Atique Anam

Bangladesh captain Jamal Bhuiyan said he is looking forward to playing in front of a full-house crowd at the Sylhet District Stadium and earn a victory against Mongolia on Tuesday.

Bangladesh holds a special place in the heart of Mongolian national football team captain Tsend-Ayuush Khurelbaatar, for It was against the men in red and green that the landlocked East Asian nation had earned their first point in international football.

The Shaheed Noor Hossain Volleyball Stadium in Paltan recently staged the Bangabandhu Cup International Kabaddi Tournament for the second time.

Incident 1: Police vs Bashundhara Kings, Independence Cup semifinal, BSSMKS, Dec 14, 2021.

The reason for this premonition is simple: there will be no shooting event in Birmingham, the first time the discipline has been dropped from the roster of the multisport event for the Commonwealth of Nations.

The Bashundhara Kings Arena is set to become the first privately-owned football ground to host a match of the Bangladesh Premier League, the top-tier professional football of the country.

As Bangladesh national football team braces for a new beginning under new coach Javier Cabrera with optimism that things will finally take a positive turn after a year of turmoil, experimentation and failure, time is probably right to remind everyone that things can only change as much as they want it to change.

The Federation Cup descended into farce on Friday after the defending champions Bashundhara Kings declined to participate, explaining their position to the game’s local governing body 24 hours before the start of the tournament.

Bangladesh’s premier golfer Siddikur Rahman has returned to the country from his five-month stay in the USA with the realisation that playing in the top-level golf competitions requires top level training.

Unprofessional and desperate is how football pundits are reacting to Bangladesh Football Federation’s (BFF) decision to replace national team’s head coach Jamie Day with Bashundhara Kings coach Oscar Bruzon for two months.

As Bangladesh woke up to the news that they were allowed qualification for the final round of the Asian Cup qualifiers, despite not meeting the previously-thought criteria following a fifth-place finish in Group E on the previous night, the pertinent question that surfaced was what they can do with this luck? Can they turn it into good fortune by stretching their ability to its limit or just accept it as a generous gift from football’s Asian governing body (AFC) and be pleased with it?

On Friday night, the All Nepal Football Association (ANFA) issued a press release saying it will organise a tri-nation tournament involving Bangladesh, Kyrgyzstan Olympic team and the host country.

The governing body of Asian football, AFC, on Thursday issued a statement following discussions with its member associations, saying that a majority of the remaining World Cup/Asian Cup qualifying fixtures of Round-2 have been deferred to June in light of existing travel and quarantine restrictions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic across the continent.

It should be a battle between the experience and riches of Bashundhara Kings against the youthful exuberance of Saif Sporting Club in the final of the Walton Federation Cup as the country’s football begins to see shift of power.

“Paolo Rossi was the one who beat Zico’s Brazil, Maradona’s Argentina, Boniek’s Poland and in the final, the Germany of Rummenigge,” the Gazzetta dello Sport, Italy’s top sports newspaper, wrote in its online column on Thursday following the Tuscan legend’s death at the age of 64.

Following the 5-0 defeat against Qatar in a World Cup qualifying fixture in Doha on Friday night, Bangladesh coach Jamie Day was quick to emphasise that the margin of defeat, despite it being the biggest of his tenure, was not an unexpected one. Instead, the coach wanted to take the positives from the match while looking forward to what comes next.

Bangladesh’s premier golfer Siddikur Rahman is prepared to forego the riches on offer in the Indian tour and even the lure of a second Olympics participation in order to be safe and secure from the clutches of Covid-19.

An iconic footballer and sports organiser, Badal Roy lost his battle with cancer and breathed his last in Dhaka on Sunday.

When watching Italy take on Poland in a crucial Nations League fixture on Sunday night, it was hard not to draw a few parallels between the four-time world champions and Bangladesh, one of the lowest-ranked footballing nations in the world.

In the late hours of Saturday, following an exhausting-yet-satisfying BFF Elective Congress when Kazi Salahuddin, surrounded by his jubilant panel members, announced to media that he “would work together with those from the opposition panel for the love and betterment of football”, one could not help wonder whether he was speaking from a script from 12 years ago or, for that matter, eight or even four years ago.