The chairman of Oman’s cricket board said he would have had to wave “goodbye” to the Twenty20 World Cup had a deadly storm that ripped through the Gulf state on Sunday taken a slightly different path.
Eleven people were killed as heavy winds and rain swept through the country after Tropical Storm Shaheen made landfall in Oman.
The Gulf state is to host six Group B matches at al-Amerat near Muscat, including three involving the home team.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Oman Cricket chairman Pankaj Khimji said that the organizers were “very fortunate” to have missed the worst of the storm.
“We were so close to being virtually wiped out,” Khimji told reporters. “We had the cyclone only a few nautical miles north. It made the landfall there and it’s devastated that whole region and flooded the whole plain over there.”
“Had this had happened over here in this area, I’d have said goodbye to the World Cup,” he said.
While a handful of hospitality tents bore the brunt of the storm, the organizers were pleased with the greener look of the outfield following the intense rain.
“We got about three to four inches [7.6cm to 10cm] of rain,” Khimji said. “And that made the ground even more lush and greener, it looks even prettier now. It washed off all the dirt and sand.”
Khimji said it was a huge honor for minnows of the cricket world to stage such a prestigious event.
“This cricket coming to Oman is gigantic,” he said. “To think that there will be tens of millions of people watching the first game, it’s overwhelming to an extent.”
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier