DUBAI // The substantial overhaul of the national team ahead of tonight’s meeting with Singapore has meant the UAE will start with teenaged debutants on the wings.
Adel Al Hendi, the highly rated Emirati player from Abu Dhabi, starts on the left and Charlie Sargent, the speedy Dubai Exiles back, is handed a first cap on the right.
While Sargent’s passport says he is from the UK, he is proud to be making his international bow for the country he considers to be home.
That said, his progression in rugby is best plotted with an atlas. When he takes the field against Singapore, he will be playing against the country of his birth. Singapore was also the first place he toured with a representative side, when he was part of the Arabian Gulf age-group side when he was 14.
Having spent various stages of his childhood in Abu Dhabi, Doha, Saudi and the UK, he has settled back in Dubai, where he spent seven seasons as a youth team player for the Exiles.
The fact the UAE will only play one Test in his debut season, as Asian rugby gets set to be revamped, means Sargent and his colleagues will be treating it as a cup final.
“From what we have heard, Singapore are a physical and fast side,” said Sargent, 19, who will start work with a property services company at the end of the rugby season.
“We are working round that, making sure we make our possession count.
“It makes it more important that there is only one match. There are a lot of guys who have been training all year to play for the UAE, and they don’t want to muck it up.
“If the older guys only get one chance to play for the UAE, they don’t want to be saying later on that their first Test cap was a loss.”
A new start in the second tier of Asian rugby after last year’s relegation has had a discernible effect on morale, according to Chris Burch, one of the survivors from last year’s side.
The Dubai Hurricanes fly-half said that even with minimal information about their opposition, it is pleasing to know the playing field will be more level than it was in the top flight. “It feels good to have young kids there like Charlie as we are nurturing players for the future,” Burch said.
“It is exciting going in to a game not knowing what the opposition is going to be like, rather than going in to matches against Japan knowing we were going to lose.”
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Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
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