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SEVEN YEARS AFTER LUKAKU LEFT, THE SMILING ASSASSIN ARRIVED
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IN the beginning it was quite easy — standing in front of just about 700 students, at my high school’s Monday morning assembly sessions — reading my report of how our football team had played in an away game that weekend.
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ONLY six months separate the arrivals of Mohamed Salah and Denver Mukamba into this world — the Egyptian the first to be born on June 15, before the boy from Highfield made his grand entrance into this beautiful garden of the living just four days before Christmas. That was in 1992. The year a battery […]
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SOMEHOW, amid apocalyptic fears triggered by concerns World War III could be on the horizon, football was supposed to provide us with something to cheer our spirits in a week pregnant with political tension triggered by the never-ending Syrian conflict.
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FOR me, it was like July 25, ’93 being replayed before my eyes all over again, reliving that nightmare, enduring that pain, the agony and shame that came with failure and the sheer weight of disappointment that came with seeing a dream being crushed in such ruthless fashion.
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THE striking irony of it all was found in Farai Jere’s beaming smile on Wednesday as CAPS United rolled the red carpet for Denver Mukamba when this Dynamos outcast, some even now call him a reject, a zitye or a bhero, arrived for his first training session as the newest recruit to the Green Machine family.
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ON June 24, 1995, a South African pilot, Laurie Kay, guided his giant Boeing 747 — then the world’s biggest passenger plane — over Johannesburg’s Ellis Park packed with more than 63 000 fans in a spectacular stunt that was fraught with danger in the event something went horribly wrong.
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EXACTLY five years ago, the finest cricket writer and broadcaster of our time, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, finally lost his brave battle with cancer and died surrounded by his close family members at home in Essex at the age of 67. For all his mastery of the analysis of both the written and spoken of the gentleman’s game, […]
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THE first big hint came in the main reception of the Yadah Hotel, one bright moonlit evening last year, the sound of water oozing from the giant water wheel, as it crashed into the pool beneath, occasionally breaking the tranquillity that had replaced the madness generated by a relentless wave of the human traffic earlier […]
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Sharuko on Saturday THE last time this blog appeared in this newspaper, only a week had passed since the inauguration of President Mnangagwa as Zimbabwe’s new leader — the culmination of landmark events in a dramatic year in which powerful winds of change swept across the domestic political and football landscape.
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SHARUKO ON SATURDAY THE only big disappointment was that when it finally happened, with more than half-a-century of history melting away in the heat of a platinum furnace, someone very, very important wasn’t there to see all this drama unfold at Ascot exactly a week to this day.
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WHERE does one really start after the intoxication of the sights and roaring sounds of that unforgettable Sunday summer afternoon when domestic football paraded the full spectrum of its enduring beauty — the smiles in the packed bays and the songs that provided a fitting soundtrack to this spectacular carnival? Maybe, I should start with the […]
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THERE HAVE BEEN SOME GOOD TIMES AND SOME BAD TIMES, BUT THAT’S THE WAY IT IS WHETHER by design, or by default, it had to be the year this Brazilian shanty town on the shores of the Atlantic, welcomed the birth of a boy who, with the passage of time, would become the world’s most […]
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HIS last dance with the domestic Premiership was covered in a blaze of glory, celebrating the last of the three domestic league titles he won as part of a special group of footballers whose immortality would be sealed — without him in their ranks — just months after his departure. Three league championships in four years […]
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Sharuko on Saturday FOR Nicholas Munyonga, a long-term Warriors doctor who, is also a sports medicine expert and the regional leader of the World Anti-Doping Agency, the warning signs flashed four years ago in Egypt during a World Cup tour of duty with the senior national team.