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SPORTS

SPORTS

Nigerian-born British heavyweight boxer, Anthony Joshua, doesn’t want to wait for too long to fight a fellow British boxer, Tyson Fury.

The rivalry between Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury has been raging for years but the two boxers haven’t been able to agree on a bout even though they were close to doing so a couple of times.

Due to the online banter between the boxers, especially from Fury, most boxing enthusiasts are anxiously looking forward to when the two Britons will finally clash in the ring.

Hence, it is expected to be one of the most talked about and lucrative fights of all time especially if it takes place now that they are still at the peak of their respective boxing career.

But currently, the two fighters are preparing for different bouts. 35-year-old Fury is preparing for his rematch with Oleksandr Usyk in December, while 34-year-old Anthony Joshua is preparing for his IBF world title fight with Daniel Dubois on September 21.

If Fury beat Usyk and Joshua beat Dubois, the two British veteran boxers will finally face off in a unification bout. But AJ told the BBC that his meeting with Fury is long overdue.

“It’s a fight that’s been brewing for a long time,” Joshua said on Thursday.

“I can’t wait until I’m 50 to fight Fury because I’d have had so many wars, I can’t sit around and wait, I’ve got to continue to fight.”

 

Brazil legend, Ronaldo Nazario says he has quit watching football, insisting the round-leather game is boring and is not worth his time.

The former Barcelona, Inter Milan, Real Madrid and AC Milan star said this after Brazil’s disappointing 0-0 draw against Costa Rica to open their Copa America campaign.

Despite Dorival Junior’s side staggering 19 shots throughout the game, they could only manage a measly four on target as they never got into any kind of flow or rhythm.

Brazil sits in second place in their group which is led by Colombia following their 2-1 win over Paraguay.

Brazil will next be in action on Saturday against Paraguay but their legend seems to have seen it all.

Ronaldo had earlier claimed he is unlikely to be supporting the Brazil squad at the Copa America because he finds it ‘too boring.’

“I think I love tennis more now than football. I cannot watch football matches. I think it’s too boring,” ‘R9’ said at the Mouratoglou Annual Charity Gala.

“I can stay for 5 hours watching tennis.”

The next tennis tournament is the Wembley Open which comes up on July 1st.

[DailyPost]

Georgia stunned former champions Portugal 2-0 on Wednesday to reach the knockout stage at Euro 2024 —- their first-ever major tournament.

The match was settled by an early Khvicha Kvaratskhelia strike and a Georges Mikautadze penalty kick.

The win, albeit against a largely second-string Portugal who had already made it into the next round, represented the greatest result for Georgia.

This was since the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. 

 

But there was nothing undeserved about the way Willy Sagnol, a former Bayern Munich and France defender, and his side claimed a third-place finish in the tournament’s Group F.

It was a win that had now set them up for a last-16 meeting with three-time Euro winners Spain.

Georgia’s win also means that England will line up against Slovakia, Romania take on Netherlands and Portugal face Slovenia in the round of 16.

Hungary, who had been in contention for a spot in the next round, were edged out.

The tournament debutants took the lead in the second minute when Kvaratskhelia, the Napoli winger, raced away after a careless pass by Antonio Silva.

He then powered a low shot past Diogo Costa in Portugal’s goal.

 

Cristiano Ronaldo —- one of only three starters for Portugal who also played in their 3-0 win over Turkey on Saturday —- stretched and strained for every ball.

This was as he sought to become the oldest goal scorer at a Euro tournament at the age of 39.

But Georgia defended as if their lives depended upon it and sought to catch Portugal on the break.

In the 53rd minute, Silva compounded his earlier error by committing a foul in the penalty box which led to an award of a penalty kick after a VAR check.

Mikautadze, who had provided the pass for Kvaratskhelia to open the scoring early on, steered his kick past Costa, making him the top scorer at Euro 2024 so far with three goals.

Ronaldo was booked in the first half for arguing and he cut a frustrated figure when he was substituted after the break, kicking out at a water bottle.

Georgia goalkeeper Giorgi Mamardashvili made late saves to keep Portugal at bay in the final minutes.

At full-time, Georgia’s squad and coaching staff sprinted onto the field to celebrate in front of thousands of their fans.

Reuters/NAN

Oleksandr Usyk has confirmed he will vacate his IBF title just weeks after he became undisputed world heavyweight champion.

The Ukrainian, 37, became the first heavyweight to hold the IBF, WBO, WBA and WBC belts when he beat Tyson Fury on a split decision in Saudi Arabia last month.

With Usyk now contracted to a rematch with Britain’s Fury, he is not in a position to defend the IBF crown against interim champion and mandatory challenger Daniel Dubois.

 

That means Dubois’ expected all-British fight against Anthony Joshua at Wembley in September could now be for the vacant title.

Usyk said in a video posted on social media: “Anthony and Daniel, listen. I know the IBF title is important to you. It is my present to you on September 21.”

Britain’s Lennox Lewis was the last man to unify the major heavyweight belts — three at the time — prior to Usyk, in 1999.

[Vanguard]

The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) has debunked speculations that the football body is talking with former Ivory Coast national team coach, Herve Renard to fill the vacant Super Eagles coaching job.

Herve Renard is the first foreign coach to win the Africa Cup of Nations with two different countries – first with Zambia in 2012, and then with Ivory Coast in 2015.

He is currently the head coach of the France women’s national team but he had said he would step down from the role at the end of the Paris Olympics this summer.

This means that Renard will be available for the vacant Super Eagles of Nigeria coaching job if the NFF decides to go for him. Note that the position has been vacant since earlier this month when coach Finidi George decided to resign from the role.

Finidi George who was appointed the Super Eagles head coach in April decided to leave the job two months later following a draw with South Africa and a defeat to Benin Republic in the 2026 FIFA World Cup qualifiers.

Reports claimed that the coach felt disregarded when the NFF announced plans to appoint a foreign technical adviser without carrying him along.

Amid that, Herve Renard was consistently linked with the Super Eagles coaching job, a speculation a top NFF official had claimed to be false.

“This report is inaccurate. We’ve not contacted Renard or his reps,” the unnamed NFF top official told BBC Africa.

Barcelona legend and Inter Miami superstar Lionel Messi has finally revealed the secret to his incredible talent.

The 37-year-old is an 8-time Ballon d’Or winner, Copa America champion, and World Cup winner with Argentina.

 Widely regarded as the greatest footballer of all time, Messi has won league titles with Barcelona and Paris Saint-Germain.
 People stopped picking my calls, so I started begging - 'Engineer' Lukman who lost both...
 
In a recent interview with Argentine podcaster Juan Pablo Varsky, Messi shared the source of his talent:

“It’s very clear to me that I was born like this because God chose me. It was a gift he gave me. I tried to take advantage of it, I did everything possible to squeeze the most out of it.

“The truth is, although I did many things, I did nothing to become the player that I already was when I was little.”

Messi is currently at the Copa America with Argentina, possibly his last major tournament.

Vanguard News

Former Manchester United midfielder, Paul Pogba has cried out that he's dead and over.
 
This comes after he was given a lengthy ban.
 
The footballer made this alarming claim amid his doping ban, saying he ‘doesn’t exist anymore’.
 
Pogba said as a footballer, one’s successes and achievements could be forgotten in a minute.
 
The Juventus midfielder is currently serving a four-year ban, handed out to for testing positive for testosterone metabolites in his system.
 
Pogba, who is currently signed to Juventus made a heartbreaking claim in a recent interview, according to The Guardian Nigeria as quoted by Sportskeeda.
 
“Football is very beautiful but it’s cruel. You can do something great and the next day you’re nobody.
 
“I’m over, I’m dead. Paul Pogba doesn’t exist anymore.”

British heavyweight Anthony Joshua says it would not be a “wise decision” for his son to follow in his footsteps and become a professional boxer.

The two-time former unified world heavyweight champion told BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs he would much prefer if his son, Joseph Joshua, known as JJ, became an accountant instead, though he added that he wanted him to carve out his own future.

He has previously said he did not envisage a boxing life for his “little JJ”, wanting his son to be the “best man that he can be” instead.

Speaking to Desert Island Discs, Joshua revealed that his views about his son’s future had not changed. He said he would tell JJ to “do the best you can do”, when advising him about what he wanted to be when he was older.


“If I was to choose (a career) for him, I would ask him to probably look at accountancy because I think it’s good to understand numbers,” he said.

Reflecting on his own career, Joshua mentioned how boxing helped him channel his energy during difficult times in his youth. He got into trouble with the police for fighting as a teenager and was homeless at 17. Boxing became a turning point for him when he entered the ring at 18.

Joshua’s career took off when he won gold at the London 2012 Olympics, and he turned professional a year later. His victory over Wladimir Klitschko in 2017 was a defining moment, cementing his status as a top heavyweight.


Joshua won all of his first 22 professional bouts, 21 of them inside the distance, to establish himself as the most renowned knockout artist of his generation.

But the low point in the boxer’s career came in 2022, when he failed to recapture the unified WBO, WBA and IBF heavyweight titles from his nemesis, Ukraine’s Oleksandr Usyk in Saudi Arabia.

As he tried to come to terms with the loss, Joshua at first denied it had a profound effect on him but at a post-fight press conference, Joshua was apologetic, choked back tears and held his head in his hands, saying the defeat tore him apart.

Speaking to Desert Island Discs, he said he went into a “dark room” for five days where he could not talk to anyone in order to heal from the inside mentally.

Ese Brume produced a sensational performance to win the gold medal in the long jump event of the 2024 African Athletics Championship in Cameroon on Sunday.

 

She has now won the gold medal in the event four times while maintaining her unbeaten run in Africa for eight years.

 

It was not a smooth sailing run from Brume, who recovered from a slow start to overtake Burkina Faso’s Marthe Koala, who led with 6.72m after five attempts.

 

Brume showed her tenacity and immense quality to finish first in the race with 6.73m to win the gold medal.

 

Another Nigerian long jumper, Prestina Ochonogor finished fourth with 6.28m.

 

Temitope Adeshina won the silver medal in the high jump final event after losing to Rose Yeboah of Ghana.

 

Team Nigeria has now won a total of seven medals in the African Athletics Championship with three gold medal two silver and one bronze.

These are sad times in Nigerian football.

The events of the past two weeks have opened up a can of worms, plus the opportunity of a microscopic look beyond the superficiality of the incomprehensible drama.

There is ‘madness’ in the air. 

Nigerian football is currently being white-washed and sun-dried in the global information superhighway.

Suddenly, nothing is right about Nigerian football, not even the seemingly improving domestic leagues, the steady growth of the women’s game, the explosion in the domestic football business, and the mushrooming of academies. All these have been set aside for the failure of the Super Eagles to win one simple football match at home against the weakest team ever to defeat them in history, a team annoyingly being coached by a foreign man rejected by Nigeria for taking Nigerian football back many decades. That singular defeat has also, now, taken Nigerian football development back several decades, nullifying even the small gains at AFCON 2023.

Worse still, the loss by the Super Eagles and the resignation of Finidi George, have both been dwarfed by the cursing and ranting (from ‘nowhere) of Victor Osimhen. It is now the most-talked about issue in the Nigerian football space, setting off mayhem in the football structure – what to do or not to do with Osimhen.

On the current billboard of Nigerian football are all the ugliness, the illegalities, the mediocrities, the injustices, the frailties, the failures in the system, everything in all their nakedness, tiworo tiworo! It is so bad that no one knows exactly what to make of it all, or how best to resolve the resultant issues.

Permit me to peer through my microscope into why in 5 short months, Nigerian football plunged from near the pinnacle of ultimate success to the dung of an unprecedented and most shameful defeat. What could have gone so drastically wrong?

The reality is that at the end of the day, it is the players and how they perform that determine the measure of success or failure of football administrations. When a team wins, everything is right. When a team loses, everything is wrong. It is as simple as that. There are no in-betweens.

Even the era of football administration in Nigeria that is often referred to as a model is only so rated because the Super Eagles played extremely well and won trophies for Nigeria in the early to mid-1990s. Inside the boardroom, at the time (I was a witness), it was also chaotic.

Some 5 months ago, Nigeria broke its own standards. The country rewarded ‘second-best’. She rewarded a team that did not win the trophy in a way such as the world had never seen before.

In history, Nigeria had lost, rather painfully, several finals of previous AFCONs. Twice, in 1988 and 2000, great squads of the Eagles’ that were even glaringly ‘robbed’ of their moments of glory were not welcomed with blaring trumpets, and no celebrations were held to honour or reward their valiant efforts.

Put that side-by-side the Super Eagles of AFCON 2023. No one had confidence in the team. For almost one decade before, they had won nothing, had not impressed very much, had not produced outstanding performances and performers, and so on. All of this under the tutelage of foreign White coaches.

Then, Cote D’Ivoire in January of 2023 happened and the same players that broke the hearts of Nigerians with a lethargic performance in the final match were accorded a heroes’ welcome, feted, honoured and handsomely rewarded by the government.

That gesture was totally out of character with the norm. It must have come with a consequence or a price, as an impetus or a depressant. The players may have concluded they were special indeed.

From amongst them, the most celebrated player before, during and after AFCON who did not deposit one single moment of magic, a single moment of brilliance for posterity to play back and celebrate in testimony to Africa’s Best Player, instead goes on a ranting spree in ‘unjustifiable’ anger, spewing out venomous words like the pus from a wound against his own coach. He was not even a part of the humiliating loss to Benin Republic!.

This can only be the product of some ‘madness’ in the air of Nigerian football. He even went to the extent of announcing that he does not care even if he is never invited to the national team again. Who says such things?

I am muted by the events of this past week. I choose not to speak about them beyond the following:

Finidi George’s resignation

Finidi George and the whole idea of hiring an indigenous coach for the country were not the desired options of the current football administrators. Finidi’s reluctant engagement was wrapped in so much bad-blood and negative intentions that it was doomed to fail!

There was no way he would not have failed even though losing to Benin Republic was never on the cards, and is a totally unacceptable result. So, Finidi’s decision to leave the poisoned Chalice alone by resigning is the most honourable thing to do.

Microscope on the Super Eagles

I am looking microscopically at the Nigerian players.

What has been staring the country in the face for over a decade is the dwindling number of exceptionally-gifted players in many positions on the field.

For several years we stuck with a goalkeeper that was glaringly short on safe-hands. I cannot understand why two foreign coaches definitely stuck to him. Is it confirmation that there is a deficit of great goalkeepers in the country?

At the full-back positions, only Ola Aina has shown consistency and exceptional brilliance down the right-side of the field over several years. The left-side has been the opposite, porous and so weak sometimes that Aina has had to be moved to the left-side to cover up for this weakness on occasions.

The centre of Nigeria’s defence line has been weak. At AFCON 2023, William Troost-Ekong rose to the challenge and provided leadership and great cover for that weakness. The first goal scored by Benin Republic against Nigeria in the absence of William clearly confirms this glaring weakness. There are no bona fide Central defenders currently in the Nigerian team.

In the midfield, Nigeria has a few names like Wilfred Ndidi and Alex Iwobi. They are very good players until you start to compare them with those before them, the engine room of most of Nigeria’s great teams of the past – Samuel Garba, Haruna Ilerika, Mudashiru Lawal, Henry Nwosu, Jay Jay Okocha, Sunday Oliseh, Kanu Nwankwo and so on? And I do not mean any disrespect to the mid-field players in the current Super Eagles.

There is an array of many good forwards in the current Nigerian team, but goalscoring has been in serious deficit, a reflection of their completeness compared to a glorious past that would surely include amongst many great names, that of Finidi George, the scapegoat of a failed system.

That is the reality.

Nigeria needs a new team of players in several positions. These players cannot be conjured into being by wishful thinking. They will come only through a proper production line established by administrators that know what they are doing!