JOHANNESBURG: Virat Kohli praised his India side’s guts and determination as they fought back to claim a much-sought after victory over South Africa.
Having already lost the three-match series Kohli and Co. were left to play for pride in the final Test. Coming into the last day the hosts were 17 for one needing 241 for victory on a pitch that had caused batsmen considerable problems.
South Africa’s Dean Elgar and Hashim Amla, however, made the track look timid as the hosts reached 124 for one, seemingly sauntering their way to a series whitewash. India then summoned one last effort to leave South Africa floundering, before bowling them out for 177 to snatch the win.
“We required some character playing on a pitch that was very difficult,” India skipper Kohli said.
“I think our guys showed great guts through the four days. Batting first wasn’t a call that went down well with some people, but we knew it was the right call.
“Elgar and Amla played really well, although it was not easy. You expect that from South Africa. But one thing I know is that when wickets go down, in pressure situations, it’s very difficult to come back.”
Amla and Elgar had survived a morning session where India’s bowlers often pitched too short. And despite finding better lines and lengths after lunch, the wicket they needed was not forthcoming.
Then, Amla, who had seen off 139 balls for his 52, flicked an Ishant Sharma delivery in the direction of midwicket. Hardik Pandya, peripheral with both bat and ball in the game, flung himself to his right and emerged with the ball in hand. In 21 overs either side of tea, South Africa proceeded to lose nine for 53, to give India a famous 63-run victory, their second at The Wanderers.
Dean Elgar, struck on the helmet on the third evening when the umpires took the players off after concern about the state of the pitch, batted 240 balls for an unconquered 86, but the other big names in the line-up could not fire when the pressure built.
AB de Villiers was squared up by a Jasprit Bumrah delivery that took the splice of the bat on its way to Ajinkya Rahane at gully. And after tea, Faf du Plessis was left almost on his haunches as Ishant Sharma got one to shape back dramatically and bowl him. Bumrah then trapped the hopelessly out-of-form Quinton de Kock for a first-ball duck as 124 for one became 145 for five.
When Vernon Philander looked to up the scoring rate, Virat Kohli, India’s captain, called on Mohammed Shami, who had barely bowled earlier in the day. Philander chopped the third ball on to his stumps, and Andile Phehlukwayo’s hesitant prod also smashed into the stumps off the inside edge.
Kagiso Rabada, who had defied India for more than a session in the first innings, edged Bhuvneshwar Kumar to first slip for a duck, and Morne Morkel was yorked by a beauty from Shami. Lungi Ngidi thwacked one down the ground, but when Shami speared one short outside off stump, the thin edge behind was enough to seal the win.
“I think India outplayed us in this Test,” said Faf du Plessis, South Africa’s captain. “We didn’t take our chances.
“But if you told me 2-1 before this series, I would’ve bitten your hand off. India have played great cricket, but we were deserved winners.”
Virat Kohli praises ‘guts and determination’ of Indian side after Wanderers victory
Virat Kohli praises ‘guts and determination’ of Indian side after Wanderers victory
‘Splendid’ Sunil Narine powers clinical Kolkata to top of IPL, Chennai win again
Narine’s blitz, laced with six fours and seven sixes, guided Kolkata to 235-6 after they were invited to bat first in Lucknow’s final home game.
Two-time champions Kolkata bowled out Lucknow for 137 in 16.1 overs for their eighth win in 11 matches and almost guaranteed a play-off berth. Second-placed Rajasthan Royals have played one match fewer.
In the first game of the day, all-rounder Ravindra Jadeja starred with bat and ball to help holders Chennai Super Kings climb to third with a 28-run win over Punjab Kings.
The top four teams will make the play-offs with the final on May 26 in Chennai.
Narine, who has impressed after being promoted to open by Kolkata this season, led their batting charge in a 61-run first-wicket stand with Phil Salt.
“He was splendid,” Kolkata skipper Shreyas Iyer said of his team’s player of the match Narine, who has amassed 461 runs at a strike-rate of 183.66.
“The start from openers has been great. Pure bliss. We just want to keep continuing the momentum so that we get to the great total and be optimistic.”
Lucknow’s Naveen-ul-Haq took three wickets to hurt KKR but Iyer, who made 23, and Ramandeep Singh, who hit a six-ball 25 not out, helped the team finish on a high.
Ramandeep returned to make an impact in the field as he took a stunning catch to dismiss Arshin Kulkarni when he ran back 21 meters to dive and pouch the ball off the bowling of Mitchell Starc.
Marcus Stoinis hit 36 but the rest of the batting fell flat as spinner Varun Chakravarthy and fast bowler Harshit Rana took three wickets each.
Andre Russell took two wickets and Narine returned figures of 1-22.
Lucknow are fifth on the table and stay in the hunt for a play-off spot.
“Once we go back to dressing room, we move on from this game and see where we went wrong,” said skipper KL Rahul. “Last home game, we are on the road for the next few games, we need to be little bit more fearless.”
In the earlier match, Jadeja top-scored with 43 off 26 balls to guide Chennai to 167-9 batting first in Punjab’s adopted home ground of Dharamsala.
Jadeja then returned figures of 3-20 from his four overs of left-arm spin to help restrict Punjab to 139-9 for Chennai’s sixth win in 11 matches.
The performance from the veteran Jadeja comes as a welcome sign for India ahead of the T20 World Cup in June in the West Indies and the United States.
Chennai suffered an early blow with Sri Lanka pace bowler Matheesha Pathirana set to return home due to a hamstring injury.
Pathirana was Chennai’s standout bowler and took 13 wickets in six matches.
But medium-pace bowler Tushar Deshpande took on the responsiblity in the absence of Pathirana and injured Deepak Chahar as he struck twice in his first over and Punjab’s second in the chase.
Deshpande sent Jonny Bairstow, bowled for seven, and then Rilee Rossouw, bowled for a duck, trudging back to the pavilion in the space of four balls and the chase could never take off.
Saudi riders dominate first World Camel Endurance Championship in AlUla
- Local riders filled the first three places in the men’s category
- Event featured a prize pool of more than SR2 million
ALULA: Saudi competitors dominated the first World Camel Endurance Championship for men and women in AlUla, which was held in partnership with the Royal Commission for AlUla Governorate.
The Saudi racers took the first three places and the championship cups in the first and second rounds of the men’s event. Fares Al-Juhani on Bayan won in a time of 15 minutes 54.27 seconds, with Nayef Al-Faydi riding Munadi second in 32:05.84, and Sulaiman Al-Huwaiti on Motaeb third in a time of 32:11.6.
In the women’s category, Saudi racer Kholoud Al-Shammari on Jabbar took first place with a time of 36:59.91, with the second and third places filled by a Jordanian and a German rider respectively.
Competitors representing 20 countries participated in the championship, with the 16 km races split into two 8 km stages, with a 30-minute break in between. After the first stage, 20 male competitors and 15 women qualified for the final stage, and the result was calculated according to times set across the two stages.
The value of the tournament prizes exceeded SR2 million ($533,333), with the winner in the men’s and women’s categories receiving SR500,000, while the balance of the prize pool was distributed between 10 runners-up in the men’s category and 10 runners-up in the women’s category.
Saudi riders dominate first World Camel Endurance Championship in AlUla
- Local riders filled the first three places in the men’s category
- Event featured a prize pool of more than SR2 million
ALULA: Saudi competitors dominated the first World Camel Endurance Championship for men and women in AlUla, which was held in partnership with the Royal Commission for AlUla Governorate.
The Saudi racers took the first three places and the championship cups in the first and second rounds of the men’s event. Fares Al-Juhani on Bayan won in a time of 15 minutes 54.27 seconds, with Nayef Al-Faydi riding Munadi second in 32:05.84, and Sulaiman Al-Huwaiti on Motaeb third in a time of 32:11.6.
In the women’s category, Saudi racer Kholoud Al-Shammari on Jabbar took first place with a time of 36:59.91, with the second and third places filled by a Jordanian and a German rider respectively.
Competitors representing 20 countries participated in the championship, with the 16 km races split into two 8 km stages, with a 30-minute break in between. After the first stage, 20 male competitors and 15 women qualified for the final stage, and the result was calculated according to times set across the two stages.
The value of the tournament prizes exceeded SR2 million ($533,333), with the winner in the men’s and women’s categories receiving SR500,000, while the balance of the prize pool was distributed between 10 runners-up in the men’s category and 10 runners-up in the women’s category.
How La Liga is building bridges with Saudi Arabia and regional partners
- Managing Director for Middle East and Africa Maite Ventura spoke to Arab News about the recent Futures FC tournament in Riyadh and promoting the Spanish league’s brand and its clubs
DUBAI: On and off the pitch, La Liga’s ties with Saudi Arabian football are growing.
At the start of March, the La Liga FC Futures U14 tournament was held at the Mahd Sports Academy in Riyadh and won by Spanish club Villarreal.
The competition had been organized in partnership with the Kingdom’s Ministry of Sports and saw 12 teams taking part, including eight EA Sports La Liga teams — Barcelona, Cadiz, Atletico Madrid, Sevilla, Villarreal, Real Betis and Osasuna — as well AS Roma from Italy, Portugal’s SL Benfica, Olympique de Marseille ofFrance and Saudi Arabia’s own Mahd Academy.
Just last week, Barcelona-based Espanyol became the latest Spanish club to welcome a delegation of the Saudi Future Falcons program, with the team from the Kingdom beating the La Liga reserve team 3-2 at Dani Jarque Sports City.
There have been several other collaborations and Maite Ventura, La Liga managing director for the Middle East and North Africa, says more projects are set to come to fruition in the coming months and years — all part of La Liga’s mission to grow its brand.
“Our goal in the case of Saudi is about understanding that the popularity of La Liga and the popularity of football in Saudi is huge,” Ventura told Arab News at La Liga’s headquarters in Dubai. “I think more than 80 percent of the population follows football, so we wanted to be there. It's one of the main countries in the region, so for us was very important to be there.
“We not only want to be there with a small project,” she added. “We have many different projects there, with the General Entertainment Authority, with the Ministry of Sports, and (recently) we were celebrating FC Futures in Riyadh, which Villarreal won. We we want to know the countries in which we have fans of La Liga.”
Off the pitch, other ventures include the opening of themed bar and restaurant LaLiga TwentyNine and the world’s largest football museum, Legends, both in Riyadh in collaboration with Saudi events company SELA and the GEA.
“So, this is our mission there, it's about connecting with all of the fans, engaging with the main institutions there,” said Ventura. “We want to be present there, and we don’t want to be there just doing FC Futures, we want to be there for a long time, and we want to be there for our fans.”
When La Liga’s office in Dubai opened in 2014, it became its first ever outside Madrid, with an urgent brief to spread the Spanish league’s brand.
“Our president, Javier Tebas, understood that the limit was the population in Spain, so the only way to keep growing was to go beyond our borders.”
Dubai was seen as the ideal strategic location from which the operation would be carried out in the rest of the region.
“This is not only the 10-year anniversary of the Dubai office, but (of) the international expansion strategy,” said Ventura. “It’s been a long journey, but actually working in the MENA region, where football is the number one sport and where La Liga is the most consumed competition, it’s a pleasure.”
Regionally, Real Madrid and Barcelona have enjoyed huge support for decades in the Middle East, while others like Atletico Madrid, Athletic Bilbao and Valencia have accumulated big followings as well. La Liga’s mission is not just to promote its collective brand, but the individual clubs as well among Arabic-speaking audiences.
“We are doing this in different areas” said Ventura. “From a data perspective, we are working with around 12 clubs from La Liga, we are managing their Arabic social media accounts, we are putting weekly content plan for them to be connecting with their own fans.
“The clubs have understood as well that their fans are not only in Spain, in Valencia or Sevilla or Vigo, but they are in Cairo, Dubai or Jeddah,” she said. “So, this clicked in their heads, and in the last four to five years, the clubs have changed their strategy to go abroad and to connect with their fans. For us, we started with just three people back in 2013. And, right now, we are almost 20 people working only for the MENA region in eight different countries.”
Alongside its strategic projects in Saudi Arabia, La Liga also has representatives working in Qatar, Morocco, Egypt and Iraq.
“Right now we have three people fully based in Baghdad, because we have a very interesting project with the football association there,” said Ventura. “In at the end, our way of doing this is always to be on the ground, physically here, understanding who our fans are, how they consume our product, how they like it, and this allows us to understand and to have this market intelligence and to go to the clubs to let them understand how this works.
“Being in Morocco is not the same as being in Dubai or Baghdad, for example. Our mission is basically to increase the brand value and the value of the TV rights to reach other audiences, other profiles, and of course, to generate business opportunity for La Liga and the clubs.”
In 2022, La Liga and Dubai-based media multinational Galaxy Racer signed a 15-year joint venture to promote the league’s brand in the MENA region and Indian subcontinent.
“We are totally convinced that (for La Liga) to penetrate any market, we need to go hand-in-hand with a partner. It doesn’t matter if it’s a local authority, football federation, local league or a club. We are here to connect with the fans, to connect with the people that like football in each of the countries. So, it’s not like we are in Dubai, and we are managing everything from here. In the case of Iraq, we have a strategic agreement with the football association there. We are working with them to transform the local league, the Iraqi Stars League.”
The highest number of users from the region registered on La Liga’s app comes from Iraq, Ventura revealed, and technology and artificial intelligence are ways through which Spanish clubs will be reaching out to fans, as well as, in the cases of Sevilla and Deportivo Alaves to name two, to gain an advantage in the fields of scouting and recruitment of players.
“We (La Liga) have been working very hard in strengthening the brand of each of the clubs,” Ventura said. “Because the clubs are not just depending on their players — if one player leaves, the club has to keep being strong. So, of course, these are very important lessons that we have been working on now over the last 10 years. First it was international strategy, they understood this, and right now for example, they are working a lot in technology, and definitely AI is going to play a key role in La Liga, not only in this region, but worldwide in the coming years.
“Each of the clubs have their own approach,” said Ventura. “Some of them, they have very strong grassroots systems. Some of them are in involving themselves a lot in technology. Each of them are specializing in (ways) to enter into the market. It’s not the same from one club to another, and they understood this in the right way.”
Ventura expects more partnerships to be signed in 2024 and beyond.
“Last year, it was very important because we partnered with a Galaxy Racer,” she said. “In the MENA region, 50 percent of the population is less than 30 years old. We are very focused on connecting with the youngest generations, Millennials and Gen Z population mainly. So, that is why, from this season, we have started to produce a lot of local content. This means that here we are creating content in Arabic for our Arab fans. We have a very strong strategy right now. We just launched the first Arabic podcast from La Liga, it is called ‘Vamos La Liga’.”
She continued: “We were expecting big numbers, but the the feedback has been amazing. We had more than five million views on the second episode that was with (renowned journalist) Achraf Ben Ayad.”
Ventura says the episode was one of the most consumed pieces of content ever produced by La Liga’s global accounts.
“The experience has been amazing, and we will keep increasing the (amount) of local content, and we are working with a lot of content creators. We will have very big names coming to this podcast very soon,” she added. “We are very focused on the production of local content, and by that I mean everything will be in Arabic, and with people from the region. So the experience has been great.
“We are also doing documentaries, we are producing other type of programmes and everything will be rolled out in the coming months so it’s very exciting.”
Smashing barriers — table tennis helping rise of sporting events in the Middle East
- WTT chief executive writes exclusively for Arab News about the impact of Saudi Smash 2024
JEDDAH: As the Middle East continues its economic transformation, its rapidly growing sports industry stands as a prominent example of this dynamic shift. Events like the Saudi Smash 2024 in Jeddah exemplify the region’s ambition to host major international sports competitions; they also underscore a broader trend toward creating immersive, engaging experiences for a diverse audience.
A reflection of regional growth
Saudi Smash 2024 is not merely an international table tennis event; it reflects a vigorous push into the sports sector, which is becoming a cornerstone of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 strategy. In 2022, the sports tourism sector emerged as a booming $600 billion industry in the Middle East, anticipated to grow even further. The sports industry in the region is expected to expand by 8.7 percent by 2026, sharply contrasting with the global industry’s slower growth rate of 3.3 percent. Studies suggest that, in some Middle Eastern countries, a halo effect boosts the tourism and hospitality industry by up to 30 percent.
But such mega sporting events do not only drive immediate economic uplift through increased tourism and consumer spending. The preparation and execution of an event like Saudi Smash 2024 involve numerous local stakeholders from various industries, thereby distributing economic benefits across a broad spectrum of the local economy. They also promote long-term economic stability by creating jobs and spurring infrastructural developments.
A need for enhanced fan engagement
Recognizing the shifting preferences of younger generations, the Middle East is tailoring its sporting events to cater to Generation Z and Alpha spectators who prefer shorter, more action-packed formats. Similar to what can be expected at a World Table Tennis Saudi Smash, these events are no longer just about the sport; they are multimedia, multifaceted experiences that incorporate advanced digital technologies — such as augmented reality and real-time data analytics — to offer personalized and interactive fan engagement. This shift is critical as fan attraction and retention now hinge on delivering more than just brand loyalty; young fans desire a voice in decision-making processes and seek bespoke experiences that resonate with their digital-native sensibilities.
The power of sports sponsorships
The global sports sponsorship market is poised to grow from $66 billion in 2022 to nearly $108 billion by 2030, and the flourishing sports scene in the Middle East provides fertile ground for brands to market themselves to millions of consumers in the region. An event like Saudi Smash offers regional and global brands a platform to enhance visibility and engage with diverse audiences. The power of sponsorship, in its traditional form, is undeniable. It offers brands an unparalleled opportunity to connect with specific audience segments, fostering emotional bonds, driving brand loyalty, and catalyzing sales. Sponsorship, long-standing in the world of marketing, has entered a transformative era. Sports event partnerships have evolved from mere logo placements and brand affiliations to deeper, more strategic partnerships with an increased focus on values, social impact, and long-term engagement. These collaborations not only drive direct revenue but also build brand associations with health, vitality, and global connectivity, aligning perfectly with corporate goals of broader market penetration and consumer connection.
The evolution of table tennis
The establishment of WTT has been instrumental in transforming table tennis into a major player on the global sports stage. By introducing high-stakes competitions and enhancing broadcast quality, WTT events like the Saudi Smash exemplify how the sport is not only elevating its profile but also integrating seamlessly into the broader context of international sporting events. These events showcase world-class table tennis talent and craft a spectator experience that is globally engaging and accessible. They not only captivate new fans but also attract brand partnerships, further embedding table tennis into the global sports narrative.
Looking to the future
The Middle East’s journey towards becoming a global sports destination is full of promise, bolstered by continuous investments in technology and infrastructure. The transformation of sporting events in the region is emblematic of broader ambitions on the world stage. Through strategic innovation and proactive engagement, the Middle East is not just participating in but is actively leading the global sports dialogue. Events like the WTT Saudi Smash are in place to support this journey, setting new benchmarks for what a sporting event can offer and inviting the world to witness the rise of a new era in global sports prominence.
• Steve Dainton is chief executive of World Table Tennis
