French call-off after fan dies

All non-League football matches scheduled for this weekend in Paris have been called off after a fan who was shot at a game in Drancy, north of the French capital, died yesterday.

"I decided to call off the 6,800 matches scheduled to take place in the area," Jean Verbeke, head of the Parisian football league, said.

The decision mirrored the suspension of virtually all sport in Italy on Sunday following the stabbing to death of a Genoa fan before a league match between his team and Milan on 29

January.

Verbeke added that a Second Division match between the Parisian side Red Star and Ales would also be postponed. The First Division programme will not be affected.

The fan, 22-year-old Douadi Atou, was shot during a clash between supporters of the Parisian Berbers and Drancy teams on Sunday. He died in hospital yesterday.

In Germany, the Bayern Munich coach, Giovanni Trapattoni, has been criticised by Udo Lattek, the coach who made the club a European power in the 1970s.

Lattek, who steered Bayern to six league titles and three European Cup triumphs, said Trapattoni's recent admission that only half of his mind was in Munich indicated that he should go home before his scheduled departure at the end of the season.

"When I hear that Trap can't perform to the best of his ability because his family isn't happy in Munich and he still has 50 per cent of his mind in Italy then I have some advice: take the other 50 per cent back, Trap," Lattek wrote in a newspaper columnyesterday.

Trapattoni, the former Juventus coach who has had problems because of his poor German, has failed to inspire the club since he arrived at the start of the season. The 55-year-old coach, who came to Germany with a brilliant track record, has already said that he plans to leave at the end of the season and has been rumoured to be ready to take over the national team job in Italy from Arrigo Sacchi.

Franz Beckenbauer, the Bayern Munich chairman who stepped into the trainer's job last season to clinch the Bundesliga title, fuelled the debate further when he said he regarded Werder Bremen's experienced coach, Otto Rehhagel, as his favourite candidate for the job.

"Rehhagel is the man we will talk to first. He is a master of the German coaching profession," Beckenbauer said. "He has been in the business for 25 years and produced some excellent work."