Southampton frustrated by Premier League decision to postpone Newcastle game

Southampton have asked for clarity from the Premier League over its decision to postpone Sunday’s match against Newcastle United.

The game at St Mary’s was postponed due to ongoing coronavirus cases and injuries ravaging the Magpies squad.

Southampton are understood to be frustrated by Newcastle’s inability to field a team, having been forced to use fringe and youth-team players in matches themselves over the last year.

The south coast club were particularly low on senior numbers when they were thrashed 9-0 at Manchester United in February.

The Premier League said on Friday that its board had accepted Newcastle did not have the required number of available players to fulfil the fixture – 13 outfield players and a goalkeeper.

Under-21 players who have senior experience must also be included when assessing the eligible personnel available.

The Magpies’ match against Everton, scheduled for Thursday night, was called off earlier this week.

The Southampton-Newcastle fixture is the second in matchweek 21 to be postponed, following the decision on Thursday night to postpone the Leicester City v Norwich City game on New Year’s Day.

Top-flight clubs have stepped up their Covid-19 protocols, including daily testing for players and club staff.

Despite that, a record 103 cases were confirmed last week.

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp revealed the club were awaiting PCR confirmation of three new Covid cases among the playing group, with further positives within the coaching staff.

The German said the situation was “not cool” but that the Reds were not close to requesting their match at Chelsea on Sunday be postponed.

The Premier League later announced rearranged dates for matches that had been postponed earlier in December.

Two matches due to be played on December 18 – Southampton v Brentford and West Ham v Norwich – have been rescheduled for January 11 and 12 respectively. The Everton v Leicester match, originally scheduled for December 19, will be played on January 11.

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.

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Southampton frustrated by Premier League decision to postpone Newcastle game

Sunday's game at St Mary’s was postponed due to ongoing coronavirus cases and injuries ravaging the Magpies squad

Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts