Rome, Sep 19 (ANI): Beleaguered football legend Diego Maradona had to hand over his diamond studs to police as part payment for the millions he owes the Italian tax authorities.
Italian officials paid the holidaying Argentinean coach a visit at the luxury hotel he was staying in and seized the earrings worth nearly 4,000 pounds, Sky News reports.
Police claimed that Maradona still owes some 20 million pounds, dating back to his seven-year stint at the Italian club Napoli, where he frequently failed to pay income tax.
After fleeing Buenos Aires on Monday following Argentina’s four defeats in five matches of 2010 World Cup qualifier, Maradona, 48, is currently staying at a spa in the town of Merano in north-eastern Italy, where he is trying to lose weight.
Italian authorities had seized two of his Rolex watches worth 11,000 pounds in 2006, when he was staying near Naples.
In 2005, they seized the money he was to receive for taking part in a TV dancing show.
Four years earlier, he was met by 20 police officers as he got off a plane in Rome.
Italy’s Supreme Court ordered the ex-footballer to pay 36 million euros in unpaid taxes.
According to the association of Italian taxpayers, Maradona still has 22.4 million euros to pay.
Recently, Brazilian legend Pele took a blow at Maradona, saying he feels another Argentine-born player, Alfredo di Stefano, is the best player ever.
“Maradona was a great player, but he could not kick with his right foot and did not score goals with his head.
The only time he scored an important goal with his head, it turned out he had used his hand,” Pele said referring to Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal against England in 1986 World Cup. (ANI)
Here’s how Zimbabwe’s blind cricket commentator Dean du Plessis bowls audiences
London, September 12 (ANI): He was born blind and has never seen a single match in his life, but has proved that all one requires to become a great cricket commentator is a mix of erudite descriptions of action, comprehensive knowledge of great players, faultless recall of statistics, and needle-sharp sense of timing and judgment.
Needless to say, Zimbabwean-born Dean du Plessis, 32, possesses all these attributes, and has been delivering commentaries on matches for nine years.
He has shared the commentary box in Tests, one-day, and Twenty20 tournaments involving all the Test-playing nations in worldwide radio broadcasts.
The commentators he has worked with include Tony Cozier, Geoffrey Boycott, Ravi Shastri, and Australia’s former spin bowler Bruce Yardley, who himself lost an eye.
In 2004, du Plessis and Yardley made the first ever team to deliver a commentary with a single eye between them.
It is du Plessis’s accentuated sense of hearing that makes up for being sightless.
He relies upon sounds heard via the stump microphones to tell who is bowling from the footfalls and grunts, a medium or fast delivery by the length of time between the bowler’s foot coming down, and the impact of the ball on the pitch.
He can tell whether a delivery was a yorker from the sound of the bat ramming down on the ball, whether a ball is on the off or on-side, and when it’s hit a pad rather than bat.
When the wicketkeeper’s voice goes flat, du Plessis tells him a draw is in the offing.
Though he can’t play the role in the commentary box of the anchor, du Plessis can tell from the crowd noise whether a ball has been gathered in a fielder’s hands or spilled.
“I have to work with the anchor. I am the guy who supplies, well, the colour,” Times Online quoted him as saying.
Andy Pycroft, the Zimbabwean opening batsman from 1979 to 2001, said: “The thing about Dean is the intuition. The public love to listen to him. If he has the right person at anchor to support him he is brilliant.”
Du Plessis hated the “blind cricket” he was taught to play with a plastic-wrapped volleyball at the blind school he attended.
At 14, while feeling bored one day, du Plessis tuned the radio in to a station devoted to ball-by-ball commentaries, and that was what was to change his life.
“There was a phenomenal noise in the background, 80,000 people in a stadium in India, people roaring. I realised it was cricket. I was fascinated,” du Plessis said.
He pushed his way into the commentary box at Harare Sports Club in 2001, and was allowed to try out with the microphone.
He never looked back. (ANI)