Mihir Bose's Blog, page 45

‘We Kenyans have a lot of talent’ – trailblazing Victor Wanyama is anxious to be a success at Southampton

Victor Wanyama made history on his Southampton debut in August as it meant Kenya became the 100th country outside of the United Kingdom to have a Premier League player.

Wanyama had long dreamed of making his mark in the Premier League but had hoped it would be for what he achieved on the pitch, rather than through a quirk of fate.

British Bangladeshi Top 100 award for Media: Mihir Bose

Here you will find 100 bright, ambitious and successful
British Bangladeshi names across 19 categories
demonstrating the dynamic, entrepreneurial,
philanthropic, pioneering and innovative nature of this
community.

Hamza Abdullah interview: Former NFL player claims ‘we don’t know’ the facts of 9/11 terror attack

Hamza Abdullah, the former Denver Broncos and Arizona Cardinals safety player, who retired last month, has made headlines recently for expletive-laden rants. In one, referring to how the NFL has handled player injuries, he called the organisation a “slave trade” and the League itself a “plantation”.

Why Brian Clough would no longer feel at home in English football

In rugby much is being made about how England's head coach Stuart Lancaster has brought back Englishness to the oval ball game. Yet look at the round ball game and you see that foreign culture is not only accepted but cherished. A glimpse of this was provided when there was much surprise that Tim Sherwood, as English as they come, would take over when Andre Villas-Boas, who could not be less English, was sacked. Yes there was surprise that Sherwood had no experience of first team coaching at this level but in many ways the greatest surprise was that he was English.

Mido: I still love Tottenham but signing seven new players was a big mistake

Mido's first taste of management comes straight out of fantasy football.

For the former Tottenham and West Ham striker has just taken over Africa’s most successful club, Zamalek, who have won the Egyptian title 11 times, the African Champions League on five occasions and attract crowds of 100,000.

Gandhi Before India by Ramachandra Guha

Gandhi Before India
Ramachandra Guha
Allen Lane 672pp £30

Mohandas Gandhi has always generated partisan feelings. Gandhi was barely 37 years old when a follower christened him Mahatma, the great souled one. The term is now so universal that in India those who do not use it are seen as anti-Gandhi and anti-Indian. However, many have never bought into this saint-like picture. During the war, after Gandhi called the British to quit India, the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, told Winston Churchill that he had always considered Gandhi a ‘humbug’. As for Churchill, such was his obsession to prove that his Indian nemesis was a cheat that in his memoirs published in 1951, four years after India was free and three years after Gandhi’s assassination, Churchill claimed that during his 1943 fast, while in a British jail, Gandhi mixed glucose with water. Only vehement denials from Gandhi’s doctors forced Churchill to withdraw the allegation from future editions. Even George Orwell, no friend of empires, wondered if Gandhi was a modern-day Rasputin. More than a generation later the passions have not cooled. So while Richard Attenborough’s film Gandhi burnished the image of the Mahatma, there are many keen to prove that the saint had clay feet. Indeed in 2011, following lurid comments in a book suggesting Gandhi might have had a homosexual relationship with his Jewish friend Hermann Kallenbach, the Indian government considered banning its publication.

Everton boss Roberto Martinez: Any team in the top seven can win the title this year

Pre-season there was much speculation about how the managerial changes at the top of the Premier League would pan out this campaign.

Chelsea and Manchester City — clubs used to changing their bosses — have fared as expected under Jose Mourinho and Manuel Pellegrini respectively.

Jérôme Champagne set to challenge Sepp Blatter and run for the Fifa presidency

Tomorrow in central London the first shots will be fired in what could prove a momentous battle to decide who runs world football when a former French diplomat will announce his intention to run for the Fifa presidency next year.

In firing the gun, Jérôme Champagne is aware he may be taking on his old master, Sepp Blatter, when the voting in the election is cast.

Can we please stop this Southampton hysteria?

The astonishing coverage of the Southampton story since Nicola Cortese left may suggest the football world on the south coast is about to collapse. I cannot recall another occasion when the departure of a managing director of a club has resulted in such media exposure. However much of it has been so hysterical and over the top that it is clear that the world of football has not changed, only the public perception of it.

Let us draw back a bit from the hubbub and examine what has happened. A paid employee of a football club, who was not a player or the manager, has left the club. This is not to deny that Cortese has played an important role in Southampton emerging from League One to Premiership. He can claim he took a club worth £14 million and has made it one that would probably fetch excess of £100 million and that in a few years is not bad going.

Macaulay, Britain’s Liberal Imperialist by Zareer Masani

Thomas Babington Macaulay, the Whig historian and politician, is not often seen as one of the makers of the modern world. However, this bold claim is made by Zareer Masani, who presents Thomas Macaulay as the creator of the idea of western liberalist intervention, in effect making Tony Blair and George W. Bush Macaulay’s children. Masani’s main thrust is to prove that without Macaulay the modern united India, the world’s largest democracy, would not have emerged.

Macaulay acknowledged that teaching European civilisation to Indians might make them want to govern themselves. He argued that the compensation would be Indians ’wearing our broadcloth and working with our cutlery’ and realising the value of British manufactures: ‘To trade with civilised men is infinitely more profitable than to govern savages.’