When Joe Cole shook hands with Shaka Hislop before the kick-off in Nuremberg on Thursday he thought back to the time, getting on for a decade ago, when they were teammates at Upton Park and the Trinidad & Tobago goalkeeper, already an experienced professional, helped to ease the English prodigy’s youthful anxieties.
Rugby, it seems, is continually in the wars, if not for misadministration then for poor results. The latest piece of idiocy presented itself in the form of the meeting between the South African administrators and MPs. In our second decade since the unification of sporting codes and our shiny new democracy, the progress made in racial integration in the sport is shameful.
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The World Cup makes us at the United Nations green with envy. As the pinnacle of the only truly global game, played in every country by every race and religion, it is one of the few phenomena as universal as the UN. You could say it’s more universal. Fifa has 207 members, we have only 191. But there are better reasons for our envy.
Lloyd Gedye talks to My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James about ditching Kentucky for the Big Apple.
Of all the forms of doping in sports, perhaps none is more vampirish than athletes siphoning, storing and transfusing their own blood. A pint here, a pint there. Packed with red blood cells that carry oxygen to tired muscles, a back-alley transfusion can add a spring to the step of a World Cup soccer player or help a Tour de France cyclist ascend steep mountain passes.
South Africa on Friday marked the 30th anniversary of the Soweto uprising, one of the bloodiest chapters of apartheid, amid renewed debate over whether whites should own up to the atrocities of the former regime. Hundreds of black youths died at the hands of police in Soweto during protests against the enforced use of Afrikaans in schools that began on June 16 1976.
Against a tide of criticism and a government application for his incarceration, the lawyer for deported Pakistani national Khalid Rashid is persisting in his bid to have Rashid’s disappearance declared a crime against humanity in South African and international courts.
Despite suffering a double blow to their midfield, South Africa are favourites to wrap up the two Test series against Scotland in Port Elizabeth on Saturday. The Springboks beat the visitors 36-16 in the first Test in Durban last weekend. Rib injuries to midfield partners Jean de Villiers and Jaque Fourie means the Boks go into the game with a new centre pairing.
When he was 11, Ben Bernanke, the spelling champ from South Carolina, was within a whisker of appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. Back in 1965, this was a big deal; the Beatles had made their first barnstorming appearance in America on the show the previous year. But Bernanke couldn’t remember how many ”i”s there were in edelweiss and missed the televised national final by one mark.
For months, the rumour mill that churns on in the wake of the collapse of the Kebble empire has been spitting out two names: Charles Cornwall and Paul Main.
”Go to Plettenberg Bay and visit the polo estates,” said the tipsters, ”you’ll find answers there.” But until this week Cornwall and Main — members of Plett’s jet set and aficionados of the rich man’s sport — had managed to stay off the front pages.