Author: RevSportz Comment

RevSportz Comment The Nations League final, billed as football’s clash of the generations, instead became a showcase for the world’s outstanding full-back to highlight his talent. Nuno Mendes, a week after winning the Champions League with Paris Saint-Germain, scored one and set up the other as Portugal drew 2-2 with Spain before prevailing on penalties. As for the contest between football’s past – Cristiano Ronaldo – and its future, Lamine Yamal, there was only one winner. The game’s key moment arrived in the 61st minute with Spain leading 2-1. Mendes picked up the ball, streaked past Yamal down the left…

Few would associate sport with death. As its worst, sport can be an outlet for tribalism and aggression, but rarely do you associate a match with loss of life. In the case of what happened outside the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bengaluru on June 4, the crowd hadn’t even gathered to watch a game. They were meant to be welcoming their heroes, who had won the IPL for the first time after 18 seasons of trying. Instead, 11 fans lost their lives and many more were badly injured, with the authorities unable to control the sheer numbers that had flocked towards…

The tears came even before the final ball was bowled. Once it became clear, two balls into Josh Hazlewood’s final over, that Punjab Kings could no longer wrench the trophy away, Virat Kohli covered his face. He was still ‘Cheeku’ when he started playing for the franchise, a teenager who’d go looking for pizza, burgers and peri-peri chicken at Sandton City with his mates in the build-up to his first IPL final in 2009. Now, 16 years later, he was the senior statesman playing his fourth final. Father of two, beard flecked with grey, he had indeed given his ‘youth,…

In the end, money didn’t just talk. It screamed. Chelsea, one of the most consistent performers in the Champions League this century, produced a second-half blitz that overwhelmed Real Betis 4-1 in the final of the Europa Conference League – the continent’s third-tier competition. It capped a memorable four days for Enzo Maresca’s team, who had clinched Champions League qualification on the final day of the English Premier League (EPL) season last Sunday. In the first half, Betis’ intelligent pressing had run rings around Chelsea, who struggled to get any sort of foothold despite enjoying most of the possession. With…

Kieffer Moore is a veteran who has represented Wales in the 2022 World Cup and at the European Championships. Yet, at the final whistle at Wembley on Saturday, he looked like somebody who had seen a ghost. At the other end of the spectrum, Tom Watson who scored the winning goal, and Eliezer Mayenda, who had equalised, are barely out of their teens and still making their way in the game. Watson, a local boy through and through, won’t even be playing for Sunderland in the English Premier League (EPL) next season. His transfer to high-flying Brighton was…

Now that it’s been confirmed that Sunday’s home game against Champions League-chasing Aston Villa will be the last underwhelming chapter in Manchester United’s sorry season, the blame game has started in earnest. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, minority owner but now in charge of football operations, is a target of much ire, especially after the redundancies that cost hundreds of loyal, long-serving staff their jobs. Ruben Amorim and his inflexible tactics are also in the cross-hairs, as is a group of players that have underperformed for years. Amorim, understandably, has preached patience, citing the scale of the task at hand. But irate…

RevSportz Comment This is Tottenham Hotspur, the club where the fans revolted against managers of the calibre of Jose Mourinho and Antonio Conte because they couldn’t identify with their pragmatic approach to winning. This is the Spurs that were the first English team to lift a European trophy – the Cup Winners’ Cup in Rotterdam in 1963 – after a swashbuckling 5-1 demolition of mighty Atletico Madrid. This is also the club that had last won a European trophy in 1984, when Glenn Hoddle – their talisman, with whom Johan Cruyff had swapped shirts in an earlier round – missed…

Usually, when a title race is over in April – and for all practical purposes, it was done by March – the last few weeks of the league season can be a damp squib. Not so in the English Premier League (EPL) this year. Such are the riches promised by the revamped UEFA Champions League that not qualifying for it could set an ambitious club on the road to oblivion. Manchester United or Tottenham Hotspur, who contest the Europa League final in Bilbao tonight, will bank around £32 million in all if they win the competition. The far greater…

Sport has often been seen as the great unifier, especially at the Olympic Games. In 1936, Luz Long — who represented Nazi Germany and its vile Aryan Supremacy theories — befriended Jesse Owens, who was a second-class citizen in the USA long after he won four gold medals in Berlin. A generation later, in Mexico City in 1968, Australia’s Peter Norman wore an Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) badge on the podium in solidarity with Tommie Smith and John Carlos and their Black Power salute. But from time to time, even sport has been unable to stay afloat against…

Fireworks, a Senegalese-American singer that few in India had heard of, and even Shah Rukh Khan can only take you so far. Before the opening night of the IPL, on April 18, 2008, all talk of light-and-sound shows was mainly a distraction. Whether you were an Indian cricket administrator, a player or even a journalist at the venue, the predominant emotion was nervous anticipation. What lay ahead? What would cricket’s brave new world look like? Frankly, no one, not even Lalit Modi, had any clue. It was one thing to borrow various elements from North American sport – notably the…