Globe-trotter Milu may stay back in china

n An old Samurai-style fortress with some 1,600 bottles of vintage French wine in the cellar, in the peace and quiet of a rural Japan on the Pacific coast. There may be no more fitting base camp for Japan’s World Cup campaign on home turf under the rule of a latter-day shogun, firebrand French coach Philippe Troussier. “It is the right place where we can perfectly maintain tranquility within the team,” Troussier said last November when he picked an exclusive golf link resort here to accommodate Japan’s 23 World Cup Samurais.

“We can feel something of zen,” he said. But aside from its spiritual aura, Katsuragi Kitanomaruis grappling with the prosaic realities of the modern world with less than two months to go before the World Cup kicks off on May 31. The hotel on a hill — five traditional Japanese houses resembling a flat Samurai residence — needs to install antennas to improve mobile-phone reception and the all-important reception of satellite television channels, for football matches in particular.

A word of wisdom from a champ

n ZAGREB: Croatia’s World Cup slalom winner Ivica Kostelic has urged national soccer team’s veteran playmaker Robert Prosinecki to quit smoking ahead of the World Cup. “It’s in our national interest to make Robert quit smoking,” Kostelic said while hosting an anti-smoking telephone hotline.

“Look at how he plays and runs as a smoker. Imagine what he could do if he stopped smoking, no one could come near him,” Kostelic was quoted as saying in Jutarnji List daily on Thursday. The 33-year old Prosinecki, now with English first division side Portsmouth, is key to Croatia’s mid-field, depleted since the departure of several internationals who helped the squad to third place at the 1998 World Cup in France. The former member of Dinamo Zagreb, Red Star Belgrade, Real Madrid and Barcelona, is known to be smoking at least one pack of cigarettes a day.