"Little hope remains for united football on the island
By Simon Bahceli
TURKISH Cypriot leader Mehmet Ali Talat’s rejection last week of a Greek Cypriot offer to partially merge football’s governing bodies of the north and south brought two well-worn expressions to mind. One was “beware Greeks bearing gifts” – the thought that must have been running through Talat’s mind. The other was the one about “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”.
The Cyprus Football Association (CFA) ’s proposal had been a long time coming, and stemmed from meetings first held in Zurich in August 2007 between the CFA, the Cyprus Turkish Football Federation (CTFF) and UEFA (Europe’s branch of the world football governing body, FIFA). The aim of the meetings was, in the absence of a blueprint for the reunification the island, to find a way of providing Turkish Cypriot footballers with the opportunity to play teams from outside the narrow borders of the self-proclaimed and internationally-ostracised ‘Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus’."
More: Cyprus Mail
