NIALL KIELYperuses the world of sport
Karimi falls to Ramadan raiders
SPORT FORCED its way onto the news pages in mid-August with the news that Steel Azin FC of Tehran had fired one of its star players, Ali Karimi, for failing to observe the Ramadan fast.
Aside from the reminder that Iran continues to be something of a bellwether for Islamic excess, it was startling to realise that a professional once known as the Asian Maradona (dubious accolade, nowadays) has instantly lost his living because some religious satraps decided he had sinned by swallowing during daylight hours.
The website announcement added that when confronted by the Ramadan raiders, he insulted the officials of the Iranian federation and Steel Azin. Good for him.
The second-most capped Iranian, Asian Player of the Year in 2004, Karimi was a Bundesliga success with Bayern Munich, and must now yearn for the relative sanity of German football.
There, the authorities have consulted local Islamic groups and got agreement that sports people can be exempted from Ramadan rules dictating that Muslims abstain from food and drink from dawn to dusk during the holy month.
Such calm sentience is also evident in the Pakistan cricket camp, although almost all of the players must be Muslim. And none has been more devout than the returned-from-retirement prodigal, Mohammad Yousuf, one of the world’s great batsmen and also a born-again son of Islam.
Born a Christian into Lahore poverty, christened Yousuf Youhan, he had a beer-drinking normality to him in his early Test years, although it was said that despite his talent he had a habit of not really getting going when the going got tough.
There were doubters when he formally converted to Islam in 2005, even when he showed up at Test matches bright-eyed and bushy-bearded: but his batting took off into a godlike stratosphere, and a year later, he scored 1,788 Test runs at an average just a whisper below 100, breaking en route Viv Richards’s three-decades-old calendar-year record of 1,710.
MoYo, as the chatroom messageboards title him, became divinely inspired.
At just 36, his return to the Pakistan squad this month has been welcomed by the players and by cricket aficionados. And there will be no Ramadan nonsense. “A player’s decision to fast is between himself and God,” team manager Yawar Saeed has said. “We don’t mix sport and religion.”
The idea that cricketers, of all sportsmen, could survive some seven hours in a sweltering field without hydration is quite risible.
And Muslim cricketers bowing to the inevitable on match days always have the option of making up fast days after Eid-El-Fitr, the celebratory feasting blast that marks the end of Ramadan.
In two years’ time, the controversy will probably rear up again when Sebastian Coe’s Olympics come to London; they are scheduled smack in the middle of Ramadan. Thousands of Muslim athletes will train and compete at an event that was ‘sold’ in part as a chance to reconcile local ethnic communities. Whatever was His Coeness thinking when he came up with that one?
One man, his dog and his DVD
I GATHER there’s unease among traditionalists (now, couldn’t that be a generic intro to just about anything, as perceived entropy gathers pace?) over the burgeoning of American-style sheepdog trials at shows like Tullamore. Spectators love them because they’re speedy and discrete; organisers likewise: the events need far less field-space than old-fashioned trials.
Is it sport? Well, it’s competitive, it’s athletically challenging, it has rules, winners, losers. And cold is the human heart that can’t revel in the joyous busyness of problem-solving dogs limning their lambent intelligence on the greensward.
That estimable columnist John Shirley was writing on the engrossing topic of sheepdogs in the Irish Independent’s farming supplement this month, and quoted a Wicklow farmer who’d recently lost a prize Collie after a decade of great service and who was asked at the bar: “What’s your new dog like?” He answered: “Useless, but the sheep don’t know that yet.”
Shirley reckons good handlers and trainers of sheepdogs are now scarcer, and he commended the work in Mayo and Meath of Teagasc’s Eamonn Egan who has been running 10-week courses to help sheep farmers train their own dogs.
I loved Egan’s take on the quadbikes that ingènues and agricultural sciolists once believed could replace old Lassie. “A quadbike might be able to round up sheep or cattle to bring them in from the field,” quoth the Teagasc adviser from Roscommon, “but it will not hold up a ewe against a fence so that you can catch her to treat maggots.”
Nothing, in Shirley’s view, will replace an intelligent, properly grounded dog – Border Collie, Kelpie or just the hardy, traditional Irish farmyard sheepdog – that has a decent appetite for work. He also pointed out that a livestock farmer gets a decent combination of working dog, security alarm and loyal companion in one good canine package.
Shirley also noted that there are DVDs you can use to train your own animal. “I’ve tried putting the dog in front of the telly and showing it the training DVD,” he wrote. “It didn’t work.”
PlayStations keep players up all night
IF YOU find the spoiled boys of English soccer somewhat infantile, not least on foot of the self-absorbed and self-regarding recent maunderings of Stephen Ireland, don’t let this item disabuse you.
A sports psychotherapist named Steve Pope reports in FourFourTwo magazine that some players are now dealing with computer games addiction which has them staying up till all hours the night before matches, “dramatically affecting their sleep patterns, as well as depleting essential stores of endorphins and hormones”. Some have had their PlayStations confiscated.
PS Fave game is Modern Warfare 2 which my in-house expert tells me involves inter alia massacring civilians at an airport.
Purists not swallowing this little SUP
THE ELEGIAC prosody of surfing mythology is taking a battering, I hear, because of an incipient beckhaming (cede me the convenience of that neologism) that has seriously offended older purists.
I doubt that surfing ephebes give a damn, frankly, but C-list American subcelebrities have taken in numbers to a practice now so well- established that it’s already spawned its own acronym, SUP – that’s stand-up-paddleboarding.
The usual tedious USA airheads are already at it, and have thus accelerated its popularity. It’s big in The Hamptons; Jennifer Aniston and Cindy Crawford are devotees. SUP involves large and broad, wooden surf ‘boards’ on which the ‘surfers’ can readily stand and propel themselves, using a two-metre pole with a big paddle.
All somewhat removed from Jack London’s Hawaiian ‘kings’, it would seem, but not if you realise that it was the watermen of Hawaii who in the 1950s devised the original big boards and wooden paddles and towed inept tourists out to catch the break.
And as the better paddlers muscle in on the big waves, collisions, clashes and near-misses with trad surfers have multiplied.
On some California beaches, SUP has been banned.
Brace yourself, Bridget, for dark Dukes
JAYSUS, FORGET the Jabulani ball over which so much critical soccer spittle was expatiated during South Africa’s World Cup earlier this summer. Brace yourself, Bridget, for the cricket equivalent this summer.
The England Test team is of particular interest to us now because Eoin Morgan – of Man O’ War in north Co Dublin – is doggedly hanging on to his batting place at number six. And England (the synecdoche is only just about merited, given the mongrel mix nowadays) is going through a labile period.
Whatever happened to the bulldog spirit, the doggedness, the bespectacled David Steeleness of decent consistency?
Has the gene pool been adversely syncretised by the willy-nilly inclusion of all sorts of colonials; has there been some sort of miscegenation of yeoman virtue? Heaven forfend.
Having hockeyed a disorganised Pakistan (whose players cannot but be distracted by domestic climatic calamities) in the first Test, England managed to leave last week’s Test behind like a crew of Dublin Gaelic footballers.
Before it, that London Times institution Christopher Martin-Jenkins (you knows you’re institutionalised when common recourse has you CMJ-ed) opined: “It will be to everyone’s advantage if the pitches . . . at the Oval and Lord’s . . . make life easier for Pakistan’s batsmen.”
It was the visiting bowlers wot won the second Test, though. CMJ had alluded, almost in passing, to the swing with which the English bowlers had been mercilessly teasing the Pakistani batsmen, using England’s usual Duke ball.
In the Guardian, Vic Marks noted at the Oval that “. . . as usual, Mohammed Asif was on target and swinging a dark Dukes ball, which must have come from the same batch that has swung all summer”.
In November when England go to Australia, it’ll be southern summer. Blue skies. Thudding temperatures. And of course it’ll be the Aussie ball, the Kookaburra: docile, biddable, suits the natives and the very stuff of their state and club cricket lives. And I haven’t even touched on the Coriolis Effect. Winter bliss.
