Mubeen Blogs

World No 4 will become the first Black American man to win the singles title at Flushing Meadow since Arthur Ashe if he can beat German for the first time As Ben Shelton lapped up the explosion of joy and adoration from a full Arthur Ashe Stadium after reaching a grand slam final for the first time, one of his first thoughts was of his paternal grandmother, Regina, who died this year. Shelton credited his grandmother with ensuring that his father, Bryan, made it as a top professional, becoming one of a small group of Black men on the tour. “My dad lost his mom earlier this year and she’s the reason he was able to play tennis,” he said. “Without her, there’s no Ben Shelton standing here today. So this one is for her.” Shelton stands on the verge of history. On Sunday, he will attempt to become the first Black American man to win the US Open singles title since Arthur Ashe in 1968, a feat he will attempt inside the stadium named after Ashe. Shelton would also be the first Black man to wi...

Is it too early for a Tottenham crisis? To which the answer is surely that it is never too early for a Tottenham crisis. After four Premier League games, they have yet to score. This kind of run has never happened in their history at the beginning of a league season. At least they mustered a couple of shots on target this time, having failed to do so last weekend in the 0-0 draw at Nottingham Forest . The first – from Mateus Fernandes – at the start of the second half was greeted by ironic cheers from the South Stand. It has certainly not been what the club expected when they spent £300m on overhauling the squad in the summer. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/y1D9fTu

Norwegian leaves rival Hocker trailing to claim $150,000 Briton Jazmin Sawyers second in the women’s long jump It is a scene that has become gloriously familiar down the years. Jakob Ingebrigtsen leaving the world’s best athletes gasping in his slipstream, holding one finger in the air, revelling in his athletic genius. But this victory over 5,000m at the inaugural Ultimate Championships carried extra sweetness – and spice. The sweetness? That came from winning a mammoth first prize of $150,000. And the spice? Well, that was provided by the way Ingebrigtsen utterly obliterated his great American rival Cole Hocker, a man he had branded a “coward” just a week ago. Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/z1yCn8B

Soprano whose strength lay in her ability to invest her characterisations with dramatic force The Romanian soprano Ileana Cotrubas, who has died aged 87, was admired internationally, not least in Great Britain, where she lived at the start of her career, and Vienna, where she and her husband later made their home. What lent her lyric soprano voice, which may have lacked the voluptuousness and amplitude of other celebrated singers, its distinctive nature was its tightly focused tonal quality (occasionally criticised as plangent), combining inner strength with a touching vulnerability. She was also an excellent actor (her exemplar was Maria Callas), her stage portrayals tellingly incarnating the often wounded women she played. Outstanding among these was her Violetta in La Traviata, which encompassed the character’s frailty, her zest for life, her exuberance and her inescapably tragic situation, in performances that were throbbing with passion and almost unbearably intense. The cumulativ...

The 25th anniversary of 9/11, Russian strikes in Kyiv, wildfires in Indonesia and Sabalenka at the US Open – the past seven days as captured by the world’s leading photojournalists Warning: this gallery contains images some readers may find distressing Continue reading... from The Guardian https://ift.tt/dbW7mUQ

Venice film festival The Venice fixture plays an illustrator haunted by his boyhood in Mario Martone’s part spooky, part sentimental oddity It’s always good to see the veteran Italian star Toni Servillo at Venice; in fact, the festival is pretty much unthinkable without him. But this initially promising prospect – adapted from a novel by Domenico Starnone – is a minor, quibbling tonal oddity, unsure if it wants to be scary or sentimental. Servillo lends it as much gravitas as he can: his mere presence is valuable ballast and the streetscape scenes of Naples are handled with a connoisseur’s touch by director Mario Martone, whose previous Naples-set movie Nostalgia was far superior. Daniele (played by Servillo) is a septuagenarian book illustrator whose old-fashioned, hand-drawn artistry is something he testily treasures. He has come back to his family home in Naples, to the gloomy apartment where he was brought up, just behind the train station, and where his grownup daughter Betta (...

Veteran Frenchman bowed out in New York but the clash of two black players in the last four of the men’s singles is testament to his effect The early days of this year’s US Open can be told in a series of farewells to competitors who plan to end their careers this year. The most moving of them all came in the form of Gaël Monfils’s grand departure inside Louis Armstrong Stadium against the wildly talented 20-year-old Learner Tien . Tien was competing in front of his home crowd, one of the Americans capable of a deep run, but for much of his straight sets defeat the Frenchman had the American crowd in the palm of his hands. Beyond the massive popularity he has garnered among tennis fans, one of the most striking parts of Monfils’s long farewell was seeing how highly nearly all of his fellow professional players, and particularly his fellow black players, regard him. Frances Tiafoe says he spent his youth looking up to Monfils. Arthur Fils considers Monfils his older brother. Naomi Osaka...