Premier League: Liverpool defender Joel Matip ruled out for rest of season due to ankle injury

London: Liverpool's injury woes mounted on Monday as defender Joel Matip was ruled out for the rest of the season after suffering an ankle ligament injury.

Matip was injured in a challenge with Tottenham striker Son Heung-min during Liverpool's 3-1 win on Thursday.

The 29-year-old is the latest Liverpool defender to be hit by a serious fitness issue this season after Virgil van Dijk and Joe Gomez also sustained injuries from which they are yet to return.

"It was really unlucky because it was a brilliant challenge he made actually, he saved our life in that moment in the Tottenham game when he won the challenge against Son," Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp told Liverpool's website on Monday.

"He injured his ankle and played the game on and now is out for the season, so you can imagine how much he tried to stay on the pitch and tried to help us.

"But he will be ready for the start of the next pre-season and finally everything will be sorted."

Matip's injury is another blow to Liverpool's hopes of retaining the Premier League title.

With makeshift centre-back Fabinho, usually deployed as a midfielder, also sidelined by injury, Klopp has had to use midfielder Jordan Henderson at centre-back alongside either Nat Phillips and Rhys Williams.

Klopp brought in defensive reinforcements ahead of Monday's transfer deadline as he signed Preston centre-back Ben Davies in a permanent deal and landed Schalke's Ozan Kabak on loan for the rest of this season.

Liverpool sit four points behind leaders Manchester City, who have a game in hand.

The Reds face Brighton on Wednesday before hosting City in a crucial clash on Sunday.

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Premier League: Liverpool bolster defence by signing Ozan Kabak, Ben Davies; Takumi Minamino off to Southampton

London: Liverpool finally bolstered their defensive options by signing Schalke's Ozan Kabak and Preston's Ben Davies before the Premier League transfer window slammed shut on Monday.

Meanwhile Premier League champions' Japanese attacking midfielder Takumi Minamino left for Southampton on loan until the end of the season in one of the few moves between Premier League clubs on a quiet deadline day.

The January window is regarded as a sellers' market and often a time for stop-gap measures but Liverpool were forced to act.

The champions are missing all of their senior central defenders, with Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip out of action.

Fabinho, who had impressed at centre-back after moving from his usual midfield position, recently joined the injured list while captain Jordan Henderson, who usually plays in midfield, has been forced to deputise at the back.

Japanese international Minamino departed Anfield for Southampton in a surprise move allowed to be completed after the window shut because the Saints had submitted the necessary paperwork in time.

"I am very pleased to welcome Takumi to our squad for the rest of this season," Southampton manager Ralph Hasenhuttl said in club statement issued two hours after the 2300 GMT deadline.

"He will help provide another good attacking option, and is importantly the right profile of player for us.

"This will give us some additional depth in our squad at an important time."

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp had been suggesting for several weeks that a replacement centre-back would be a major lift for his team.

Klopp got his wish at last as the Reds brought in two defenders in the final hours of the transfer window.

Kabak joined on loan until the end of the season, subject to international clearance.

The Premier League champions have paid an initial £1 million ($1.37 million) loan fee with the option to buy for £18 million at the end of the season.

The 20-year-old arrives after two years in the Bundesliga, where he played for Stuttgart before joining Schalke in July 2019.

He previously gained Champions League experience at Galatasaray and has won seven caps for Turkey.

Davies, 25, signed for an initial fee believed to be £500,000, plus future add-ons.

Klopp conceded signing a relatively unknown player from the second tier was a move forced by financial restraints of the pandemic and Liverpool's injury woes.

"It's probably clear that in a normal transfer window, without any issues, we would not look at Preston if there's a player for us," he said.

"But since we saw him and since our situation got clearer and clearer -– the problems we had –- when we saw him we got really excited about it and thought, 'Wow.' We see the quality and we see the potential."

Davies made 145 appearances for Preston, scoring two goals, since his debut in 2013.

Low-spending window

"Obviously it came as a bit of a surprise when it first came out but once you start to get your head around it, the opportunity that is in front of me is incredible," Davies said.

"I've never actually been to Anfield and I haven't had a look around yet."

Major moves involving "Big Six" Premier League clubs were few and far between in the January window.

Top-flight clubs, who splashed the cash in the summer transfer window, are reeling from the financial fallout as a result of the COVID-19 crisis and are coming to terms with new Brexit rules that make it tougher to recruit young players from Europe.

The last time less than £100 million was spent in the January transfer window was 2012.

Arsenal allowed Shkodran Mustafi to leave, with the German defender signing a short-term contract at Schalke.

Gedson Fernandes ended his disappointing spell at Tottenham, with the midfielder's loan from Benfica cancelled so he could join Galatasaray.

Relegation-threatened West Bromwich Albion signed Turkey midfielder Okay Yokuslu on loan from Celta Vigo until the end of the season.

West Brom also agreed a deal with Arsenal to take the versatile Ainsley Maitland-Niles on loan until the end of this term.

Ecuador international Moises Caicedo joined Brighton from Independiente del Valle for a fee of around £4 million.

Newcastle signed Arsenal midfielder Joe Willock on loan for the rest of the season, while Magpies' right-back DeAndre Yedlin joined Galatasaray in a permanent deal.

Fulham landed former Sunderland forward Josh Maja on loan from French side Bordeaux.

Everton were hoping to sign Bournemouth striker Josh King in a late deal.

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How The White Tiger's hammy voice-over narrative adds to its white gaze conundrum

Ramin Bahrani’s The White Tiger, based on Aravind Adiga’s 2008 novel of the same name, released on Netflix earlier this month. The narrative follows Balram Halwai (Adarsh Gourav), a Bihari driver who kills his employer Ashok (Rajkummar Rao) and steals a bag full of cash; this is the starting point of his entrepreneurial journey, which he is recounting in an open letter to Wen Jiabao, the visiting Chinese premier.

To an extent, Bahrani’s film has the same problems as Adiga’s novel — the central character is too steeped in clichés to offer original insights, plus there is a fundamental dissonance between the ‘realist’ air it tries to conjure and the patently unrealistic speech patterns of just about every major character, starting with Balram.

And then there’s the supremely annoying voice over. In the very first scene of the movie, we see Balram ‘freezing’ the action (his employer and his wife during a drunken midnight drive) and taking us through the motions of a flashback. “Pardon me. This is no way to start a story. I am Indian after all and it is an ancient and venerated custom of my people to start a story by praying to a higher power.” The triteness of the line aside, the voice-over is also a bad move here because it renders the non-prologue opening moot. Throughout the course of the movie, Balram’s voice-over becomes a proxy for the director’s overly expository voice, much like Adiga’s clearly Western-educated voice ‘merges’ with the ‘authentic’ Bihari voice he tries (and fails miserably) to create.

Let’s not beat around the bush: Voice-over (VO) work is not among Bollywood’s strong suites (although The White Tiger, is, of course, not-Bollywood).

They tend to be hammy, disruptive and more often than not, a hedging mechanism for inadequate screenplays. Did we really need Dil Dhadakne Do to tell us that Aamir Khan sounds like a smug little pug at times? No we did not; we already had Satyamev Jayate for that. Did we really need Anil Kapoor’s voiceover to tell us bad puns about “Monsoon ki raat” (the young woman he is talking to is called Monsoon) in the movie Chocolate? (The correct answer is of course, we did not) Did Simmba really need a voice-over from Ajay Devgn’s Singham? Actually, yes — how else are you supposed to transform a wholly different story into the hastily inducted latest member of the Rohit Shetty Cop Universe? The Simbba/Singham story is a great example of the way voice-overs are treated in Bollywood — like an afterthought, a short order solution to just about any problem, narrative or otherwise. Once Shetty decided that his rape-revenge story will be more saleable as a Singham spinoff, Devgn shot exactly one action sequence, and the rest of the Singham connection was spelt out for the audience through a quick, shockingly lazy voice-over by Devgn in the first ten minutes of the movie. Problem solved, presto chango! No wonder we are stuck with a deluge of mediocre, poorly-written voiceovers.

There are, of course, notable exceptions. It worked in Gangs of Wasseypur because of how closely Piyush Mishra’s sardonic tones matched the tragicomic ethos of the movie (and of course, the little sociological asides that helped bridge the cognitive gap between Bombay audiences and the realities of Bihar). It worked in Dhobi Ghat but that movie was an exception in so many ways outside of this context, too. It worked in Shaandar because Naseeruddin Shah, over and above his other formidable skills, has plenty of experience narrating fairytales (which is what Shaandar was); remember his Karadi Tales audiobooks?

A young Amitabh Bachchan provided a memorable voice-over for Satyajit Ray’s Shatranj Ke Khiladi (but again, Ray isn’t Bollywood), including the delightful ‘cherry-picking’ animated sequence, where Bachchan’s sense of whimsy and mischief really comes through. I’ve caught several Bollywood actors trying to mimic Bachchan’s voiceover style down the years; everybody wants Lagaan-like gravitas, only on a budget.

In general, however, Bollywood voice overs veer between the merely bad to the so-bad-it’s-hilarious. Which is a shame because, in skilled hands, voice-overs can not only be a more than a handy narrative tool, they can also help filmmakers break the fourth wall, reach out to the audience ‘directly’ without using the characters as conduits, a la The Office, which pioneered the ‘irony tag team’ effect (characters doing one thing while voice over finds a way to puncture that very thing or proposition). In Mean Girls, the voice over went even further — a combination of VO and imagery put audiences inside the head of the character in a way that felt immediate, urgent, irresistible.

Earlier this week, I wrote about how the TVF/SonyLiv series Gullak employs the titular gullak or piggybank as narrative voiceover; now there’s an inspired choice that works at multiple levels.

Finally, I was disappointed by The White Tiger’s subpar voice-over work because of director Ramin Bahrani’s own track record. His 2009 short film Plastic Bag was a weird little masterpiece, a fusion of manic love story and environmental parable, narrated by the titular plastic bag who has fallen in love with its first-ever owner. The plastic bag, whose voice-over dialogues are the film’s sole narration (the music is by Sigur Ros founding member Kjartan Sveinsson) is voiced by none other than Werner Herzog, one of the greatest filmmakers alive. Herzog’s voice, with its endless subtleties and its poker-faced humour, adds so much to this film. Once you’ve heard him, it will be impossible to imagine the film with a different voice. And that is the hallmark of a truly great voice-over.

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Watch: Trailer of Flee, Riz Ahmed, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau's animated Sundance documentary released

Riz Ahmed and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau have lent their voices to the English version of animated Danish documentary Flee directed by Jonas Poher Rasmussen. The doc had its premiere Sundance Film Festival 2021 on 28 January.

Flee chronicles the true story of Amin Nawabi (a pseudonym) journey as a child refugee from Afghanistan. Ahmed and Coster-Waldau serve as executive producers on the doc, whose North American rights were bought by Neon for an undisclosed amount, writes The Wrap.

Here is the official synopsis:

"Amin arrived as an unaccompanied minor in Denmark from Afghanistan. Today, he is a successful academic and is getting married to his long-time boyfriend. A secret he has been hiding for 20 years threatens to ruin the life he has built."

Rasmussen and his friend Amin engage in a conversation about the latter's life story and struggles in the film. The filmmaker told IndieWire that he had spoken to his friend about sharing his story, long before he conceptualised Flee. It was only when he decided on doing an animated film did Amin warm up to the idea.

"I knew he had a backstory that he didn’t even want to talk about. I have a background in radio and I asked him numerous times if he would tell his story as a radio interview and he was never ready to share his story," said Rasmussen.

Final Cut for Real has co-produced Flee with animation studio Sun Creature, Denmark, Vivement Lundi!, France, MostFilm, Sweden, Mer Film, Norway and ARTE France and Vpro, Nederland.

Watch the trailer here —

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Abu Dhabi T10 League: Nicholas Pooran's power-packed 26-ball 89 helps Northern Warriors down Bangla Tigers

Abu Dhabi: Nicholas Pooran's power-packed 26-ball 89 helped Northern Warriors outplay Bangla Tigers by 30 runs in the Abu Dhabi T10 event.

It was raining sixes at the Zayed Cricket Stadium with Pooran smashing 12 maximums and three fours to help his side post the second-highest score of 162 for 4 in the tournament.

The Bangla Tigers chased bravely through their skipper Andre Fletcher, who hit 53 runs off 28 balls with four boundaries and four sixes.

He was well backed by UAE's Chirag Suri, who remained unbeaten on 42, but they fell short of the target by 30 runs, managing 132 for 3 in the stipulated 10 overs.

Sent to bat, the Northern Warriors got off to a quick start picking 17 runs off the first over with opener Waseem Muhammad hitting two sixes off Mohammad Irfan.

In the second over, Mujeeb Ur Rehman had Waseem out for 12 getting him caught at long-on. Pooran walked in and began hitting right away.

Qais Ahmed, who bowled the fourth over, was hit for 23 runs. It included Pooran's three sixes and one boundary.

The sixth over saw Pooran in full flow, hitting Mohammad Irfan for three successive sixes. the West Indian raced to his half-century in the seventh over off 17 balls.

When Garton was re-introduced in the eighth over, Pooran hit him for four successive sixes and two boundaries to take 32 runs off that over.

Karim Janat removed Lendl Simmons by having him caught at long-off for 41. He also ended Pooran's knock by having him caught by Andre Fletcher at extra cover off the next ball.

Chasing the mammoth score of 162, Pakistan pacer Wahab Riaz struck a huge blow when he clean bowled Johnson Charles for a duck with the third ball.

Fletcher began to strike freely, hitting Riaz for two successive boundaries. In the fourth over, he smashed two successive sixes.

Fabian Allen had Hossain caught by Powell at deep mid-wicket. Suri joined Fletcher in the middle with the Bangla Tigers needing another 113 runs from the last 30 balls.

Wayne Parnell, who took a hat-trick in his last match, bowled the sixth over and gave away just seven runs.

Suri then lifted Allen for two consecutive sixes off the first and second deliveries of the eighth over. He also hit the fourth delivery for another six to take 31 runs off that over.

Emrit was introduced again to bowl the ninth over. Fletcher lifted Emrit over long-on and reached his half-century in 22 balls.

With 49 runs needed off the last six balls, Junaid Siddiqui trapped Fletcher leg before for 33 to end their chase. Suri remained unconquered with a quick 42.

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Australian Open 2021: Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova advances at tuneup event in Melbourne

Melbourne: Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova beat Japan's Misaki Doi 6-1, 6-4 in a first-round match at the Yarra River Classic, one of six tuneup tournaments being played this week at Melbourne Park ahead of the Australian Open.

The first major of the year was delayed by three weeks to allow for COVID-19 protocols which required all people arriving into Australia to spend 14 days in quarantine.

The 11th-seeded Pavlyuchenkova has been a quarterfinalist in three of the last four years at the Australian Open.

Serena Williams was scheduled to play local hope Daria Gavrilova later Monday in the Yarra River Classic.

Williams is aiming to win her 24th Grand Slam title with victory at the Australian Open, the most of any player in the professional era. Her 23rd major was in 2017 at Melbourne Park when she beat her sister, Venus, in the final.

In other first-round matches at the tournament, Nadia Podoroska beat Francesca Jones 6-1, 6-3, Camila Giorgi beat Clara Burel 6-4, 6-3, Alison Van Uytvanck swept Hsieh Su-wei 6-2, 6-0 and Vera Zvonareva beat Kristyna Pliskova 6-4, 6-7 (4), 6-3.

No. 13 Danielle Collins of the United States beat Nina Stojanovic 6-2, 6-1 in a second-round match.

SIX EVENTS ON BOARD

All six tuneup tournaments are being played this week at Melbourne Park ahead of the 8 February start of the Australian Open.

The biggest men's tournament is the ATP Cup team event, which starts Tuesday. The other men's tournaments are the Great Ocean Road Open and the Murray River Open.

In addition to the Yarra Valley Classic, the WTA has the Gippsland Trophy and the Grampians Trophy. The Grampians event is a 28-draw tournament and open only to players who were forced into hard lockdown for 14 days without the benefit of practice because of positive COVID-19 cases on their charter flights to Australia.

CORNET ADVANCES

At the WTA's Gippsland Trophy, French veteran Alize Cornet beat local hope Ajla Tomljanovic 5-7, 6-1, 6-3. Cornet got an early break in the deciding set and fended off several comeback attempts by Tomljanovic, who is the No. 2-ranked Australian player behind world No. 1 Ash Barty.

In other Gippsland Trophy matches, Mayo Hibi beat Varvara Lepchenko 6-4, 6-7 (3), 6-1 and Katie Boulter had a 6-1, 6-3 win over Anna Kalinskaya.

TIAFOE OUT IN 1ST ROUND

Corentin Moutet of France won a tough first-round match over Frances Tiafoe, beating the American 3-6, 6-4, 6-4 at the Murray River Open.

The 21-year-old Moutet had to overcome a sluggish start before he found his rhythm against 2019 Australian Open quarterfinalist Tiafoe. The Frenchman outlasted Tiafoe in the third set to fight off break points and take a 3-1 lead.

"It was so nice to play a match," Moutet told the ATP website. "It was a long time since I've played a match, especially in front of people. A tough match, but definitely a lot of pleasure."

AUSTRALIAN INTO 2ND ROUND

At the Great Ocean Road Open, local hope Aleksandar Vukic beat Lu Yen-hsun 6-4, 7-5 and Kamil Majchrzak upset 12th-seeded Laslo Djere 6-3, 6-4. No. 13-seeded Aljaz Bedene beat Yasutaka Uchiyama 7-6 (5), 7-6 (5).

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Anushka Sharma, Virat Kohli reveal name of their baby girl, Vamika, share first picture

Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli have shared the first image of their baby daughter and her name -- Vamika.

The couple shared the image on social media, alongside the caption, "We have lived together with love, presence and gratitude as a way of life but this little one, Vamika has taken it to a whole new level! Tears, laughter, worry, bliss - emotions that have been experienced in a span of minutes sometimes!"

Check out her post here

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A post shared by AnushkaSharma1588 (@anushkasharma)

The couple on 11 January, announced that they have become parents to a baby girl. Indian skipper Kohli took to Twitter to share that both Anushka and the baby are healthy and how they feel beyond blessed to start a new chapter of their lives.

The couple had earlier sent a note to the paparazzi, appealing them to refrain from taking images of their newly born daughter. The couple has written that as parents, they have a simple request to make, adding, "We want to protect the privacy of our child and we need your help and support."

Sharma and Kohli, both 32, first met on the sets of a commercial and dated for four years before getting married in a private ceremony in Italy on 11 December, 2017.

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