Given the soaring temperatures plus their arduous workload on the field, the UAE national team’s cricketers would have been forgiven for putting their feet up whenever time permits this week.
Especially Rameez Shahzad, who was forced to retire hurt during the first one-day international of their three-game series against West Indies in Sharjah on Sunday.
The team themselves have suffered two bruising defeats so far against their illustrious opponents, while Rameez suffered a literal blow when he was hit on the head by a well-directed bouncer from Odean Smith.
Rather than sit inside and lick his wounds, though, he has been back out in the heat, doing what he can to help bring about what he hopes will be a lasting impact on the game here.
The 35-year-old batter is one of three UAE internationals who are coaching at a new training centre, called Zenith Cricket Academy. On Wednesday afternoon, the day after the second ODI, he was running the rule over the academy’s high-performance players, who are enrolled in a progamme called “Road to UAE” run by the Vision Next event management company.
The premise is that Rameez, Salman Farooq and Nasir Aziz – his fellow coaches – will be able to draw on their own experiences in the game here to help guide those aspiring to follow them.
“Growing up I played a lot of cricket in UAE and I thought, ‘What can we do differently in our training?’,” Rameez said.
“We would do nets for 10 or 15 minutes, bowl for a bit, field for a bit, then go back home. It is the same process, over and over. It keeps on going.
“The question is how can we get the best youngsters and what can we do to improve that? I was coaching at an academy, and changed the set up a bit so the kids would bat for an hour or more.
“They were begging, saying, ‘We don’t want to bat anymore.’ It was the same with bowling. We would do things like tire them out before the session, then make them bat.
“We didn’t discuss any of these things. We wouldn’t tell them. Then slowly, when I saw them buying into this I pointed out to them that when you are tired out, you still have to perform your best.”
The programme is capped at 40 players, each of whom is seen as a potential UAE player in the future.
“For now, we have 14- to 19-year-olds, and the idea is for them to end up playing for UAE age group sides, and then hopefully the men’s in the future,” Farooq said.
“Nasir, Rameez and I have played a lot of cricket together in the past. We get along well. We know about Nasir’s cricket credentials, but he is also one of the hardest working coaches that I’ve seen.”
The academy plans to have exchange programmes overseas with organisations such as English county side Sussex, Pakistan Super League franchise Lahore Qalandars, and Delhi Capitals from the Indian Premier League.
They also have an affiliation with a sports mechanics and data analysis specialist in India, Ramakrishnan Subramanian, who has previously worked with the India team as well as Chennai Super Kings.
While Rameez hopes those opportunities will help the academy’s young players understand what is required in the elite game, he says the guiding principle will be hard work.
“We all [the three coaches] have been part of the set up, and I still am, so we know what they have facing them in the future,” Rameez said.
“We do Yo-Yo testing, the 2km runs, everything that they are going to have to do, but then we push them a bit more.
“If the target is 8mins 30 [for 2kms] they have to do it under 7min 30. So by the time they get there, they will be ready. We are trying our level best to push these kids.”
Skewed figures
In the village of Mevagissey in southwest England the housing stock has doubled in the last century while the number of residents is half the historic high. The village's Neighbourhood Development Plan states that 26% of homes are holiday retreats. Prices are high, averaging around £300,000, £50,000 more than the Cornish average of £250,000. The local average wage is £15,458.
Results
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ALRAWABI%20SCHOOL%20FOR%20GIRLS
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2.0
Director: S Shankar
Producer: Lyca Productions; presented by Dharma Films
Cast: Rajnikanth, Akshay Kumar, Amy Jackson, Sudhanshu Pandey
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
Starring: Saja Kilani, Clara Khoury, Motaz Malhees
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Rating: 4/5
