The Orgy is No Longer Alleged

There were mutterings last week about some serious partying certain members of the Peruvian national team — including Chelsea’s Claudio Pizarro — got up to following their 1-1 draw with Brazil during the last round of South American World Cup qualifying. Since their next match was only days away and resulted in a dismal 5-1 loss to Ecuador, no one in Peru — the members Peruvian Football Federation (FPF) included — was very happy when a TV show reported that the players had allegedly engaged in a forbidden “night of pleasure with women and alcohol” between the two matches.

Well, the FPF has investigated, and the “alleged” part of the story is gone.

According to press reports today, the FPF has talked with employees of the hotel at which the team were staying and examined CCTV footage and photographs, all of which contain enough evidence for federation head Juvenal Silva to suspend four players. If Silva’s decision is ratified by the rest of the Federation, the four — Pizarro, Jefferson Farfan of PSV Eindhoven, Andres Mendoza of Ukraine’s Metallurg, and Santiago Acasiete of Almeria — will serve indefinite suspensions, and may even find themselves banned from the team for good. Yikes.

There have been problems in the Peruvian national team for a while, and the players are frequently accused of bad behavior (with the exception, one assumes, of Nolberto Solano, who doesn’t have an inappropriate bone in his body). They, in turn, tend to blame the problems on the over-eager attention of the press, but it’s going to be awfully hard to talk their collective way out of this one.

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Category: South America, World Football