Author: RevSportz Comment

How many Indian sports lovers have even heard of Suresh Goel? These days, he’s just the answer to a trivia question – who was India’s last men’s singles champion before Prakash Padukone won nine straight National Championships? Between 1962 and 1970, Goel took the trophy five times. But as Lakshya Sen dips his toes in uncharted waters at the Paris Olympics, it’s something else that Goel should be remembered for. Back in 1972, in Munich, badminton made its Olympic debut, as an exhibition sport. Goel was India’s representative and the No. 5 seed. Unfortunately, he fell at the first hurdle…

RevSportz Comment Imagine that you’re Elavenil Valarivan. To most of your fellow Indians, and others beyond the borders, you’re just an unpronounceable name and an unrecognisable face. You have around 14,000 followers on Instagram. Social media influencers who do nothing more than experiment with different kinds of pouts get more attention in a week. You turn 25 next Friday, midway through the Paris Olympics. This was your moment. You also know that in an event like the 10m air rifle, just making it through qualifying is everything. After that, it’s a pure lottery, so closely matched are the contestants. Back…

A day after Antoine Dupont, the world’s best player, inspired a crowd of 70,000 to raise the roof at the Stade de France with a virtuoso display in the men’s Rugby 7s final, the host nation serenaded another sporting hero at the Paris La Defense Arena, venue for the Paris 2024 swimming. Leon Marchand smashed Michael Phelps’s Olympic record while winning the men’s 400m individual medley by an astonishing margin of 5.67 seconds from Japan’s Tomoyuki Matsushita. The hardest event in the pool, which tests your ability at all four strokes, has seen some all-time greats win gold. Hungary’s Tamas…

RevSportz Comment Daniil Medvedev will be there, but Victoria Azarenka, from Belarus – Russia’s biggest ally – won’t. The Russian anthem, with lyrics by Sergei Mikhalkov and music composed by Alexander Alexandrov won’t be heard, and if any of the ‘Individual Neutral Athletes’ win, they will stand on a podium under an unrecognised teal flag, listening to a tune without lyrics. In Tokyo, despite the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia being banned for its state-sponsored doping programme, as many as 335 athletes had competed under the standard of the Russian Olympic Olympic (ROC), winning 20 gold, 28 silver and 23 bronze…

RevSportz Comment If Manolo Marquez needs a sense of how difficult it will be to combine stewardship of a national team with a club side, he need only look at two of the managerial greats. Rinus Michels, the man credited with introducing Total Football to the world, doubled up as coach of both Barcelona and the Netherlands national team in 1974, while Sir Alex Ferguson, then riding high as manager of Aberdeen, had to take charge of Scotland in tragic circumstances in the mid-1980s. The greatest Scottish manager of them all, Jock Stein – who had led Glasgow Celtic to…

Which is worse? A group of international footballers singing an explicitly racist ‘celebratory’ song that references several of their club teammates, or a senior politician trying to justify those comments? Enzo Fernandez, the Chelsea and Argentina star who posted the vile clip from the team bus after Argentina’s Copa America win, at least had the decency to apologise for streaming what was sung. Not so Victoria Villarruel, Argentina’s vice-president, who poured gallons of fuel on the flames with her incendiary comments on the matter. “No colonialist country is going to intimidate us for a song on the pitch or for…

RevSportz Comment By the time Gareth Southgate took charge of the England men’s national football team, the half-decade of underachievement under Sven-Goran Eriksson were starting to look like glory years. Eriksson had taken England to successive World Cup quarterfinals in 2002 and 2006, with a last-eight appearance at Euro 2004 sandwiched in between. He had enjoyed no luck either, losing two of those matches on penalty kicks to Portugal and the other to a freak goal from Ronaldinho. The decline thereafter was precipitous. England didn’t qualify for Euro 2008 – prompting the ‘Wally with a brolly’ headlines about Steve McLaren,…

This was not a vintage Copa America, and while Argentina may have edged ahead of Uruguay into first place with 16 wins in the tournament, this was not a team that will be remembered decades from now. Some may recall Lionel Messi’s tears as he limped off, and fewer still might summon up Lautaro Martinez’s sublime strike to win the trophy, but on the whole, these three and a half weeks in the USA left precious few footprints in the sand. Argentina beat Canada twice, saw off weak challenges from Chile and Peru, and struggled almightily against Ecuador. Colombia dominated…

When Luis de la Fuente took over from Luis Enrique after Spain’s round-of-16 exit at the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, 2022, expectations were low. It had been a lost decade for Spanish football, with a horrendous World Cup title defence in Brazil (2014) heralding a sharp decline after the glory years between 2008 and 2012. They did reach the semi-final at Euro 2020, succumbing to Italy in a penalty shootout, but it escaped no one’s notice that four of their six matches were draws. Unlike his celebrated predecessor, de la Fuente never played for La Roja. And the two…

RevSportz Comment It’s not without reason that we recall Spain, especially the 2008-2012 vintage, as one of the great teams in football history. A hat-trick of major trophies – no other team has ever retained their Euro crown – ensures their place in the pantheon. But amid the nostalgia, let’s not forget that not one of those three title-winning teams was perfect. Italy held them to a goalless draw at Euro 2008, and Portugal did the same in the semi-final four years later. Their 2010 World Cup campaign began with a shock defeat to Switzerland. The current crop, superbly coached…