They have been their country’s most celebrated outfield players for, well, almost long as Bosnia and Herzegovina has had a competitive national football team to represent its young nation.
On Sunday, in Greece, Edin Dzeko and Miralem Pjanic hope once again to show that their individual qualities can dovetail effectively in the service of their country.
For Dzeko, a major milestone is within touching distance. One more goal and the forward will have 50 in international football.
He will win his 83rd cap on Sunday. By any standards, that is a fine ratio of goals per game. By the standards of a small country, who have been taking part in international competitions for only two decades, it is excellent. In his home country, Dzeko has been a pathfinder, as well as a formidable penalty box predator.
In club football, where he has commanded high transfer fees and achieved significant medals, Dzeko’s reputation is high, but perhaps just a little short of the very top rung in the hierarchy of great 21st century marksmen.
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Dzeko was devastating as a young striker in Germany, and hugely influential in propelling Wolfsburg to an unlikely Bundesliga title in 2009.
When that persuaded Manchester City to spend over €35 million (Dh139.5m) on him in 2011, he seemed to have entered a new stratosphere.
He would win two Premier Leagues with City, score 50 goals in his 130 appearances there but while there were periods of electric form, there were also droughts, not least a run of 15 matches without a goal in the 2014/15 season.
He could look detached from his midfield at times, fine target man though he is. City loaned him to Roma in the summer of 2015, with a clause in the contract that the move should become permanent a year later.
At Roma, Dzeko has enjoyed more security of his first-team starting place; and, better still, he had a long-time alibi.
Pjanic, his compatriot, had been with the club from the Italian capital for four years, Roma having made the delicate midfielder who had emerged as a potential star — and French Ligue 1 champion — at Lyon an important creative fulcrum, a precision passer, a superb executor of free-kicks and corners.
Pjanic, four years Dzeko’s junior at 26, has been a senior Bosnia international alongside Dzeko since he was 18. He has been the leading provider of assists in Serie A for the past two seasons.
Dzeko the poacher plus Pjanic the provider, two men speaking the same language, well rehearsed at international level in each other’s movements and talents: Roma should have celebrated a great marriage of talents, of the two players who had done as much as any to guide Bosnia towards a first major tournament, the 2014 World Cup, and endorse the country’s calibre.
“They are the two idols of our country’s football,” says Tino-Sven Susic, the Bosnia midfielder. Yet as fellow Romans, they sometimes seemed strangers. After an exhilarating start to the season of Dzeko-and-Pjanic in tandem, Roma stalled. Dzeko’s goals ran dry. His form spluttered through the winter and spring.
Pjanic outscored him, with 10 goals in the league season, to Dzeko’s eight. And, remarkably, only once in the entire campaign did a Pjanic pass lead directly to a Dzeko goal.
When Pjanic was lured to Juventus last summer, consensus in the capital was that Roma had lost the wrong Bosnian.
Yet since then, Dzeko, orphaned of Pjanic’s through-balls and crosses, has rediscovered his mojo. He currently leads the Serie A scoring list, and has scored eight of his 10 goals this season for Roma since the beginning of October.
Pjanic has yet to fully tune in with Juventus, who see him as their new Andrea Pirlo, although he has had his moments.
The partnership, the pairing that never quite clicked at Roma, has flourished since Pjanic and Dzeko ceased to be club colleagues.
For Bosnia, who could join Greece on nine points with a win on Sunday, and aim to leapfrog the Greeks into at least second place in a group led by Belgium, the duo have lately looked again the perfect pairing. Dzeko, who has three goals from three qualifiers so far, scored twice in the win against Cyprus last month.
Naturally, it was the trusty Pjanic who set up both goals.
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NO OTHER LAND
Director: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal
Stars: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham
Rating: 3.5/5
The Birkin bag is made by Hermès.
It is named after actress and singer Jane Birkin
Noone from Hermès will go on record to say how much a new Birkin costs, how long one would have to wait to get one, and how many bags are actually made each year.
Brief scores:
Day 2
England: 277 & 19-0
West Indies: 154
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.
U19 WORLD CUP, WEST INDIES
UAE group fixtures (all in St Kitts)
- Saturday 15 January: UAE beat Canada by 49 runs
- Thursday 20 January: v England
- Saturday 22 January: v Bangladesh
UAE squad:
Alishan Sharafu (captain), Shival Bawa, Jash Giyanani, Sailles
Jaishankar, Nilansh Keswani, Aayan Khan, Punya Mehra, Ali Naseer, Ronak Panoly,
Dhruv Parashar, Vinayak Raghavan, Soorya Sathish, Aryansh Sharma, Adithya
Shetty, Kai Smith
ELIO
Starring: Yonas Kibreab, Zoe Saldana, Brad Garrett
Directors: Madeline Sharafian, Domee Shi, Adrian Molina
Rating: 4/5
Wicked: For Good
Director: Jon M Chu
Starring: Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, Jeff Goldblum, Michelle Yeoh, Ethan Slater
Rating: 4/5
Third Test
Day 3, stumps
India 443-7 (d) & 54-5 (27 ov)
Australia 151
India lead by 346 runs with 5 wickets remaining
More from Rashmee Roshan Lall
Despacito's dominance in numbers
Released: 2017
Peak chart position: No.1 in more than 47 countries, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Lebanon
Views: 5.3 billion on YouTube
Sales: With 10 million downloads in the US, Despacito became the first Latin single to receive Diamond sales certification
Streams: 1.3 billion combined audio and video by the end of 2017, making it the biggest digital hit of the year.
Awards: 17, including Record of the Year at last year’s prestigious Latin Grammy Awards, as well as five Billboard Music Awards
A list of the animal rescue organisations in the UAE
Brief scores:
Liverpool 3
Mane 24', Shaqiri 73', 80'
Manchester United 1
Lingard 33'
Man of the Match: Fabinho (Liverpool)
