Al Shamal buying blow

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Al Shamal buying blow

It comes after an unexpected loss that affected us psychologically, but I take responsibility for the loss. We are going through a very difficult work stage that focuses on the mental aspect. When you win five consecutive matches and then lose by four goals, it can have an impact on the players. We must be on top of readiness against Al Shamal. Hence for our next match, we must be ready for all challenges against Al Shamal. Since I arrived at Al Duhail, I know that this club is one of the best sides in the country. I have principles that I work with - the first of which is honesty and working hard with the players. Until the final whistle is blown, we must deal with matters in a transparent manner. I take the blame - and not the players — if things go bad. We wanted to attack and that caused gaps at the rear. We will do our best to beat Al Shamal. We risked a lot offensively in the previous match in order to score goals, that created the spaces for the Al Wakrah team to counter our slackness. Al Wakrah players took advantage of our mistakes and succeeded in scoring. It is still a long way to go. We are now facing a new match — our fans can rest assured that we will work hard. Other news. Title Sponsor. Official Sponsors. Business Partners. Please login to Continue. Al Ahli. Al Arabi. Al Wakrah. Al Khor. Qatar SC. Al Rayyan. Al Sadd. Al Gharafa. Umm Salal. Al Shamal. Al Shahania. Al Duhail. Back To Home. Please login to Continue User Name. Remember me Lost password?

Basketball: Al Sadd v Al Shamal statistics and results

Al Shamal buying blow

Sabin Iqbal Sabin Iqbal 22 Dec, But, I did end up in the Gulf, like the thousands of men from my hometown, Varkala, a seaside town on the Thiruvananthapuram-Kollam border, in spite of my efforts to escape the common destiny of hundreds of youngsters flying across the Arabian Sea every year like following an invisible pied piper, chasing El Dorado. Or, fleeing the uncertain future back home. But, strangely though, there are many others who want their sons to somehow leave the shores of Kerala and land in some jobs in the Arabian Gulf. My father came back for good with two cartons of books he had collected over the years he lived in Abu Dhabi and Ras Al-Khaimah, and a malignant tumour tucked somewhere in his lungs. Immediately after finishing my journalism course at the Press Club, I had sold my bike and gone to Delhi to become a journalist. I had wanted to write on cricket. Equipped with recommendation letters from senior journalists, I met a few editors and senior journalists from Kerala. One of them, who is now no more, asked a nervous me if my name was Sunil Gavaskar or Ravi Shastri, for that matter. I gulped my fears. I stood before him with my knees knocking against each other. I stared down at the floor. He may have meant well but in the process he had dented the confidence of a young man who wanted to become a sport writer. It was winter in Delhi. I was staying with a friend of mine who was a trainee reporter in an English news magazine. The room was too tiny for both of us. Before I drained all the money I had, I packed my bag and left Delhi. A couple of months later, I passed the written test and was called for an interview for the post of a trainee reporter in Lucknow for the same news magazine. I would be paid five grand, and I knew that would be barely enough for me to survive in the city of kebabs and biryanis. In the meantime, my brother-in-law, who had been in Abu Dhabi for a few years, managed to get me an employment visa as secretary to the finance manager of the large company he was working for. I was in a dilemma. In one hand I had the interview card, which could open a door to the world of journalism; and in the other, a visa for a job which could bring enough money to calm the nerves of a widowed mother. My dream job or my filial duty? They heaved long, heavy sighs. They were warm yet unfamiliar, like siesta gusts or the shamal, whirling in from the desert, spraying tiny, shiny powder of sand. As the tired men continued to watch, with sagely composure, the sea slapping on the breakwater boulders, they wondered if the waters had ever changed since the day they boarded the launch, were tossed up and dropped down viciously, and, after countless days of journeying under star-filled skies with seasickness, arrived on this coast, sapped of every ounce of their energy, parched and hungry, yet with a glimmer of hope somewhere within their heart. Worse, after many summers, their sons follow their footsteps. Years later, shadows of the fathers and sons merge under an inescapable, scorching sun. Drunk and senseless, I wept to sleep, lamenting my fate. I walked around the industrial area in the sweltering heat, watching the people and their lives around me. My friends and cousins thought I was crazy to be out in the sun. I was looking for stories from the lives of the labourers around me. I wrote features about them and sent them to a local English newspaper. None of them were published. Unperturbed, I watched the life around me in the dusty industrial area with grey dust-smeared shops of spare parts and scraps, and workshops lining the bumpy roads. I observed the men who worked in construction sites and lived in squalid shanties. I watched the dark, frail women who worked in garment factories. I wrote about them in my notebook. The heat in the summer months was not just palpable but oppressive—like a beast—pressing heavily, squeezing out every ounce of fluid. The faint hopes of the expatriate labourers on construction sites grew fainter as the day progressed. At sunset, a blood-red, sweating sun dribbled down a pallid horizon, silhouetting scaffolds and cranes into apparitions of fantasy. In the evenings, they returned to their matchbox-like shanties, or Labour Camps, sapped of every ounce of energy. Their eyes burnt, emanating the heat of the noon sun, and their hearts ached from agony for which they had no names. Some called it suffering, some fate, and some others, hell. They sat in their pickup van with sweat-soaked towels draped around their face to ward off the hot breeze and dust, and thought about their families back home. They remembered the now-distant moments with their wives, children and parents. They remembered the fleeting, lighter phase of life. Tears welled up in their flaming, dust-filled eyes; a lump clogged their throat. Their wages were at the mercy of their employers, given once in a few months. Their fuzzy, sunken eyes mirrored the shadows of the bloody war back home. Every day, they were brought to work in minibuses with dysfunctional air conditioners and no fan. They had to keep the sliding glass windows of the vehicle half-open to let some breeze in, but the hot, dry desert breeze brought with it the fine dust of sand, which settled on the fringes of their hair and brows, and on the cracks on their dark, brown lips. Several of these buses picked them up from their shared hovels in another part of the city and dropped them at their work destinations unceremoniously, taking them back at sunset. Though, in the morning verve, they spoke about things back home, by the time they returned, they plunged into silence. On their way back, they kept staring at the shops lining the streets and the vehicles whooshing by. Every day, their eyes kept getting sucked further back into their sockets and their cheeks caved in deeper. What they realised in these quiet moments of daily travel was that hardship at home and hardship in a foreign land were the same man, manifesting his cruelty in two different ways. Walking down the short flight of stairs, he turned back once or twice and looked to where Umma and I stood. Sister was in a cloth-cradle, sleeping, not aware of the emotional separation being played out in the portico. It would take another 15 days for his first letter to arrive, in which he would describe in detail how difficult it was for him to leave her, me and Sister behind; how crowded the Bombay airport was, and how dry and hot Abu Dhabi was. Without a phone, there was no way we could exchange any real-time information. When one of our neighbours had a telephone in their house, Vappa used to call at a scheduled time, and Umma, sister and I would take our turns to speak to him. For the most part of my teenage years, my father was nothing but an annual warmth—who came every year for 30 numbered days with lots of love, gifts and stories of camels, deserts and a city of expatriates, and left creating a huge vacuum of paternal love and care. Not all men could afford to take their families with them to the Gulf. Growing up under the shadow of a mother who was a graduate and yet a homemaker and a grass widow, I could never fully fathom the desperation, longing and frustrations of a young woman forced to live away from her husband. Umma was one among thousands in Kerala. I remember Umma pulling out the monthly cheque tucked between the sheaves of onion-thin, sky-blue letterheads. Occasionally, he enclosed a few photographs of his, taken in a studio with a backdrop of a huge crescent rising over sand dunes and camels decked up for Eid. Sometimes, he sent pictures of himself sitting by a row of red and yellow flowers in a park in Abu Dhabi. Behind him, we could spot expatriate workers in green dungarees watering or pruning plants. Going to the bank to cash the cheque was a monthly ritual, which I eagerly looked forward to. Once the teller called out the number, and Umma counted the bundle of banknotes, we would walk to Reena Bakery for fruit salad. On our way back, she would buy me a Poompatta and a few copies of Mandrake and Phantom. When I began to learn the letters of the English alphabet, he drew them with corresponding animals in his letters to me, written in big, round letters. Good at drawing, he sent me pictures of boys and girls in action to describe what a verb was. When one of our neighbours had a telephone in their house, Vappa used to call at a scheduled time, and Umma, Sister and I would take our turns to speak to him. Umma would smile ear-to-ear. Sister would sing aloud, and I would hum a tune. When we had a telephone at home, he used to call every Friday, and when there was any urgency. He called me up when Rajiv Gandhi was blown to death in Tamil Nadu. I still remember the first time he complained of a numbing pain in his right hand. Unnikrishnan has brilliantly captured the predicament of a newly married man who works in Dubai and phones his wife back in Kerala. Johnny Kutty bought phone cards and called his wife once a week. Life in the UAE, over 15 years, opened a world of opportunities for a village boy like me. It gave me, a diehard cricket fan, the opportunity to meet, shake hands, and even to sit in a press box, with my childhood heroes as I reported on cricket from Sharjah. When I was in college and Sister in high school, he came back for good to the house he had built on a hillock spending all the money he could make, living a life he never wanted to live. He came back home with two boxes of books, a VCR and cancer in his lungs. As a parent, he never wanted me to go to the Gulf, given my inclination towards reading and writing. I, too, followed suit. But for me, life in the UAE, over 15 years, opened a world of opportunities for a village boy like me. Though the editor of the newspaper never published the features I had sent him from the industrial area, he once called me in my office and offered the post of a subeditor. A door opened to my dream world of journalism. I began to edit and report local matches. I began to meet stars. Even now when it rains incessantly during the monsoon, I remember the June morning when my father walked down the stairs of our family house in a backwater village, and how he turned back twice to where Umma and I stood. Since the oil boom in the Gulf many fathers have left home with a heart broken and bleeding for their family left behind, many mothers have heaved sighs of loneliness, and many children have grown up dreaming of the annual warmth of paternal love. Thanks to the unbelievable innovations in telecommunication, the Gulf is no more a land of mystery. We all have become digitally naked and close. While the physical and mental torture and trauma Najeeb, the protagonist, undergoes is not common among the men in the Gulf, there are hundreds of others who live their lives in weirdly tragic ways—there are many who have not returned home for decades. These men hardly realised then that, in many ways, it would turn out to be a one-way journey. With no social acceptance and access to not even basic human rights, they lived and endured hardship. They lived in a dust bowl that pulled their feet down every day into an abyss of uncertainties— a trap set by the insecure native upstarts, for whom freedom and civil rights were veritable threats to their new-found stroke of prosperity. Over the years, back home, their wives, with no word from their men, grew impatient, frigid, indifferent, and, finally, distant. Their flesh lost hunger, blood its youthful gurgle, their dreams lay thwarted prematurely in the untimely sweeps of frustration and angst. Kriti Soni. Siddharth Singh Militant unionism, agitating farmers and electoral populism in key states can sabotage the India growth story. Minhaz Merchant He expected others to keep their word. He always kept his. Illustration: Saurabh Singh. I never wanted to go to the Gulf. I tore up the interview card. Share this on. When one of our neighbours had a telephone in their house, Vappa used to call at a scheduled time, and Umma, sister and I would take our turns to speak to him Share this on. It gave me, a diehard cricket fan, the opportunity to meet, shake hands, and even to sit in a press box, with my childhood heroes as I reported on cricket from Sharjah Share this on. About The Auth o r. Sabin Iqbal. More St o ries. M O st Popular 1. Guru Girija Veejay Sai. More C o lumns. Cover Stories The Threat Within Siddharth Singh Militant unionism, agitating farmers and electoral populism in key states can sabotage the India growth story.

Al Shamal buying blow