| Sky browned off as landlords turn to Al-Jazeera |
[Aug. 22nd, 2006|09:55 am] |
Tuesday August 22, 2006
The Guardian
A group of pub landlords in Portsmouth have escaped punishment after finding a unique way of showing live Premiership matches at knock-down prices. They have signed up to Al-Jazeera Sports Plus which, at only £300 for an annual subscription, is considerably cheaper than the £6,000 that some pubs in Britain have to pay for the privilege of showing Sky Sports in their hostelries.
The commentary is in Arabic and the adverts for items normally of little interest to anyone in Portsmouth, such as Middle East mobile phone companies. "We turn the volume down," said Derek Hopper, landlord of the Royal Exchange pub. "We tried radio but we found it was a little distorted."
Al-Jazeera is doing nothing wrong as they have legally bought the rights to the matches for countries outside the European Union. "It's illegal and it's copyright theft," said Dan Johnson, a spokesman for the Premier League. "We sell to Sky, and they have the sole rights to show league matches [in Britain]."
The Premier League has tried to sue the five pubs in Portsmouth showing matches on Al-Jazeera but in two cases last month the landlords were cleared because the judge ruled they were not aware they were doing anything illegal. The other three had their case dismissed after the judge refused the Premier League time to gather more evidence. The pubs' problem is that they now know they will be challenged and must decide whether to carry on and risk getting caught. |
|
|
| Umpire 'racist' say Pakistanis |
[Aug. 22nd, 2006|09:50 am] |
Tuesday, August 22, 2006; Posted: 3:33 a.m. EDT (07:33 GMT)
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (AP) -- Pakistani anger against Australian cricket umpire Darrell Hair flared for a second day Tuesday, with mass circulation newspapers accusing him of racist behavior over a ball-tampering row that led to Pakistan forfeiting a test match to England.
In an editorial entitled "It's not cricket," The News said Hair "does not have a very good history with Pakistan or Asian teams in general."
It referred to a 1995 controversy in which Hair called Sri Lankan spin bowler Muttiah Muralitharan for chucking -- or using an illegal bowling action -- seven times in a Melbourne test match.
"Sad as it may sound, there will be many who will wonder whether Darrell Hair would have done what he did on Sunday if the bowling team were Australian or English," the editorial said.
On the fourth day of the fourth test Sunday at The Oval in London, Pakistan was penalized five runs for tampering with the ball by umpires Hair and Billy Doctrove, from the West Indies.
Pakistan continued in the short term, but protested the decision by refusing to come out of the pavilion after a tea interval. That prompted the umpires to award a forfeit to England, the first in almost 130 years of test cricket.
Pakistan went on to the pitch later in the day, but by the then the umpires had made up their minds. Hours of frantic negotiations would not sway the officials to change the decision.
Newspapers on Tuesday condemned the sport's governing International Cricket Council for not being able to settle the row.
Another Pakistani daily, The Dawn, said the ICC had previously ignored Pakistani requests for Hair not to be appointed to Pakistan's matches because "there is widespread view that Hair is heavily biased ... against subcontinental teams, particularly Pakistan and Sri Lanka."
"Sunday's controversy has only added to these fears," it added.
Another English-language daily, The Nation, said the events at The Oval "left none with honor and damaged the game immeasurably," and that ICC should not leave the game "to the whims and biases of mini-Hitlers like Mr. Hair."
Pakistani cricket great Imran Khan had earlier described Hair as a "mini Hitler" for his authoritarian-style in a column in The Nation.
"Is it because the ICC's chief executive is a fellow Australian that Mr. Hair gets away with murder, despite being complained against by three South Asian boards over the last decade?" Tuesday's Nation wrote in an editorial entitled "bad Hair day." |
|
|
| Not cricket |
[Aug. 22nd, 2006|09:21 am] |
I'm worried that in the pressure cooker of religious difference, the latest Cricket Test between England and Pakistan will have implications far greater than one might at first think.
The situation is this. Darrell Hair, an Australian umpire with a history of contentious decisions against Pakistan, accused the Pakistan team of 'tampering' with the cricket ball.
'Tampering' changes the condition of the ball in flight, thereby giving the bowler an advantage over the batsman, and at that stage Pakistan were the bowling team.
Pakistan denied the charges and left the field, to save the reputation of their country, which had been called into question (said Pakistan captain Inzamam-ul-Haq). When they refused to return to the field, the match was awarded in England's favour.
Former Pakistan captain Imran Khan accused Australian umpire Darrell Hair of acting like a "mini Hitler" and a "fundamentalist" following his role in the Test debacle.
If Islam is the official religion of Pakistan, then cricket is surely the unofficial religion. It draws huge crowds, and cricket is played wherever and whenever time and space allows. It is far more popular, for instance, than soccer in England and is more akin to basketball in inner city America than the village game seen in the Home Counties.
Pakistan draw huge support from across the Islamic world - they are surely the most successful example of Islamic sporting excellence - and are followed by Indonesians, Saudis and Afghanis. If Hair is seen to be acting as an agent of Ango-American policy - and some do see him as such - the effect on Muslim cricket lovers will not be lost. |
|
|
| Execution of a teenage girl |
[Jul. 24th, 2006|05:57 pm] |
Don't miss BBC2 on Wednesday at 9pm. There is a documentary about the execution in Iran of a girl aged 16, Atefah Sahaaleh, who was hanged in a public square in 2004 for 'crimes against chastity'.
The Guardian calls it 'one of the best documentaries of the year and one of the most important'. |
|
|
| Why Iran loves Zidane |
[Jul. 13th, 2006|09:04 am] |
Hossein Derakhshan
Thursday July 13, 2006
The Guardian
Outspoken presidents and oil are not the only things Iran and Latin America have in common. There's also football. Which is why the head of the external relations committee of the Iranian parliament, Alaeddin Boroujerdi, has sent a letter to Zinédine Zidane, congratulating him for his "logical" reaction and "timely" defence against insult to his "humane and Islamic" identity. This, in case you missed it, refers to the exchange in the World Cup final last Sunday between the French national team's captain, and Marco Materazzi, which saw the Italian defender mutter something and Zidane react with his head.
Where Boroujerdi led, Kayhan, a radical hardline newspaper and a strong supporter of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad followed. It ran with Zidane on its frontpage, using two big pictures of the infamous headbutt. The headline read: "Zidane's proud farewell - The best player of the World Cup defended his Islamic identity."
The Iranian MP and Kayhan probably don't know that Zidane calls himself a non-practising Muslim and is married to a scarfless, non-Muslim dancer from Spain who has borne him four boys, none with an Islamic name. Nor did they know exactly what went on between the two players. But even if they did, it wouldn't change much. Football is so popular in Iran that the newly elected president likes to use it on any possible occasion to expand his influence among the masses.
Before Iran left for Germany for the World Cup, Ahmadinejad showed up at one of the exercise sessions, with the national jersey and football boots, and kicked a ball with the national team players. His shooting and dribbling skills and his lecture to the players, wishing them success similar to that of the other young Iranians who are driving Iran's nuclear programme, were widely covered by the local media. So was the photo-op later with captain Ali Daei who gave the president a jersey with number 24 on it.
It was the first time an Iranian president had done such a thing, most likely because all previous incumbents were clerics who found it insulting to appear in public with sportsmen's clothes rather than their sacred cloths.
Earlier this year, Ahmadinejad famously decided to rescind a long-standing ban on women in football grounds and ordered his deputy for sports to reserve the best seats for women so that they could also enjoy the games along with their families.
But critics were suspicious. Ahmadinejad's order was soon reversed by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamanei, and some analysts say the president was expecting this: that he knew all along that the religious establishment would oppose his decision, but his gesture to the large number of young women in the population would position him as a victim of religious fanaticism.
This in fact reveals a truth about Ahmadinejad. He is not a fundamentalist, he is a populist. And football just happens to be a very effective way of reaching the masses.
www.hoder.com |
|
|
| Zizou |
[Jul. 10th, 2006|01:42 pm] |
The end of the 2006 World Cup will probably be remembered more for Zidane's sending off than for either the Italian victory or the swan-song of one of football's great gentlemen.
Zinedine Zidane was determined but never dirty, skillful but not flamboyant, brave without being reckless. His red card for head-butting the Italian Materazzi, was, therefore, something of a glitch in a brilliant career. And totally out of character.
Nobody is saying what abuse Materazzi dished out to Zidane, least of all the two players. But one wonders if there wasn't a racist element to Materazzi's sledging of Zizou? What else would have provoked such an extreme reaction?
It's a shame. The multi-cultural French team, captained by an Arab and led by a black African, have done much to show the world that while the French right are vociferous they are ultimately weak. For a month, les Bleus brought their country together again with football. |
|
|
| 'We play cricket as messengers of peace' |
[Jul. 5th, 2006|11:17 am] |
It was the sport of refugees and survived war and the rule of the Taliban. Azam Khan tells Peter Frawley of Afghan cricket's bright future
Sunday December 4, 2005
The Observer
Peter Frawley: How did you discover cricket?
Azam Khan, development officer of the Afghan Cricket Federation: After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, Afghans began to migrate to Pakistan and were living there in refugee camps, mostly in Peshawar and other areas in the North-West Frontier province. Many Afghans began to play cricket for the first time. Cricket did not seem like an alien game; in many ways, it is very similar to our own game of thope danda, which is played with a ball and a bat like baseball. During the 1987 World Cup, I was living in Peshawar as a refugee along with my family after migrating from Afghanistan in 1983. The Pakistani media were giving a lot of coverage to cricket. I was seven years old and at primary school, where the other pupils were always discussing and playing cricket. Imran Khan, who, like us, is a Pashtun [Pathan], was our favourite player and our model.
I began to play cricket with my brother and with other members of our large extended family. We set up our own team and played friendly matches with the local Pakistanis. But we had to play in secret because we did not have permission from our parents, for security reasons, to play cricket away from home.
In time, we improved and, as the only Afghan team in the area, we began to receive widespread attention. After two years we were able to take part in tournaments.
In May 1995, we reached the final of a tournament, in which more than 10 teams had taken part. When my father heard about this, he was delighted and asked my uncle to drop the team to the ground in our pick-up vehicle. It was our first chance to play openly, without any concerns from our family. Better still, we won by a big margin and received so many messages of congratulations, which was a huge motivation to continue to spread the word about cricket among Afghans. It was often a struggle to keep going but, fortunately, because my family was well off, I supported the team by paying for kit and equipment, entry fees for tournaments and transport to and from games.
How did you get involved in the development of cricket in Afghanistan?
This was in May 1999 following our return home after having lived for 18 years in Pakistan. My brothers and cousins were worried that our cricket life would come to an end; we didn't think anyone played the game in Afghanistan. But I never entirely lost hope and one day, having settled in our home village of Dabar in the Charkh district of Logar province, I heard that cricket was being played in Kabul, which is 50 miles from our village. I travelled to Kabul and joined the Afghanistan Cricket Federation as well as founding the Logar Cricket Association (LCA) and registering cricket as a recognised sport in the province. We built our own cement pitch in Logar, practised hard and organised our own tour to Kabul.
When I joined the ACF, we worked very hard and applied for membership of the International Cricket Council. Every year we organised an inter-provincial cricket tournament in Kabul as well as participating in Pakistan's grade-two cricket tournament [Quaid-e-Azam trophy]. In 2001, with the assistance of the Pakistan Cricket Board, we were given affiliate membership of the ICC. But there were problems. One day in August 2001, during an inter-provincial tournament in Kabul, the Taliban's vice and virtue police turned up at a game in their 4x4 pick-up vehicles and some other cars surrounded the ground. We had forgotten to go to prayer. All the players and spectators were dispersed. Some people were arrested, including two players. They were imprisoned for about a week and missed the rest of the matches.
On another occasion, the then president of the Afghanistan Olympic Committee, Maulawi Qalamuddin, told us that the Taliban Grand Council wanted to ban cricket, which they considered to be an American game. We managed to convince the Taliban that cricket was not American and that it was in fact very similar to thope danda
In October 2001, when we were playing in a grade-two tournament in Peshawar, Pakistan, the US and its allies declared war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The Americans were dropping bombs on our beloved country and thousands of innocent people lost their lives. Everyone in the team was concerned about their families and relatives back home. We were shocked and distressed, but we did not withdraw from the matches. We saw it as our mission to play on as messengers of peace and to show the world that we could spread love and peace through cricket.
So once again your cricket was being played outside Afghanistan. When did you get back home?
When the war was over and a new government was established in Afghanistan, we decided to reorganise the ACF. We wanted to convince everyone that sport had nothing to do with politics. We succeeded in our mission and in reorganising the federation. The Pakistan Cricket Board had asked for an official letter from the new government to assist us with ICC affiliate membership, so Allah Dad Noori (a former president of the ACF) and I travelled to Peshawar. As the border was still closed we travelled through the mountainous area of Khyber. We had to climb on very steep and high mountains. After a hard journey, we were so tired and dehydrated that Allah Dad fell to the ground and was unconscious for a while. His blood pressure had fallen because of dehydration. I bought some juice and oranges for him. He recovered a little, but was still too weak to walk. I hired a mule for him. He rode on the mule while I walked alongside.
So what now?
I have seen so many ups and downs in my cricket life, but I never once lost hope. Cricket was my keen interest, my passion and my everlasting love. Afghanistan is now an affiliate member of the ICC and we have associate membership of the Asian Cricket Council. We are participating in every cricket event in Asia and our national team have participated in the ICC trophy in Malaysia; unfortunately, we narrowly missed out on qualifying for the quarter-finals. Our youth sides are all making good progress and the game has a bright future in Afghanistan; we even hope to build a national stadium in Kabul in 2006, with money from the ACC, and a national academy. Funds are very tight, of course, but God willing we shall soon be able to compete at international level. One day we may even become world champions.
Peter Frawley is CEO of the International Cricket Group. The Afghanistan Cricket Federation's national XI is planning a tour of friendship to England in 2006 to help raise funds for Afghanistan cricket development. For more details, email info@icricketgroup.com |
|
|
| We Are Iran: book review |
[Jun. 12th, 2006|04:41 pm] |
Non-fiction
Food for thought
Helen Zaltman
Sunday June 11, 2006
The Observer
We Are Iran
by Nasrin Alavi
Portobello, £9.99
As a succession of repressive regimes shut down newspapers and magazines, writers in Iran have taken up blogging with such fervour that Farsi is now the fourth most common language in the blogosphere. Numerous young Iranians want to distance themselves in the eyes of the world from militant Islamists and to prove that Iran isn't just the country next for a trouncing by the US. Making judicious selections from the more widely read blogs, Nasrin Alavi creates a sweeping social history of the country since 1979; the highly educated populace illuminate such inflammatory subjects as compulsory hijab wearing, the social standing of women and the uproar over the Danish cartoons of Muhammad. This is a valuable document on an intriguing, troubled country. |
|
|
| Offside: Observer Sunday June 11, 2006 |
[Jun. 12th, 2006|04:38 pm] |
Film of the week
Iran 1 Female fans 0
Jafar Panahi's delightful comedy about women football supporters highlights the absurdities of the ayatollahs
Philip French
Offside
(91 mins, PG) Directed by Jafar Panahi starring Sima Mobarak-Shahi, Safdar Samandar, Shayesteh Irani
Arguably the best movie about cricket is Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, in which Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne as the quintessential Englishmen Charters and Caldicott discuss the game on a train somewhere in central Europe but never get anywhere near the Test Match at Old Trafford they're obsessed with. Equally, the best drama touching on soccer is Tom Stoppard's TV film, Professional Foul, whose hero, a football-mad philosophy professor, uses an international conference in Prague as an excuse to attend a World Cup qualifying match between England and Czechoslovakia. The film is set entirely in hotels and conference rooms and the nearest the professor gets to the game is hearing a radio commentary in the background.
The excellent and extremely topical Offside resembles Stoppard's drama in several ways. It's about arbitrary justice in an authoritarian society, centres on a World Cup qualifying match where the game is barely glimpsed and it uses a soccer term as a metaphor in its title. The game in question is last year's fixture between Iran and Bahrain which resulted in Iran going forward to this year's finals in Germany, and the movie is, bar the 20 minutes half-time, as long as a standard game.
Director Jafar Panahi is in the neo-realist tradition and, as usual, works with a largely non-professional cast, whom he handles with the skill of a Vittorio de Sica or a Ken Loach. He has constantly run into trouble with the local censors for such films as The Circle, a Kafkaesque look at the exploitation and humiliation of Iranian women, and the masterly Crimson Gold, a thriller focusing on a traumatised war veteran working as a pizza deliveryman who's driven into a suicidal jewel robbery. His new movie is lighter in tone and often very funny, but no less trenchant in its criticism of the absurdities of the ayatollahs and their regime.
The movie begins with a middle-aged man sitting in the back of a taxi talking to its unseen driver, an iconic shot of Iranian cinema that's especially associated with Panahi's mentor, Abbas Kiarostami, several of whose movies take place almost entirely in moving vehicles. The passenger is a desperate father pursuing his teenage daughter, who has apparently gone straight from school to Tehran's Azadi stadium, where the Iran-Bahrain game is being played.
Iranian women are barred from attending football games because they're not allowed to see strange men with bare legs and arms or be exposed to the foul language of the crowd.
The film leaves him early on, initially to follow a beautiful young girl disguised as a boy, her cheeks painted in the national colours. She buys a bootleg ticket from a sly tout, but is arrested at the entrance when she objects to being frisked and is handed over to a young soldier from the provinces. After borrowing her mobile to phone his girlfriend (but refusing to let her call home), he escorts her to a special pen near the top of the stadium. There she's kept with five other girls whose disguises have also been rumbled, to be handed over to the vice squad for punishment.
Though there's no formal exposition, the girls take on individual identities. One is tough, defiant, streetwise; she smokes and talks back. Another gains entrance disguised as a soldier, then makes the big mistake of sitting in an officer's seat. She's now handcuffed. A third is a serious soccer player in a women's team. She finds it absurd that women have to play with their heads covered, can only be watched by other women and have to be instructed by their male coach via a mobile.
What binds the girls together is their passion for football. They're true aficionados, far better informed about the game than the men around them. But instead of watching the match, they have to rely upon the reports from a male soldier who can see the pitch through a hole in the wall but doesn't understand what he is seeing. A fine feminist metaphor there.
The movie is full of telling observation and the funniest setpiece comes when one of the girls has to be escorted to have an urgent pee in a men's lavatory. Her military guard forces her to use a poster of a soccer star as a mask, tries to clear all the men out and orders her to cover her eyes so she can't read the offensive graffiti. The guards are incapable of defending what they do other than by appealing to tradition or using Ring Lardner's famous debating formulation: 'Shut up, I explained.' Yet what gradually emerges is that they're as much the victims of the repressive clerics as their prisoners.
In a glorious climax, with bright day turned to neon-lit night and a few minutes left of the game, all divisive restrictions and inequities are forgotten, though the girls are being taken in a minibus to face the vice squad. When the bus stops beside a cafe, they briefly see the game on TV through the window, then the NCO escorting them stretches his arm outside the bus to hold a broken aerial so the girls can hear the final, suspenseful seconds on the car radio.
In a wonderful group shot, the five girls and a teenage boy thrown in with them are framed together, eagerly leaning forward to follow the commentary. They exude a collective anxiety and ecstasy. It is a beautiful moment and it leads on to a transcendent scene of hope and national elation as the girl, holding sparklers given them by the young male delinquent, become one with the exuberant throng. Pahani's ending recalls the great crowd scene that concludes Les Enfants du Paradis. But in this case, the tone is happy and affirmative |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[May. 31st, 2006|06:04 pm] |
|
This is the second lesson in blogging for the Kooch Group. Today we are going to learn how to add 'friends', add images, and add hyperlinks. |
|
|
| i-kooch |
[Apr. 10th, 2006|06:11 pm] |
|
Welcome to the first i-kooch journal page. This page will contain the thoughts and feelings of i-kooch members. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
i_kooch's journal
