Sport Star Exhibit
This One for The Readers!
By Quazi Zulquarnain Islam
Its almost one year to the day that SportsWatch first reared its ugly/interesting (ofcourse it is exciting) head in the Rising Stars. The sunny morning of the 20th of January 2005 heralded with it the usual Rising Stars. But wait! There was something different! The backpack was bathed in red and adorned with a collage of pictures of Maria Sharapova, whilst below it featured a small snippet outlining the highlights of the coming month. That was SportsWatch.
I am pleased to say that it has come on a long way since then which is something I realise partly from the amount of letters that I get. No, it is nowhere near the number you are thinking about but once you work here for a while you will be able to discern what is a lot and what is not. Aside from public participation which I duly appreciate the other way that I realise it has advanced is by the fact that I now write about such diversified topics. What began as a sport highlights for the week has materialised into a sports column that is at least to some quarters of the population interesting.
However, all this is beside the point really. What I really wanted to do for the SportsWatch anniversary was to incorporate an aspect that I belatedly realized I had completely ignored. But as they say, better late than never. And the aspect is the people.
Let me explain. I have had a lot of mails over the past year or so. Many of them have been short one line quips about how they either enjoyed my work or how much of a duffer they thought I was! There were some other really invigorating mails that praised me profusely for the job I was doing- to them I am grateful. There were also some others that lambasted me for the things I wrote. But one thing that most were unanimously in agreement was that they all liked the fact that someone had implemented sports into the Rising Stars.
Now, without further ado, let me get on to what I had planned to do in the first place i.e bring you excerpts from some of the more interesting mails that I have got over the past twelve months.
First up we have Tahseen Samee, a Liverpool and Milan fan, who wrote in from Chittagong, condoning the fact that the picture with SportsWatch had Real Madrid written in it, when only 5% of the article was about Real. However he went on to agree with the point that the EPL (English Premier League) was overrated as a league and he gave his own diversified viewpoints regarding the matter.
Which is more than I could say for one Ashfak who vented his frustrations in a short, curt email that had too much colourful language for me to put in this article!
The days following the “English Premier League exposed” issue saw my mailbox flooded with emails. One such was from Raul who mentioned that he was fed up with my foolish ideas about football. I wrote him a rejoinder and we have been on good correspondence terms since.
And then there was Raja who congratulated me on my piece on the Bangladesh victory over Australia but wondered why I had quoted Andrew Miller on the fantastic occasion and not a Bangladeshi like Rabeed Imam.
But probably the best mail of the lot came from one Richard Williams who engaged me in a very lively debate about European football.
There were many more mails like the one from Shoaib who made by day by saying that he admired the fact that I could write about so many sports or the one from Zaheed who hoped I kept up my good work.
There were requests galore to exhibit sports stars through cell-email. I tried my best to grant them that but many have been missed so please accept my apologies.
The funniest mail of the lot though came from one Maria who said. “Your write-ups are pretty good, but I was just wondering how a person's bowling and taking wickets can be "mouth-watering". Does it in a way remind you of food?”
I promised her that I would fix my analogies.
It has been a pleasure writing about sports for a year now and I hope that the readers keep up their correspondence so that we can continue to expect another glorious year ahead for sports, the RS and yourselves!
So keep those mails flowing in!!!
Ciao!
(you know the drill: zulquarnain.islam@gmail.com )
