Sport Watch
For the people by the columnist
By Quazi Zulquarnain Islam
First up, I think its about time to reveal the result of the polls that I started to run on this column about three weeks back. Although I made barely a whisper of a mention of it in the last two instalments of the column, I was pleasantly surprised to find a bulging mailbox full of choices from interested people. Cheers mates! Keep it up!
People wrote in to mention who they thought the best players were in the specific fields of cricket, football and tennis. The answers and choices themselves served to bring to my notice the fact that this had been a very open-ended poll and the diversity of the choices alone revealed that to its fullest.
What that meant is there were a lot of people voting in for Dhoni and an equal amount for Shahid Afridi, when all of us know that there are definitely more better players in the world than those two; explosive as no doubt both are. Even the ones who voted for Afridi adhered to that fact as they only wrote his name because of the fact that he was such an entertainer.
Well enough of the explanations. On with the polling results.
The winners in the respective fields are:
Cricket: Ricky Ponting
Football: Zinedine Zidane
Tennis: Rafael Nadal (men's) Maria Sharapova (women's)
So, we can't say that the polls didn't have their share of surprises.
Ricky Ponting though was almost a foregone conclusion as more than 70% of respondents voted him the best cricket player in the world. I cannot disagree.
It seems that Zinedine Zidane is still a very popular choice amongst the collective sporting community in Bangladesh as a lot of respondents voted him the best player on the planet. He was closely followed by the Brazilian Ronaldinho and Englishman Frank Lampard. Although, I received a quite enlightening argument from one Yasir Malek arguing the case of Steven Gerrard, there were hardly any other voting for the Liverpool man.
Finally tennis threw up the biggest surprise as Rafael Nadal of all people managed to upstage Roger Federer whom I had singled out as the likely winner of this poll. Seems like the Spaniard has earned a lot of attention from people in Bangladesh. And last but definitely not the least, Maria Sharapova completed a formality as she won the women's poll by a landslide ahead of Amelie Mauresmo, who also had her fair share of votes.
Well, the public has spoken and so be it. I must say that the first effort at polling has been a huge success.
Till next time!
Adios!
