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The new beginning, not the end
The death of a golden dream
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Wushu gives India two bronze
Koreans’ love for cricket Sania-Cara qualify for World finals Singapore, September 23 The Indo-Zimbawbwean combination of Sania Mirza and Cara Black became the fourth pair to qualify for the BNP Paribas WTA Finals Singapore, next month. It will be Mirza's maiden appearance at the event, the WTA announced in a press release.
Hurricanes win by 86 runs
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The new beginning, not the end
Now he’ll be a free bird — he would be the amateur who shoots in professional shooting tournaments, right up to the Olympic Games. He’ll be the ‘hobby shooter’ who will attempt to win the Olympics gold medal. This is unprecedented, inexplicable, mystifying. So is Bindra, but he has made a few things very clear — he loves shooting, but he’s had enough of the pain that shooting must entail. He’s witty and funny, but shooting stunts feeling. He wants to just enjoy it again. When he said his life as a professional shooting was getting over, it was interpreted as the end —divorce from shooting. It, in fact, seems to be the start, or the restart, of his love affair with the sport. “For 20 years, I have been a professional shooter, lived a life where I did nothing but shoot day in and day out, trained my heart out,” he said later. “From tomorrow onward, I will be a hobby shooter, I will train twice a week. That’s it.” Bindra’s last day as what he termed a “professional shooter” — ie, someone who trains and shoots like a professional would — was triumphant. He won his first individual medal ever in the Asian Games, in the 10m air rifle event; he helped India win the team bronze, too. Two medals in this supremely competitive continental championship, a day after declaring that this phase of his life was getting over, was a remarkable feat. Bindra had qualified fifth-best out of the eight finalists with 625.4 points; in the final, he came up with a string of 10s. His 10th shot got him a 10.7, just .2 off the maximum possible — this put him in the lead, but only .1 point ahead of Yifei Cao. But Bindra’s 12th shot got him only 9.6 — Cao got 10.5, and Bindra was down to fourth at 124.1. The quality of shooting under pressure was just brilliant after that: Bindra had 10.4, 10.5, 10.3, 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7, but Cao shot better, and Haoran Yang shot the best and got gold. Young Yang
Later, at the press conference, Bindra was asked about being a one-time Olympic champion who could “only” shoot a bronze here. He turned to Haoran and asked: “How old are you?” Haoran, who became the world champion last month, said: “I’m 18.” “See, I’m double his age, I have white hair, and still I’m able to compete with him,” Bindra said. “So I’m quite happy with the medal that I’ve won. Haoran, actually, has memories of Bindra winning the gold medal in 2008 — he was just 12 then. Bindra had beaten a Chinese shooter, Zhu Qinan, to the gold. Beating Bindra, the man who vanquished a Chinese shooter then, was especially satisfying for Haoran. Haoran was inspired to take up shooting after the Beijing Olympics — but his hero was Cai Yalin, who won gold in the same event at the 2000 Olympic Games, during which Bindra turned 18, on September 28. Cai Yalin is now Haoran’s coach. Haoran is the next big thing of world shooting — he already is big, actually, for he won the gold medal at the recent World Championship in Grenada. Bindra said he’s always been inspired by the Chinese shooters; it’s possible Haoran reminds Bindra of himself at that age. But Bindra was intense — for Haoran, shooting is just ‘playing’. Haoran used to love guns right from his childhood; he’s still in love with the sport. “He shoots not to win gold but to ‘play’ the sport,” said a Chinese reporter who’s known Haoran for many years. Haoran doesn’t like to practise much, he shoots because he enjoy ‘playing’ with guns, which he’s done right from his childhood. Bindra wants to be like that — at 31. Bindra says that he’s an old man. But he wants to recapture his youth. He wants to do it in the only way he thinks he possibly can — by ‘playing’ with shooting, like Haoran, the genius teen who shoots to play, unfettered by his expectations. Five days before he turns 32, Bindra today stepped again on the road to teenage. |
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The death of a golden dream
Incheon, September 23 Immediately after losing the men’s squash final to good friend Abdullah Al Muzayen of Kuwait, Saurav Ghosal, the eight-time Indian champion, flung his racquet high and let it fall to the floor. Then he picked it up, congratulated the winner and stormed out of the court. He went to the players’ waiting room and sat on the black bench there, contemplating the hurtful bonfire of his dreams. He grabbed his head, stared at nothingness, rubbed away his tears. He held his I-card and stared at it with unseeing eyes. The dope control officials went in to advise him about the procedure of taking a sample, but he seemed unable to understand anything. The expression on Ghosal’s face said: “Who are these odd men in grey and white? Where am I? Who am I?” His teammate Harinder Sandhu went in to console him. But Ghosal was beyond consoling. Ghosal, finally, put on a new T-shirt to go to the medals ceremony — but he forgot to change from his shorts to his track suit trousers and put on his India jacket. Dipika Pallikal, who finished with a bronze in the women’s event, rushed to get them for him. Ghosal then waited for the ceremony to begin — he slumped down to the floor, sat there for an eternity, perhaps wishing that he’d wake up from a nightmare, and that the gold medal would be in his fist. “It’s not a bad defeat — it would be a bad defeat if I didn’t play well,” Ghosal told this writer later. “But I actually played well. It’s a failure for me. I’d come here to win gold, and I didn’t win gold.” “Personally, it’s a failure for me,” said Ghosal, 28, and winner of two singles bronze medals in the Asian Games in the past. Incredible comeback
About 30 minutes into the match, it seemed that Ghosal would crush Abdullah — he won the first game 12-10, and the next in only six minutes, 11-2. In the third, Ghosal had a match point at 12-11 up. Abdullah saved it when a stroke was awarded against Ghosal; Abdullah won the next two points with untouchable drops. The match turned — Abdullah won the fourth 11-8. In the deciding game, Ghosal was 6-4 and 7-5 up; Abdullah then won five points in a row — three match points. Ghosal saved two but failed to pick up a powerful smash. Match gone — dream over. Didn’t they seem to collide and bump each other a bit too often? “Sometimes, the movements of the two players differ,” Ghosal, ranked world No. 16 against Abdullah's No. 46, offered a defence for his opponent. “Abdullah and I are very good friends. We don’t dislike each other, we have great mutual respect and talk with each other most weeks. I’m one of the few guys he talks with. He is a good guy.” But Abdullah did seem a bit slow in moving out after playing a shot. “Yes, but then he had a very tough five-game match yesterday, and so he may have been tired and slower in his movements,” Ong Beng Hee, whom Ghosal beat in the semifinal yesterday, told this writer. “And Abdullah is a bit heavier, too… I don’t think there was any intentional rough play there.” Ong said squash is tricky business. A player benefits by blocking his rival’s access to the ball, but doing so is against the rules. “It’s a thin line — a player would like to block his opponent’s path to the ball, but he must be seen to be making an effort to move away,” he added. Abdullah said that the match was not bad-tempered. “We’re great friends,” he told this writer. “We first met in 2002, I think, and are friends from our junior days. In a match, of course, we’re very intense rivals and play hard, and so things can get a bit heated up.” That did happen today. In a glass cage, in front of a wildly cheering audience, things got heated up — Ghosal cracked and went to pieces. |
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Incheon, September 23 Sanathoi lost to Zhang Luan of China in the women's Sanda 52kg category semifinals, while Grewal was defeated by Jean Claude Saclag of Philippines in the men's 60kg semifinals. Both the Indians went down in identical 0-2 'Win by Round' verdicts. The two bronze today ensured that wushu players managed to equal the two medals they bagged in the 2010 edition where India won a silver and a bronze. Indian men beat Oman 7-0
For India, Rupinderpal (18th, 19th min) successfully converted two penalty corners before limping off the field. The off-colour Raghunath (39th, 60th) managed two goals via penalty stroke and penalty corner. Akshdeep Singh (33rd), Ramandeep Singh (54th) and Danish Mujtaba (60th) were the other scorers. The worrying factor for India will be Rupinderpal's injury before the crucial game against arch-rivals Pakistan. — PTI |
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Hockey TENNIS Women's Doubles First Round BADMINTON Men's doubles round of 32 BASKETBALL BOXING Men's Light (60kg) EQUESTRIAN
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India suffer defeat in men’s and women's sepaktakraw
The Indian men's team went down fighting 1-2 to Japan, while their women counterparts were blanked 0-3 by Myanmar in the preliminary round of the sepaktakraw event on Tuesday. Indian rowers enter medal round
Indian rower Sawarn Singh Virk made the final of men's single sculls and the double sculls and the lightweight quadruple sculls teams too entered the medal round here on Tuesday. Sawarn claimed the top place in repechage 1 of the 2000 metre race in seven minutes and 10.93 seconds. The double sculls team comprising Om Prakash and Dattu Baban Bhokanal bagged the first place in repechage 2 of their event. Unwell lifter
Sathish Kumar fails to participate
CWG gold medal winning weightlifter Sathish Kumar Sivalingam on Tuesday pulled out of the Men's 77kg competition as he was suffering from a sore throat and fever. "Sathish did not take part because of sore throat and fever. He took ill the day Taiwan's Lin breaks two world records, grabs gold
Taiwan's Lin Tzu-chi (in pic) broke two world records with her final lift to snatch gold away from China's Deng Wei in the most dramatic of fashions in the women's 63kg. Lin took the lead with a clean and jerk lift of 143kg which took her to a total of 259kg and smashed the old combined world record of 257kg. Deng then strode out and hoisted 144kg on her final lift to break the clean and jerk world record by 1kg, equal Lin's total and go into gold medal position by virtue of lower bodyweight. But Lin then hauled 145kg to claim gold. — Agencies |
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Koreans’ love for cricket
Incheon, September 23 When that happens, when she frets over the lack of strength in her arms or her lack of height, her coach shows her videos of a retired cricketer and tells her: “See, this guy is short in stature, but he’s very tall in his achievements.” The short man with tall achievements is, of course, Sachin Tendulkar. South Korea’s women cricketers don’t possess a straight backlift like Tendulkar, their straight-drives are not yet replicas of Tendulkar’s, but that’s quite excusable – they’ve been playing the game for only seven-odd months. South Korea has had a cricket league for quite some time – right from the early 1990s. But the players were, without exception, expatriates from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, England and Australia. And they were all male. Over time, they did get an all-male team, due to cricket becoming an Asian Games event in 2010. Last year, the Koreans decided to set up a women’s team too. They hired Nasir Khan, an Pakistani-origin cricketer who’s been living in Korea for over 20 years. He’d played club cricket in Lahore and then in Korea, and started coaching in the year 2000. Khan had a problem in selecting his XI. He started the search for girls who wanted to play cricket for Korea. They put up banners in colleges and universities and found about 20 girls. They were all sportspersons — but it wasn’t quite cricket. “They were from swimming, golf, softball, tennis, badminton, taekwondo — they were clueless about cricket,” Khan chuckles. Now the team wanted to go and train in a cricketing nation — they chose Nepal, naturally enough. But seriously, why Nepal? “The girls were not ready to go to Pakistan to train; Australia was too cold, and we were worried that I could be denied the Indian visa because of my Pakistani background,” Khan explains. “Sri Lanka would have been too rainy. Then, we’d been familiar with Nepal, and the costs were low, too.” They spent two months in Nepal and came back better cricketers. They trained there, and they watched a lot of the IPL too. The IPL is, to most serious coaches, a tamasha — but to the Korean girls, it was the highest form of cricket. More pertinently, the format in the Asian Games is Twenty20, too. The coach would hold viewings of IPL matches, live or recordings, and quiz them about their understanding of the sport. The girls liked stylish strokeplayers and exciting pace bowlers. They became fans of Virat Kohli for his style and strokes and Lasith Malinga for his hairstyle and his slingy action. They weren’t much like their hero, Kohli, in their matches against Hong Kong and China. They were bowled out for 57 and 49, and lost both matches. But Khan is not discouraged. “See, it’s very difficult for a novice to play this game with style, in the manner it should be played — straight bat and all that,” he says. “But these girls were able to do that. I was worried that they’d be confused by rules, the terms, the fielding positions. But they’ve understand all of that very well.” Eunjin Lee says that she enjoys playing cricket. “I really like it very much,” she says. They’ve not yet started savouring the joys of sledging yet, though. “There were a bit of aggressive comments by the Hong Kong girls,” Khan laughs. “My girls didn’t understand it at all. They didn’t know the reason for this strange and rude behaviour!” Over time, Khan hopes that the girls would improve, play on and excel. Korean women behaving badly while playing cricket brilliantly — sounds just fascinating! Hope Khan can make it happen.
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Sania-Cara qualify for World finals
Singapore, September 23 Black would be making her 11th appearance in the competition having qualified for the previous 10 years with three different partners — Elena Likhovtseva, Rennae Stubbs and Liezel Huber. Sania and Cara would compete in the eight-team doubles competition, joining Sara Errani and Roberta Vinci, Ekaterina Makarova and Elena Vesnina, and defending champions Peng Shuai and Hsieh Su-Wei, who qualified earlier. “Cara and I are excited to have qualified for the WTA Finals and look forward to competing against the best teams,” Mirza said in the WTA statement. “I'll be making my first appearance at the season finale while for Cara it's the first time since she became a mother, so we have lots to celebrate already,” she added. — PTI
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PSB lift Baba Farid Gold Cup
Faridkot, September 23 Vikramjeet Singh, Taranbir Singh, Ramandeep Singh and Captain Singh scored a goal each. PSB Academy had defeated Signals Jalandhar 6-0 on Monday.
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Raipur, September 23 Brief Scores: Hobart Hurricanes: 178/3 (Blizzard 62, Malik 45*) bt Northern Knights: 92 (Styris 37, Hilfenhaus 3-14, Bollinger 3-22) by 86 runs. — PTI
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So, Abhinav Bindra isn’t retiring, after all — he’s just going to break free, after living in bondage to shooting for two decades.
So, Abhinav Bindra isn’t retiring, after all — he’s just going to break free, after living in bondage to shooting for two decades.
Despite drag-flicker VR Raghunath missing as many as eight penalty corners and Rupinderpal Singh sustaining a serious thigh injury, India managed a 7-0 victory over minnows Oman in the men's hockey event here today. 
before yesterday but seemed to have recovered. We were confident of fielding him in the event but he again fell sick and was taken to the doctor, who said he could not take part in the competition," said India's chef-de-mission Adille
Sumariwalla.