Argentina, Nigeria soccer final

Dinesh WEERAWANSA reporting from China

The high-riding Argentina will take on giant killers Nigeria in the final of the Olympic men’s football tournament to be played at the National Stadium here on Saturday night - the penultimate day of the XX1Xth summer Olympiad.

Brazil, who made an unfortunate exit in the semis, will make every effort for a consolation bronze medal when they take on Belgium in the play off match for the third place to be played at Shanghai Stadium on Friday night.

Former World Champions Argentina humbled Brazil 3-0 in their semi final match which was expected to be a thriller. The pre-match predictions proved right until the half time as the scores stood nil-all.

But Argentina cut lose in the second half, scoring three fabulous goals.

It was Sergio Aguero who turned the match in Argentina’s favour with two goals, followed by Juan Riquelme’s penalty which extended the lead.

Argentina will be at full strength for Saturday’s big ‘un and will go all out for that elusive Olympic soccer gold under lights at the Bird’s Nest.

But Nigeria is well determined to prove that their presence in the final was not by a mistake. Nigeria booked their passage to the final with a four smart goals to one win over Belgium.

Nigerian goalkeeper Ambruse Vanzekin has been outstanding in the tournament and would play a keyrole.

Nigeria will be playing in its first Olympic final since Atlanta 1996, where it came back from behind and defeated Argentina 3-2 to win the gold medal.

If Nigerian soccerites could win on Saturday, it will be their first gold medal at Beijing Games.

Meanwhile, The Beijing 2008 Olympic Games “looks to be the biggest broadcast event in the Olympic history.”.

According to Director of television and marketing services for the IOC Timmo Lumme, there are around 5,000 hours of coverage for the Beijing Games, an unprecedented amount of Olympic sports content available to IOC’s rights holding broadcast partners located in over 200 countries and territories around the globe.

The total output of the Beijing Olympic coverage has been three times more than that of Athens Games.

A staggering 842 million people in China tuned in to watch some coverage of the opening ceremony, which surpassed the Sydney and the Athens opening ceremony in the major markets from various parts of the world.

Here in China, over one billion people have watched one or more Olympic sports programs and the worldwide TV audience is expected to reach a record high when Argentina meets Nigeria in the football final on Saturday night.

The Beijing 2008 Games are also the first Olympic Games to offer worldwide digital media coverage.

This digital coverage includes live broadband internet broadcasts, online high definition signals, and mobile phones clips. In comparison, there were only eight territories that experimented with delayed internet coverage during the Athens Games.

The IOC has launched its own online channels to broadcast the Beijing Games to reach 77 territories across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, including countries such as India, South Korea, Nigeria and Indonesia.

At the time of writing, a total of 37 world records have been broken during the Beijing Olympics while so far, a total of 76 Olympic records have been lowered.

BEIJING, Thursday