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/ 26 November 2004
A month that began with a promise of log domination and a semifinal place in the Coca-Cola Cup for Sundowns ends with neither. A loss to Orlando Pirates in the Premier Soccer League and defeat by Wits in the quarterfinal of the Coke Cup has left Sundowns’s pride battered. Coach Paul Dolezar has had to get police protection and owner Patrice Motsepe is throwing his hands in the air in disgust.
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/ 26 November 2004
The Zanu-PF old guard has awoken from its slumber ahead of the party’s crucial congress in Harare next week and achieved what many world leaders, including President Thabo Mbeki, have been unable to do: summons President Robert Mugabe and get him to act on their advice. Surrounded by trusted former liberation war fighters, Mugabe relented and endorsed their candidate for the one vacant vice-presidential post.
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/ 26 November 2004
Who would have thought that South Africa would ever need to take a rugby lesson from Argentina? The Pumas have been the Cinderellas of southern hemisphere rugby for half a century, but after Saturday’s 24-14 defeat of France in Marseille they finally made it to the ball.
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/ 26 November 2004
Something is rotten in the kingdom of Spain. Two days after the Madrid-Barca derbi and everyone actually agrees. (Well, everyone who’s not completely blind, or stupid, or both). No matter where you look people are saying the same thing. That Real Madrid are rubbish, while FC Barcelona are the hostia, the holy host, the body of Christ in bread — the dog’s dingly-danglies to the non-Catholics among you.
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/ 26 November 2004
President Thabo Mbeki will hit the ground in Côte d’Ivoire this week with the deadlock hardening between the government and the rebels, and President Laurent Gbagbo’s relationship with France steadily unravelling. The world’s former cocoa capital is currently in the throes of a violent domestic row, the likes of which has not been seen in post-colonial Africa. Trying to save the peace deal here may just be the most difficult thing Mbeki has ever done.
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/ 26 November 2004
The Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) is set to be paying for its showpiece Millennium Stadium for at least another 35 years under the terms of a debt re-financing package announced on Thursday. The WRU is 55-million pounds (-million) in debt, the entire deficit resulting from cost over-runs in the construction of and a lack of income from the 73 000-capacity stadium.
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/ 26 November 2004
The selection of only one fast bowler by India ahead of this week’s first Test in Kanpur was a neon-lit hint of what was to come. Not that hints were needed, of course. Green Park is one of those Test venues on the frontier of respectability, where corporatised cricket still rubs shoulders with old-school skullduggery.
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/ 26 November 2004
England cricket boss David Morgan repeated on Friday, the day the England team were due to fly to Zimbabwe, that financial concerns had to have priority over moral questions about Robert Mugabe’s regime. In the huge market that is world sport, England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) chairman Morgan said money was a prime factor in their thinking.
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/ 26 November 2004
South African players are comfortable tackling India’s rampaging spin bowlers on low bouncing pitches after dominating the drawn Test series opener this week, but the thought of playing in front of the world’s noisiest cricket crowd is worrying them.
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