Mihir Vasavda

The qualification system also opens the door for both India and Pakistan to qualify. Nothing prevents both teams from featuring in the six-team tournament at the 2028 LA Olympics.

Raul Jiménez's black headband has become one of football's most recognisable sights. Behind it lies a story of survival, resilience and a striker once again carrying Mexico's World Cup dreams.

After clashing with Leandro Trossard over a misplaced cross, Youri Tielemans scores from the winger's cross before converting a 120+4th-minute penalty in Belgium's astonishing comeback from 2-0 down vs Senegal.

Skills learnt on tiny pitches and fenced cages in the working-class suburbs of Paris have carried the players to the sport's grandest stage

The best international teams have always evolved with the game. But the most successful ones have usually adapted without becoming copies of somebody else

The tour had been almost two years in the making. Discussions between the New Zealand Hockey Association and the Army Sports Control Board began in late 1924, culminating in a formal invitation to the Indian Army in early 1925.

In June 1926, India played its first international hockey match; 100 years later, that historic tour has become a tool for sporting diplomacy between the two countries.

FIFA World Cup: Alvarez's nickname came not from a marketing campaign or a comic-book obsession but from the dusty football grounds of Calchin, a farming town of barely 2,500 people in Cordoba province.

Garry Kasparov has asked, 'Who makes the final decision?'' That is one of the many questions plaguing this tournament, where every contentious decision has been viewed through the lens of bias, especially involving one team - Lionel Messi's Argentina

Englishmen - railway engineers, dock workers, merchants and teachers - took the game to Argentina in the late 19th century but the South American nation came up with its own style, full of imagination and improvisation