Indoor football: Missing stars fail to spoil a busy sporting summer

Saturday, Jul 06, 2013

Dubai: Nothing seems to stop ever in a fast-paced city such as Dubai. Summer is upon us and many of us opt for a well-deserved break with the family so that our batteries can be re-charged and we can then look confidently ahead towards a brand-new sporting season.

A tempting thought indeed, but that is certainly not the case this year. Hardly did we proclaim the so-called end-of-season when we find that nothing has ended!

At least, not sport and related activities in Dubai.

For instance, the UAE has sent its squads to the Asian Indoor and Martial Arts Games taking place in Incheon, South Korea. Meanwhile, the country’s athletics team has travelled east to the western Indian city of Pune for the 20th Asian Athletics Championships, taking place until Sunday.

But closer home, we have had some big football names grace the third edition of the Dubai Indoor Football Championship taking place at the Dubai World Trade Centre until Saturday night.

A couple of weeks back we reported that a public relations agency had promised that football stars David Beckham and Gareth Bale would be in Dubai for the launch of a new website dealing with the transfer of players. Of course, needless to say, nothing like this happened and it later came to pass that it was a ‘clever’ ruse by this agency to lure media into covering the event.

This week too we nearly ended up with a near-similar predicament where organisers promised a host of stars of yesteryear for the above-mentioned Dubai Indoor Football Championship.

When players from the four European clubs taking part — FC Porto, FC Barcelona, Real Madrid and AS Roma — touched down at the Dubai International Airport, there were some big names conspicuous by their absence.

But in this case, unlike the incident two weeks before, there was a genuine reason for why certain players missed the tournament. At least one of them is reported to be going through an acrimonious divorce and therefore has to take custody of the children. Meanwhile, another had made prior plans of travelling and hence could not change his schedule to come to Dubai.

And the majority did not travel for the tournament as they are already preparing for the season ahead, mostly in their new positions as coaches and technical staff at clubs or as players.

We may have missed out on Gaizka Mendieta, Miguel Angel Nadal, Michael Reiziger, Patrick Kluivert (all FC Barcelona) and Fernando Couto (FC Porto). But we were still lucky to have names such as Ruben de la Red, Christian Karembeu, Fernando Sanz (all Real Madrid), Joao Pinto, Rui Barros (FC Porto) and Santi Ezquerro and Victor Munoz (FC Barcelona) playing right here.

“We had just two months to get this team together this year,” said Leonardo Giammarioli, the marketing manager at AS Roma. “Next year we will be here with much bigger stars.”

Sounds interesting, especially considering that next year’s tournament will be so close to the 2014 Fifa World Cup.

Alaric Gomes Senior Reporter