The AD Zone

When the news filtered through from Santiago in March 2008, it was a shock to every one. It was like a football world cup without Brazil. For the first time in 80 years, an Olympic hockey tournament would not have India as one of the competitors. To make a mockery of it, Narendra Batra, former [...]

Young Gaurav Sabnis made an impassioned case which builds on his constant campaign to have us natives call the beautiful game “soccer” and not “football”. Well, under normal circumstances, one should, like his European and South American friends, simply shrug and and put him down under the category

The last couple of months one came across some excellent writing on football (or soccer as some people insist on calling it). Yael Averbuch played in the women’s professional Soccer League in USA before it was suspended in 2012. So she transferred to the European Champions League playing for Rossiya

The last few years there have been many players coming in and out of the Pakistani cricket team. Two years back, Azhar Ali was one of them, part of a possible plan to transition the middle order from the aged warriors like Mohammad Yousuf, Younis Khan and Misbal-ul-Haq. He made his debut in 2010 in

The Hungarian national airline Malev closed down. In an advisory to passengers, they write: Dear Passengers Concerning your travel, we suggest that you ask other airlines about their offers or, if possible, you choose an alternative method of transport. The reasons for closure – bankruptcy. The last

A frequently heard argument in favour of book festivals is that they provide a venue for writers to meet the reading public. Although appealing, this argument is based on a flawed premise in that it assumes that attendance is equivalent to approbation. This, however, according to Ghosh, is not reall

Sometime back during the 2009 IPL, I was following Shastri’s commentary with the objective of listing out all his cliches. Given Shastri’s success as a world level commentator, his book of cliches would be useful for any budding commentators. So I had posted this in 2009. In the 30 days since the st

The former no 1 and present no 1 teams are struggling while on tour “It’s always nice when you turn up to a ground where history suggest you can score runs. But that doesn’t really count for anything. We’ve got to go out and put our poor performance behind us.” This could be by someone [...]