COPENHAGEN, Denmark: With a little tuck here and a little tuck there, Shabnam Mabarz hides her long hair under a red headscarf and gets ready to play.
“Voila,” said the 20-year-old Mabarz, a member of Afghanistan’s national soccer team.
Mabarz and her teammates will be the first to wear a new hijab that is connected to the base layer under their national team shirt. The new creation, which also includes leggings, will make it easier for women to combine their soccer with their faith.
Using it is optional.
“This jersey is the Afghani team uniform and I am proud to be a role model for thousands of young girls and women back home in Afghanistan,” said Khalida Popal, the team’s former captain. “It is very special to me. It is our identity.”
The outfit was designed by Danish sportswear brand Hummel, the company that also makes the national team uniforms for Denmark and Lithuania.
Playing soccer in Afghanistan can be dangerous for women, so many members of the national team live in Europe.
“Football was not easy for us to play, especially in a male-dominated country,” Popal said. “It was not acceptable for women to play. Football is a man’s game.”
When women are allowed to play in Afghanistan, they are usually required to wear a headscarf. But that often proves tricky with the cloth sometimes falling over the players’ eyes.
“So we thought of this solution, the sports hijab that is part of the whole package we made for the Afghan Football Federation,” Hummel owner Christian Stadil said. “We wanted to make one that is cool and fashionable.”
Stadil, who previously sponsored the exiled Tibet team, said the brand was in talks with other Middle Eastern countries to provide a similar outfit. He declined to name them.
“Our core value,” Stadil said, “is to change the world through sports.”
Afghani women’s team gets jersey with integrated hijab
Afghani women’s team gets jersey with integrated hijab
Ex-heavyweight boxing champion Anthony Joshua injured in Nigeria highway crash
- Pictures circulating online showed a shirtless Joshua — a British national of Nigerian heritage — surrounded by what appeared to be broken window glass
LAGOS: Former world heavyweight champion Anthony Joshua suffered “minor injuries” in a fatal car accident that killed two people Monday, Nigerian police said.
Pictures circulating online showed a shirtless Joshua — a British national of Nigerian heritage — surrounded by what appeared to be broken window glass on the seats around him.
The circumstances around the wreck are “currently being investigated,” said police in Ogun state, just north of Nigeria’s economic capital Lagos, which throngs with visitors from across the country and diaspora each December.
Joshua “was seated in the rear of the vehicle, sustained minor injuries and (is) receiving medical attention,” the police statement said.
Joshua’s promoter Eddie Hearn told Daily Mail Sport he was on a family holiday and “awoke to the news of this incident.”
“We are trying to contact Anthony and in the meantime we don’t want to speculate on how he is but thankfully he appears OK from what I have seen in the images,” he said.
Police said the wreck, in which two people in Joshua’s car were killed, occurred around 11:00 am, in the town of Makun, along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway.
Nigeria’s Federal Road Safety Corps said in a statement that the Lexus Joshua was riding in “was suspected to be traveling beyond the legally prescribed speed limit on the corridor, lost control during an overtaking maneuver and crashed into a stationary truck... by the side of the road.”
Witness Adeniyi Orojo told Punch news Joshua was traveling in a two-vehicle convoy, and was seated behind his driver.
“The passenger beside the driver and the person beside Joshua died on the spot,” he said.
The police gave the same toll, saying the two killed were “passengers in the vehicle” who “lost their lives at the scene.”
The names of the victims have not been released but a spokesman for the Ogun state governor said preliminary reports indicated they were “two male foreign nationals.”
Earlier this month Joshua knocked out YouTuber-turned-boxer Jake Paul in a Netflix-backed bout in Miami.
The former Olympic champion Joshua has since been linked with a fight against compatriot and fellow former world champion Tyson Fury.
Joshua’s last fight prior to the match with Paul was a fifth round knockout loss to fellow Briton Daniel Dubois in September last year.
