Author: WebDesk

Has African football finally come of age?   More than four decades after Pele’s bold prediction, African teams have excelled at the 2022 World Cup. Though one of them may not win, big strides have been made under homegrown coaches. Pele may have been the greatest footballer that the World Cup has seen, but he was never a soothsayer. When it came to predictions, Paul the Octopus had considerably greater success. It was sometime in the late 1970s, not long after a Zaire team had been annihilated 9-0 by Yugoslavia at the 1974 World Cup, that he said an…

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Atreyo Mukhopadhyay Three Asian teams in the World Cup pre-quarters and two from South America? Four Asian teams putting it across three World Cup winning nations and two Euro champions? Culmination of these scarcely believable eventualities is the maximum number of Asian teams in the knockouts of the FIFA World Cup ever. Japan, South Korea and Australia all had been there before. Australia made it to the round of 16 in 2006, Japan reached the same stage in 2002, 2010 and 2018, South Korea stunned the world by finishing fourth in 2002 when they were the co-hosts with Japan and…

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Atreyo Mukhopadhyay Soon after Saurashtra completed a five-wicket win against Maharashtra in the Vijay Hazare Trophy final, a photograph started doing the rounds in social media. It showed the players posing with their wives, children and parents. Normally, trophy pictures do not feature them. It showed that the Saurashtra cricket team is a happy family, literally. Although Saurashtra had won this title in 2008, they did not quite become a force in domestic cricket. Barring three, they have not produced India players since. The transformation started becoming visible from the early parts of the previous decade. Ranji Trophy finalists four…

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