Double Czeching Your Geography

May 28th, 2008 | by: chris | Comments(6)

I couldn’t help myself. My deepest apologies.

The Czech Republic has been nominated for the first deep investigation into its education system for their stupidity this summer (and they won’t be the only one).

The suits at the Czech FA found themselves mighty red in the cheeks after their tune-up friendly versus Lithuania yesterday, because somebody forgot to tell them Lithuania is not, in fact, Latvia. Even if one is right on top of the other, so they could easily be confused if they were preparing for this game by only looking at a map.

It was bad enough that the Czech FA put the Latvian flag and the team picture of Latvia into the game program, something which probably wasn’t all that easy to change, but apparently nobody realized the gaffe and they played the Latvian national anthem before the game. It’s really unfortunate we don’t have any video of the Lithuanian players looking around in bewilderment.

Of course, this is mighty embarrassing for the federation and, as one would expect, the people who oversaw this got their walking papers today (one, the spokesperson who appears to be the biggest of big involved here, actually fell on his sword before anyone could fire him).

But really, how many hands did those programs have to go through before the national anthem was played without anybody realizing this? Not a single person with any influence had any idea? Yikes.

Anyway, Lithuania, Latvia, didn’t really matter. Jan Koller was the balls, scoring one in each half as he attempts to go out on top at the Euros.