{sporting.news} 7:45 PM

A quarter-to-eight PM, is a nostalgic time of the day, when I feel the lack of something essential in me, something that I have been addicted to for many years: the daily dose of 15-minute sporting news!

At that time of the day, many Iranian sport-enthusiasts forget about whatever they are doing and tune in to IRIB-3 to listen to the usual pattern of news, starting with the domestic soccer-league results and ending-up with Tour-de-France brief results. The footage shows the same archives day-in and day-out from who-knows-when. Yet, me and my likes, the sport-fanatic coach potatos, would not miss it. The fun part was the ladies results, which didn't even have an archived footage, but rahter some static images of perhaps-a-lady doing some-kind-of-unknown-sport or a scene from the city where the sport even was being held.

With about a month to the World Cup 2006 and without the essential dose of my sporting news, I desparately surfed the web to find some sport-crack to inject. The results were not promising. Our Team-Melli star Ali Karimi wasn't even in the reserves list of Bayern in one of their last matches. That injury of his may cause him his career, if he won't impress in the games (by the way, Bayern repeated the double eventhough they were stopped by Kaiserslautern in a disappointing match). Zandi did not even enter the pitch from the bench, and Hashemian has had a nightmare season. Ali Daei is turning 37 and is definitely not fit for world-class match-ups. The only fit player at the moment is Mahdavikia who assisted nicely on a goal last week, but his team lost this week. They still have one more chance to compete for the second spot that guarantees them entering the Champions League next season.

Disappointed by the individual performances, I browsed FIFA's page on Iran to see if the Iranian Federation has managed to seal a few important warm-ups before the event. It was nice to know that we would have a serious friendly against Croatia on May 28, and an interesting Cape Verde Islands (FIFA Rank=122) two days after in Swizerland. I mentioned "interesting", because without following sporting news the chances were that I die without knowing where Verde actually is (I always thought that I have been to Verde, S. R.'s Verde! Could this be true: does her father own that country?). Yet another interesting news is that the day after the CPV match, IRN would be playing Bosnia and this latter happens only 11 days before our first game in the tournement against MEX! The poor manager has a very very limited time to compensate the weak sides.