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from Photographers Blog:
Shooting the Rugby World Cup
In the third installment, Sydney-based photographer Tim Wimborne describes what is necessary to keep the file fresh throughout the tournament and to satisfy different client needs.
In the second of a series of multimedia pieces, Bucharest-based photographer Bogdan Cristel talks about the focus required to cover the Rugby World Cup.
In the first of a series of multimedia pieces, London-based photographer Stefan Wermuth talks about the challenges he anticipates at the Rugby World Cup in New Zealand.
from India Insight:
Doesn’t anyone love the underdog anymore?
It is said that everyone loves the underdog. You can't fault Ireland if they disagree.
Days after cricket's showpiece event ended, the game's governing body, the International Cricket Council (ICC) announced its decision to trim the next two World Cups to just 10 teams and throw out the associate nations from the 2015 edition, featuring only its 10 full members. The 10 spots for the 2019 edition will be determined through qualification.
"This is not a World Cup, it's a glorified Champions Trophy," said Ireland's captain William Porterfield, after the ICC's decision to trim the 2015 World Cup that will see associate teams like Ireland and Netherlands miss out on the chance to rub shoulders with the best of the cricketing world.
Porterfield has a point there. Given that much of the excitement and drama of the initial group stage games of the recently concluded 2011 edition -- hailed by some experts as “the best World Cup of all time” -- was provided by his brilliantly spirited and gutsy team, it is difficult not to agree that Ireland may have been hard done by. Associate member nations will now have to wait until 2019 for a chance to compete again.
Without Ireland, the 2015 edition could play out rather flatly -- and more worryingly -- predictably. Without Ireland, we would not have witnessed one of the greatest one-day innings of all time in the form of Kevin O'Brien.
Without Ireland (and the other associate teams), the 2015 World Cup will be reduced to the status of a league of extraordinary cricketers battling it out for glory.
In 2007, we witnessed the dullest World Cup of all time. Australia came, saw and conquered. It was a foregone conclusion even before the tournament began. What made it even more unbearable was the fact that the teams had to play a second round of unending, insipid group stage games -- the Super Eights, as it was called, which was anything but super -- after the first round was done and dusted with and the tournament's biggest draws, India and Pakistan, had been sent packing.
from Left field:
Momentum the key to World Cup success for England’s cricketers
Look away now Australian cricket fans, this one’s going to hurt like a cricket bat to the groin. Their team has carried their abject 2010 form into 2011 by slumping to another defeat to a rampant England side but this time in Twenty20 rather than tests.
While England notched up their eighth straight victory in the shortest version of cricket – a new world record – the last ball defeat in Adelaide means Australia have now lost 17 of their last 24 completed matches in all forms of the game.
The prospect of an Australian victory at the moment appears as likely as Inzamam-ul-Haq calling for a quick single.
Australia’s major victory in that run was in the Ashes test in Perth against England to level the series at 1-1, before the Australians were destroyed like a quarter-pounder at a burger eating contest by a particularly ravenous contestant.
Three of the matches Australia have won in that time – two in the one-day series in England and one against Sri Lanka in an ODI prior to the Ashes – have come with the series already gone for the once mighty baggy greens.
But if England are to bring home their first 50-over World Cup form the sub-continent in the coming months the team must keep winning in Australia and carry the momentum through to the tournament, meanwhile trampling all over the current holders' remaining spirit like an errant infant over its parents’ freshly planted tulips.
Australia have bagged the World Cup winners trophy on the last three occasions, and while they remain ranked as the best one-day side in the world, another home one-day series defeat to England, following its pre-Ashes subsidence to Sri Lanka, will surely spell the end of their dominance in the shorter form of the game.
Best of Britain: Let it snow
For the past week, snow was more than just a single story, it encompassed many stories. This week’s Best of Britain features a selection of pictures ranging from a sheep in a winter landscape to students determined to protest despite the snow. There’s a West Ham United player frolicking after scoring a goal and the trace footprints of pedestrians walking down a London street.
Also included are photos of Elton John guest editing The Independent, the cries of anguish as a fallen soldier is lead through Wootton Bassett and football fans distraught that the World Cup will not be coming to England in the near future.
from Reuters Soccer Blog:
FIFA’s World Cup decision day — live
We'll be following all the presentations and the vote itself as FIFA's executive committee decides on the hosts for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups.
Spain/Portugal, Russia, England and Netherlands/Belgium are the four rival bids for 2018, while Australia, South Korea, Qatar, United States and Japan battle it out for 2022, with the vote to come on Thursday.
Follow it all here live...
from Reuters Soccer Blog:
FIFA battens down the hatches as allegations mount
The chill winds of corruption allegations swirling once again around FIFA's Zurich HQ have got world soccer's bosses busy battening down the hatches in the forlorn hope that, if ignored, they will all just blow away.
But if they were to peep out of the windows of their ivory tower overlooking the Swiss financial centre they might see that, in the eyes of much of the world, it is their credibility that is blown and that the process of selecting the hosts of the 2018 and 2022 World Cup finals has been seriously tainted.
Allegations aired in a British television documentary by the BBC that three long-standing members of FIFA's executive committee had received bribes from the body's marketing partners ISL and that a FIFA vice-president had ordered World Cup tickets for himself to sell on to touts were bad enough.
Those claims followed hot on the heels of an entrapment operation on FIFA bosses by London's Sunday Times. The newspaper sting resulted in two executive committee members being fined and excluded from office for indicating their willingness to "sell" their votes to the best bidder in Thursday's ballot.
Though FIFA acted in that case, they did so through gritted teeth, complaining loudly about media practices. They then made absolutely no move to investigate the potentially more serious claims produced by the Panorama programme.
In June this year, a Swiss court found that unnamed FIFA officials had taken bribes from FIFA's former and now bankrupt partner ISL.
Only a few weeks ago former FIFA general secretary Michel Zen-Ruffinen claimed to undercover reporters he knew which FIFA executive members were open to bribes for votes. FIFA, one might have thought, has reached its "Salt Lake City moment".
from MacroScope:
The octopus and the economists
What do an eight-legged creature in an aquarium in Germany and 74 economists have in common? The consensus view that Spain would claim the World Cup -- until the economists, as they so often do, changed their minds.
If World Cup 2010 goes down as one of the most unpredictable and exciting competitions in recent history, bringing underdogs Holland and Spain to the final showdown, what was hopelessly routine was watching so-called expert opinion converge around the safest bet. At least among financial professionals, who have done so well of late predicting the future.
When Reuters first surveyed economists and forecasters in May on which team would be kissing the golden grail on July 11, 2010 in South Africa, it made for interesting reading. Spain would take it -- by a narrow margin, it has to be said -- followed by Brazil, Argentina and England. Improbable probability analysis, perhaps, but not boring.
Then as various teams got knocked out of the competition -- former champions Italy, France, and England -- in a miserable and well-deserved defeat to Germany, Reuters re-polled these same economists and a few more for good measure. And that's when they fell flat. Those brave forecasters slipped back to the easy choice, and as a group they picked Brazil. We all know what happened to them.
It's hard enough to accurately predict where GDP growth is headed, where a currency will trade, or where interest rates will go, let alone who's going to win a major sporting tournament. But what the economists should have done was go with their gut and hang on to their convictions instead of revising their views with each little new development, as they so often do.
But for all those last-minute changes, it has to be said the economists were better at it this time around than in 2006. Back then, fewer than 10 percent of them predicted Italy would win -- about the same proportion who managed to predict the biggest financial crisis in generations.
from The Great Debate UK:
Luck is the residue of design—even in football
- Isaac Getz is a professor at ESCP Europe Business School and co-author of Freedom, Inc. (Crown Business, 2009). The opinions expressed are his own. -
This Sunday will decide the World Cup champion. Yet, most nations will ask themselves again what’s needed to build a world-class national team?
The majority will go for the easy answers: great players, great coach. England had both. Some nations, though, might search for more complex answers—as Germany did.
After the French won both the 1998 World and 2000 European championships, the German World Cup winning player and coach Franz Beckenbauer said: "France is a model with its school tracks [combining] sports and studies and its [soccer clubs’] training centers. We are trying to copy… but we will need ten years to catch up with them."
And Germany did. Its football federation completely redesigned the German football system. Its most important new component became the mandatory academy for every professional club which trains future great players beginning from the age of 12.
Best of Britain: Fakes and spills
This week’s Best of Britain brings us everything from highs and lows to fakes and spills.
Prince Harry falls off his horse as he plays polo in the Veuve Clicquot Manhattan Polo Classic on Governor’s Island in New York, June 27, 2010. REUTERS/Stephen Lovekin/Pool
Samantha Cameron poses with waxwork of her husband, Prime Minister David Cameron, at Madame Tussauds in London, July 1, 2010. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
A pair of England chairs are abandoned after the World Cup match between England and Germany at the Glastonbury Festival, June 27, 2010. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor
Best of Britain: Competitions and celebrations
This week’s Best of Britain photos highlight a week of competitions and celebrations.
The first couple of photos are from sporting events high on the minds of Britons: Wimbledon and the World Cup. Also included is a photo of John Isner’s final victory at the end of an epic record-setting 11 hour 5 minute match against Nicolas Mahut.
Between them are summer solstice celebrations and revellers marking the 40th anniversary of the Glastonbury festival, as well as a race of Sumo-suited runners and the winner of the Golden Jubilee Stakes at Royal Ascot.
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The Wall
