Colombia knock Senegal out to qualify for pre-quarters
Samara, June 28: Colombia qualified for the pre-quarterfinals of the 2018 FIFA World Cup riding on Yerry Mina's second half winner to knock Senegal out in a crunch Group H encounter here on Thursday.
After a barren first half, Mina (74th minute) headed in a corner to send Colombian players and supporters into delirium as they needed nothing less than a victory to secure qualification.
Colombia finished on top of the group with six points, while Senegal finished level on four points with Japan, who lost 0-1 to already-eliminated Poland in the other group game played simultaneously.
Both Japan and Senegal had even goal differences and had scored four goals each, but Japan advanced as runners-up because they only picked up four yellow cards in the group stage, while Senegal had six.
This is the third time Colombia have reached the last 16. This time, it boiled down to their final group game in which chances were few and far between as both sides started cautiously keeping in mind the stakes of the game.
Colombia forward Radamel Falcao won a free kick in the 11th minute while Juan Quintero's shot was saved by the Senegal goalkeeper.
Senegal were then denied a penalty in the 18th minute after a VAR review in the 17th minute. Sadio Mane was brought down by Colombia defender Davinson Sanchez inside the box and Senegal was awarded a spot kick. Following the VAR check, the referee reversed his decision and cancelled the penalty for the Teranga Lions afterwards.
In the 31st minute, the South American side suffered a major jolt when James Rodriguez, 2014 edition's top scorer, was taken out by coach Jose Peckerman in what looked like an injury.
In the second half, Colombia looked to up the ante but Senegal too put pressure and goalkeeper David Ospina was forced into some good saves to keep them at bay.
There were number of chances wasted at both ends too as time ticked on.
Then came Colombia's moment of reckoning when Quintero's corner was majestically met by Mina to bullet home a downward header and send their swathes of supporters into raptures.
Senegal tried hard to stage a comeback but their main man Mane looked off colour as they eventually failed to pull one back.
With Senegal's exit, this will be the first time since the Round-of-16 came into being in 1986 that there will be no African teams represented.
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Oath-taking ceremony of first BJP govt in Bengal on May 9; Modi, Shah likely to attend
Kolkata (PTI): The oath-taking ceremony of the first BJP government in West Bengal will be held at Brigade Parade Ground here on May 9, marking the saffron camp’s arrival in power in a state after decades on the political fringes.
The ceremony, scheduled to begin at 10 am, is expected to witness the presence of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president Nitin Nabin, several Union ministers and chief ministers of BJP- and NDA-ruled states, party sources said.
“The new BJP government will take oath on May 9 at 10 am at Brigade Parade Ground,” state BJP president Samik Bhattacharya announced on Wednesday.
Even as the BJP leadership kept its cards close to the chest on the chief ministerial face, Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari has emerged as a frontrunner in internal discussions after cementing his position as the party’s principal mass leader in Bengal politics.
Adhikari, once among Mamata Banerjee’s closest lieutenants and a key architect of the TMC’s rural expansion in districts such as Purba Medinipur, crossed over to the BJP ahead of the 2021 assembly elections and went on to defeat Banerjee in Nandigram in one of Bengal’s fiercest political battles.
Five years later, he again found himself at the centre of Bengal’s political churn by beating Banerjee in her own turf at Bhabanipur by over 15,000 votes.
Other names for the CM post doing the rounds include Bhattacharya, Union minister Sukanta Majumdar and former Rajya Sabha MP Swapan Dasgupta, though party insiders indicated that the leadership was inclined towards projecting a “bhumiputra” face rooted in Bengal’s linguistic and cultural ethos.
During the campaign, Shah repeatedly asserted that the BJP’s chief minister in Bengal would be a “son of the soil”, born and educated in the state, in an attempt to blunt the TMC’s sustained attack that the BJP represented an “outsider” political culture alien to Bengal’s social and intellectual traditions.
The BJP bagged 207 of the 294 assembly seats in the recently concluded elections, ending the Trinamool Congress’s uninterrupted 15-year rule and scripting the saffron party’s biggest breakthrough in a state where it once struggled to open its electoral account.
Significantly, the swearing-in ceremony will be held on the 25th day of Baisakh in the Bengali calendar — observed across the state as Rabindra Jayanti, the birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore — lending the event a deeper cultural symbolism.
According to BJP leaders, the choice of the date is aimed at embedding the party’s historic rise within Bengal’s cultural imagination and countering the long-standing perception battle over identity and belonging.
Over the last decade, the BJP has steadily attempted to appropriate and reinterpret icons of Bengal’s cultural nationalism — from Tagore and Swami Vivekananda to Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and Syama Prasad Mookerjee — as part of a broader ideological effort to expand its emotional and political footprint in the state.
Party insiders said the leadership was also conscious of the need to balance Bengal’s competing regional aspirations while choosing the chief ministerial face, with discussions also taking place around whether greater representation should be accorded to north Bengal, a region where the BJP has made substantial electoral gains over successive elections.
A meeting of the newly elected BJP MLAs has been convened on May 8 evening, party sources said, though the leadership remained tight-lipped over the final choice.
The Brigade Parade Ground ceremony is expected to mark not merely a transfer of power, but a defining moment in Bengal’s political history, the culmination of the BJP’s long ideological and organisational march from the margins to the centre of power in a state that had for decades resisted the saffron surge seen elsewhere in India.
