With the start of the new football season, talk will be about new coaches, players, coaching techniques and fitness levels, and how commercialisation of the game is widening inequality among the clubs. Little will be said about the role of luck. But, if in doubt about this aspect of the game, ask the one man whose name and fortune — or misfortune — best tell the story.
Never before has the Premier League season been so dominated by African players as we head towards the second weekend after the biggest-spending, most-hyped pre-season on record. Prepare for more. It doesn’t matter where you look this weekend.
”You can feel the anticipation and the tension growing because the serious stuff starts this week. Whether you’re a rugby player in South Africa or England, we’re in World Cup countdown and suddenly it feels very real. And that’s just the way it should be — because we’re close now. We’re very close,” says Schalk Burger, the Springbok flanker expected to be one of the stars of the tournament.
Jacques Kallis should take his omission from South Africa’s Twenty20 squad as a compliment, rather than flying into a huff, resigning as vice-captain and threatening to quit all forms of the international game. The fact that Justin Kemp — a technical and temperamental pygmy by comparison — has been selected ahead of him merely drives home the point.
Beijing banned more than one million cars from its roads on Friday in a test run to improve air quality for the Olympics, easing gridlock but failing to lift a curtain of smog from the capital. More than 6Â 500 traffic police were on duty across the city to ensure car owners observed the ban, while an extra two million more trips were expected to be taken on subways and buses during the day.
Three of the rescuers attempting to find six workers trapped in a Utah mine since last week have been killed following a cave-in, officials said on Thursday. Additionally, six rescuers were injured, said Tammy Kikuchi, a spokesperson with Utah’s department of natural resources.
Health Minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang will go to the Johannesburg High Court on Friday to protect her reputation, the Star reported. Court papers show the minister and Medi-Clinic are asking for the return and prohibition of the use of various medical records and documents relating to the minister’s stay in a Cape Town hospital in 2005.
There might be millions of characters in the Chinese language, but English letters and even symbols are increasingly being used as names in China. In one of the strangest names, parents tried to call their son "@", while other people have used transliterated English names to make their own sound more Western, the <i>First</i> newspaper reported.
Wouter Basson has been named as a co-conspirator in the indictment in the case against former law and order minister Adriaan Vlok, the South African Broadcasting Corporation reported on Thursday. Vlok is facing attempted murder charges for the poisoning of former South African Council of Churches general secretary Frank Chikane.
A two-day summit of Southern African leaders closes in Lusaka, Zambia, on Friday with observers eagerly anticipating word on two reports on efforts to resolve the crisis in neighbouring Zimbabwe. South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki was due to report to the summit on his efforts to broker a stalemate between Zimbabwe’s ruling Zanu-PF and the opposition.