"The game had started off well enough with just a few jostlings", said Coach Almazbek Atambayev of the Kyrgyzstan team. "Then, as usually happens with the team from Uzbekistan, a few extra vowels and consonants got thrown around and soon, there was a major scuffle!"
The opposing team captain Surxondaryo Viloyati was his usual reserved self in explaining that the Uzbeks had been having a tough time lately with two-a-day practices at the Central Asian alphabet school in Tashkent. "They're under a lot of pressure here at Sochi trying to spell their teammates names correctly. And don't even bring up signing autographs for all those little "Stan-Fans" here."
A plurality of plural names has been a hallmark of these great teams from the south and fans hope they can come together to do a good job of spelling during the games.
