No Room at the Inn

You do the math: South Korea is expecting 140,000 visitors during the World Cup but has only 40,000 hotel rooms and 10,000 homestays. The government has had to enlist thousands of love hotels to plug the gap. They are called “budget inns” on the official accommodation website, worldinn.com, but most are the kind that rent rooms by the hourup to a maximum of four hoursand where guests slip in through entrances artfully hidden behind massive potted plants. Worried that foreigners may get the wrong idea, the government recently ordered the hotels to abide by some decency rules: they must eschew such suggestive props as water beds, mirrors on the ceiling and porno posters. Hwang Seong Un, deputy director at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, says that “the only difference is these motels have no lobby.” He apparently hasn’t noticed the red lights (they are everywhere), the video shelves on every floor offering titles like Sex Toy and Shining Lust, and the heavy pink curtains on the windows, drawn 24 hours a day. Don’t bring the kids.

The Divine PonyTail Tells All
By JEFF ISRAELY Rome
He may be a practicing buddhist and one of the cleanest players in the game, but Italian star Roberto Baggio has a nasty streak just like the rest of us. In his autobiography, A Goal in the Sky, due out this month, Baggio, 34, trashes many of the famous coaches he has encountered during his long career. “The Divine Ponytail” takes angry sideswipes at Renzo Ulivieri and Fabio Capello, but reserves special venom for Marcello Lippi, his tormentor at both Juventus and Inter Milan. Baggio claims Lippi tried to recruit him as a locker-room spy and then tried to destroy his career. Notably absent from this roll of dishonor is current Italy coach Giovanni (“Trap”) Trapattoni, in whose hands rest Baggio’s dreams of making his fourth World Cup. In a year at the helm, Trap hasn’t tapped the veteran forward, but he hasn’t ruled Baggio out of his plans for Korea/Japan. Either way, he could get a chapter of his own in Baggio’s sequel.

Saviola Sits It Out
By ANDREW DOWNIE Rio de Janeiro
Life can be hard for a teenager saddled with the nickname “El Conejo,” the rabbit. But Javier Saviola has more serious problems at hand. The 19-year-old Argentine sensation is banging in goals aplenty for his Spanish club, Barcelona, in the world’s best league, but he still can’t find a place on the national side. Coach Marcelo Bielsa has an abundance of superb forwards to choose from (Gabriel Batistuta, Hernan Crespo, Claudio Lopez, Ariel Ortega, Kily Gonzales, Gustavo Lopez … we could go on) and Saviola looks likely to sit out Korea/Japan. Still, he has time on his side. And history, too: five World Cups ago, another diminutive teenage prodigy with an unflattering nickname”Pelusa” or “The Wild-Haired One”found himself confined to the Argentine bench. Argentina won that Cup, and the snubbed teenager went on to become the finest player of his age: Diego Maradona.

Brazilian Back to the Future
By ANDREW DOWNIE
Brazil, too, may be counting on a repeat of history. The buzz in Rio de Janeiro is that Carlos Alberto Parreira is about to be recalled as coach, to replace the unimaginative Luis Felipe Scolari. After a scratchy qualification campaign under four different coaches, the four-time winners need to start looking like champions again, and who better to do that than the man who twice led them to glory, as player and as coach. Parreira knows exactly how hard it can be to please his football-mad countrymen: he once said the national team has 170 million coaches. But few can argue with his record. Besides, superstitious Brazilians will remember what happened the last time the country changed coaches on the eve of the Cup, in 1970: the new man, Mario Zagalo, led the side to victory.