A Long Summer Vacation

You're a winner in our book, Andrei.

With World Cup qualification (finally!) coming to a close and the draw for next summer's tournament already taken care of, attention has largely been on the winners, the 32 qualified nations. And while that is all well and good, we here at Femme Football would like to take a moment to offer our sincere condolences to those footballers who will be missing out on South Africa.

For these poor souls something to hang their hat on in the interim, we have created a new honor: the "Best Player Not Playing in This Year's World Cup," abbreviated BPNPTYWC, and known commonly known as the Ryan Giggs Award.

Here are this year's honorees:

4th Runner Up: Petr Cech, Czech Republic (It really has been all downhill since that Steven Hunt incident)

3rd Runner Up: Dimitar Berbatov, Bulgaria (Not scoring goals in a Man Utd uniform to be replaced by not scoring goals in Bulgaria's red and green)

2nd Runner Up: Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Sweden (At least you won't fall prey to the tricks of small children off the field or those of wily defenders on it)

1st Runner Up: Emmanuel Adebayor, Togo (We shall miss your strikes, but, as any Arsenal fan will tell you, we'll mostly miss you're class)

And this year's BPNPTYWC/Ryan Giggs Award goes to......Andrei Arshavin, whose Russian side decided to do everything in its power to undo the 2-1 advantage it had going into the second leg of UEFA qualification play-offs. Andrei, you may be king of the house, but your coronation in South Africa was just not to be.

Oh yeah, and congratulations on your win!