his cousin Daniel Wass plays in the Champions League.

Finally, nothing to do with Villarreal at all, but I liked this article on French women’s coach Corinne Dacre, who coached in Ligue 2 for a time with Clermont-Ferrand before taking the French national team job. Enjoy.