The rumour spread swiftly. By half-time it had reached enough people for a chant to start: "Murderers," cried supporters, and the word spread like contagion, across both ends of Rome's Stadio Olimpico, the sky-blue and the red-and-orange. The accusation was directed at the riot police around the pitch.
Shortly after half-time, a small group of fans then hurdled the small wall separating the seats from the playing area.
None of the police prevented these intruders, the so-called capo-tifosi, from walking briskly on to the pitch to talk to Roma captain Francesco Totti. Even five years later, the precise details of the exchange between the captain and the ultras are a little mysterious. But they had a dramatic outcome.
Totti immediately spoke to his head coach, Fabio Capello, and related to him that the fans had told Totti a child had died outside the stadium, run over by police, and that he, Totti, had to stop the Rome derby. Totti told Capello: "If we carry on, they'll kill us."
Thus was one of the more famous Rome derbies of the 21st century, the Roma-Lazio meeting of March 2004, abandoned after 47 minutes, because the fans spoke to the team's captains about a rumour that was utterly untrue.
No child had been hit by a police car, although in fighting outside the stadium, 153 police and 21 fans were later injured. Among those arrested were the capo-tifosi who approached Totti. The Rome chief of police, Achille Serra, later talked of a planned conspiracy, and the decision to abandon the game was widely condemned by police and the government.
Each season since, Totti has been reminded of the bizarre events of that evening and what it said not just about the unruliness of ultras around these fixtures, the first of which this season takes place today, but about the strange bond that exists between Roma fans and their iconic captain, Totti.
It was to him the conspirators directed themselves that night, in him they put the authority to call off a game. It was Totti who recognised the grave threat in their tone. He may be a superstar, but something in Totti remains intimately familiar to hundreds of thousands of Romans.
Totti, 33, is part of a rarer and rarer breed: a one-club loyalist, more than half of whose life has now been spent in the first-team squad of his hometown club.
He is what Paolo Maldini was to Milan, Raul is to Real Madrid, what Steven Gerrard may become to Liverpool. But Totti is more than all these in that, by most reckoning, Roma have never had a better footballer than him.
"He is unique," said Claudio Ranieri, the latest of the 13 coaches in charge of Roma in the 16 years since Totti made his senior debut for the club. "I call him our magic box, and I would be reluctant to compare him to any other players I have worked with, and I have worked with many champions."
Totti's statistics tell a little of the story. In 428 games for Roma, he has 187 goals. For a natural trequartista, not a centre- forward, that is remarkable. For a No 9, it would be astonishing given the standards of Serie A through his career.
"He is fantastic and to this club, he is as important as the Coliseum is to Rome", added his coach. Ranieri, a Roman, appreciates that especially, and though the totem of the playing staff and the head coach have had their differences of opinion, they speak the same language- quite literally, as Totti joked recently. "Because Ranieri is a Roman, we understand the same insults," he said.
There will be a few those echoing from the stands at the Olimpico tonight. "Lazio are angry," warned Ranieri of opponents looking for a first win in 11 matches.
Lazio will be worried, too, and cursing their timing. Totti was out nursing his troublesome knee for a month until the last week of November. He celebrated his comeback with a hat-trick that took him to the top of the goalscoring charts. He added another goal to his tally in the Europa League in midweek.
Totti also discovered, to his mild alarm, that his website had been infiltrated by hackers last Wednesday. The educated guess is Lazio fans were involved. At least in cyberspace the pitch invasions are not so vividly frightening as they were the night the derby just stopped.
@Email:ihawkey@thenational.ae
Roma v Lazio, KO 11.45pm, Aljazeera Sport +1
How green is the expo nursery?
Some 400,000 shrubs and 13,000 trees in the on-site nursery
An additional 450,000 shrubs and 4,000 trees to be delivered in the months leading up to the expo
Ghaf, date palm, acacia arabica, acacia tortilis, vitex or sage, techoma and the salvadora are just some heat tolerant native plants in the nursery
Approximately 340 species of shrubs and trees selected for diverse landscape
The nursery team works exclusively with organic fertilisers and pesticides
All shrubs and trees supplied by Dubai Municipality
Most sourced from farms, nurseries across the country
Plants and trees are re-potted when they arrive at nursery to give them room to grow
Some mature trees are in open areas or planted within the expo site
Green waste is recycled as compost
Treated sewage effluent supplied by Dubai Municipality is used to meet the majority of the nursery’s irrigation needs
Construction workforce peaked at 40,000 workers
About 65,000 people have signed up to volunteer
Main themes of expo is ‘Connecting Minds, Creating the Future’ and three subthemes of opportunity, mobility and sustainability.
Expo 2020 Dubai to open in October 2020 and run for six months
Specs
Engine: 51.5kW electric motor
Range: 400km
Power: 134bhp
Torque: 175Nm
Price: From Dh98,800
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Tonight's Chat on The National
Tonight's Chat is a series of online conversations on The National. The series features a diverse range of celebrities, politicians and business leaders from around the Arab world.
Tonight’s Chat host Ricardo Karam is a renowned author and broadcaster with a decades-long career in TV. He has previously interviewed Bill Gates, Carlos Ghosn, Andre Agassi and the late Zaha Hadid, among others. Karam is also the founder of Takreem.
Intellectually curious and thought-provoking, Tonight’s Chat moves the conversation forward.
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INVESTMENT PLEDGES
Cartlow: $13.4m
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Soum: $4m
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Plug and Play: $25m
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Apple%20Mac%20through%20the%20years
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FOOTBALL TEST
Team X 1 Team Y 0
Scorers
Red card
Man of the Match
The%20specs%3A%202024%20Mercedes%20E200
%3Cp%3E%3Cstrong%3EEngine%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E2.0-litre%20four-cyl%20turbo%20%2B%20mild%20hybrid%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EPower%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E204hp%20at%205%2C800rpm%20%2B23hp%20hybrid%20boost%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ETorque%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E320Nm%20at%201%2C800rpm%20%2B205Nm%20hybrid%20boost%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3ETransmission%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E9-speed%20auto%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EFuel%20consumption%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3E7.3L%2F100km%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EOn%20sale%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3ENovember%2FDecember%0D%3Cbr%3E%3Cstrong%3EPrice%3A%20%3C%2Fstrong%3EFrom%20Dh205%2C000%20(estimate)%3C%2Fp%3E%0A
Results
Stage 4
1. Dylan Groenewegen (NED) Jumbo-Visma 04:16:13
2. Gaviria (COL) UAE Team Emirates
3. Pascal Ackermann (GER) Bora-Hansgrohe
4. Sam Bennett (IRL) Deceuninck-QuickStep
5. Caleb Ewan (AUS) Lotto Soudal
General Classification:
1. Adam Yates (GBR) Mitchelton-Scott 16:46:15
2. Tadej Pogacar (SLO) UAE Team Emirates 0:01:07
3. Alexey Lutsenko (KAZ) Astana Pro Team 0:01:35
4. David Gaudu (FRA) Groupama-FDJ 0:01:40
5. Rafal Majka (POL) Bora-Hansgrohe
