Conway replaces injured Allen in NZ squad for T20 tri-series
Wicketkeeper-batter Devon Conway will replace the injured Finn Allen in the New Zealand squad for the 20-overs tri-series in Zimbabwe, New Zealand Cricket said on Sunday.
Allen has been ruled out of the tournament after suffering a foot injury while representing the San Francisco Unicorns in the Major League Cricket in the United States.
"We're really gutted for Finn," New Zealand head coach Rob Walter said in a statement issued by the New Zealand association.
"I was looking forward to working with him and to see him continue his form from the MLC but unfortunately injuries happen.
"We're lucky to be able to call on someone of Devon's quality to replace Finn."
Mitch Hay, Jimmy Neesham and Tim Robinson will also join the squad as cover for Michael Bracewell, Mark Chapman, Glenn Phillips and Rachin Ravindra, who are involved in the MLC final on Monday.
"We knew there'd be a possibility that a handful of players could be involved in the MLC final on Monday, so we're bringing in Mitch, Jimmy and Tim as possible replacements," Walter said.
Top stories
Swipe. Select. Stay informed.
Singapore Government looking at enhancing laws around vaping to tackle issue of drug-laced vapes in Singapore
Singapore Why the vape scourge in Singapore concerns everyone
Singapore I lost my daughter to Kpod addiction: Father of 19-year-old shares heartbreak and lessons
Singapore Organised crime groups pushing drug-laced vapes in Asia including Singapore: UN
Asia Why China's high-end hotels are setting up food stalls outside their doors
Business 29 Jollibean workers get help from MOM, other agencies, over unpaid salaries
Singapore Geothermal energy present in S'pore, but greater study on costs, stability needed, say experts
Singapore Driver arrested after 66-year-old woman dies in car crash at Geylang pasar malam
Hosts Zimbabwe face South Africa in the tournament opener on Sunday. New Zealand begin their campaign against South Africa on Wednesday. REUTERS

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles

Straits Times
19 minutes ago
- Straits Times
Singapore's sports odyssey, from amateur games at the Padang to Olympic triumphs
Weightlifter Tan Howe Liang (left) was Singapore's first medallist at the Olympics, clinching a silver at the 1960 Rome Games. It took the Republic another 56 years before it finally struck gold, courtesy of swimmer Joseph Schooling at the 2016 edition in Rio de Janeiro. SINGAPORE - Worn and faded though they may be, these ordinary objects at the Singapore Sports Museum at the Sports Hub would tell extraordinary stories if they could speak. The shuttlecocks with frayed feathers, for instance, helped Wong Peng Soon to his four All England titles in the 1950s. Chee Swee Lee's blue spike shoes from 1974 are torn and faded. That was the year she won an improbable 400m gold at the Asian Games in Tehran, becoming Singapore's first female Asiad champion. A white singlet, still pristine, clad the late weightlifter Tan Howe Liang, who won Singapore's first Olympic medal, a silver, in Rome in 1960. However, even if these artefacts cannot speak, the feats they bore testament to were covered in glorious detail in the pages of The Straits Times. News of Chee's victory ran on the front page on Sept 16, 1974, with the report noting that the publication's switchboard was flooded for the result long before her race even took place. Chee Swee Lee's blue spike shoes and medals at the Singapore Sports Museum at the Sports Hub, and the story about her victory that ran on the front page on Sept 16, 1974. PHOTOS: ST FILE, JONATHAN WONG A last-minute cramp that almost derailed Tan's Olympic medal bid was retold in a behind-the-scenes article titled ' The 'miracle' in Rome' . Wong's breakthrough All England triumph in 1950 made the front page on March 5 under the succinct headline 'Wong wins title'. In the years that followed, more pages were devoted to his achievements. Badminton player Wong Peng Soon, seen here in the Thomas Cup finals in 1955, was one of Singapore's early sports stars. He won the prestigious All England Championships four times. PHOTO: ST FILE When he announced his retirement on July 15, 1955, the publication paid tribute to his legacy and 'a life of almost spartan severity' in which he played each stroke 'thousands of times till perfection was acquired and the grace of an artist was added'. Until Wong's rise in badminton, beginning in the late 1930s, however, The Straits Times in its early days paid only modest attention to sport. Wong Peng Soon's shuttlecocks and badminton racket, on display at the Singapore Sports Museum at the Sports Hub. ST PHOTO: JONATHAN WONG This, even though the history of organised sport in Singapore dated back to 1826 when the country's first sports club was founded – the Singapore Yacht Club. The first known organised game, cricket in this case, was played in 1837 by the British at the Padang, then known as the Plain. Such was cricket's popularity that it made its way into The Straits Times on July 29, 1846, a year after the publication's founding. A small announcement on Page 2 reported an upcoming match between 'Young Singapore and the military gents'. It was one of the first mentions of sport in the publication, an unheralded introduction to what would become some of the better-read pages. When Singapore's football team defeated Selangor to win the inaugural Malaya Cup on Oct 1, 1921, it was reported only two days later in a single column on Page 10. The front page that Monday was instead filled with advertisements for 'pure Devonshire cyder' and 'pure beef dripping'. Wong's success on the international stage, however, fired up the country. Support began to increase for home-grown talent. The first South East Asian Peninsular (Seap) Games held in Bangkok in 1959 gave local athletes a platform and brought them into the public eye, in an era when amateur sportsmen and women aspired to bring glory to Singapore. As Tan told a reporter many years after his Olympic success: 'I'm no hero. I was just a keen young man eager to win for my country in the Olympics.' While Tan stayed grounded, Singapore began to dream bigger. Three years after his Olympic breakthrough, the Government announced plans for a National Stadium in Kallang. It would eventually cost $50 million and open in July 1973, just in time to be the centrepiece when Singapore hosted the Seap Games for the first time soon afterwards. 'Sheares opens Seap Games' ran the front-page headline on Sept 2, with photographs of the fully packed 50,000-seater stadium and the colourful opening ceremony graced by then President Benjamin Sheares filling pages. A new generation of athletes, such as track runner C. Kunalan and swimmer Patricia Chan, were also becoming household names in post-independence Singapore. It was not just their sporting exploits at home and on the international stage that were regularly chronicled and celebrated. Post-retirement, Chan directed and sang in her own musical which The Straits Times c overed in its entertainment pages while Kunalan's wedding in 1966 also made the news. Singapore sprinter C. Kunalan was chosen to light the cauldron at the newly opened National Stadium during the opening ceremony of the 1973 Seap Games. It was the first time the country was hosting the event. PHOTO: ST FILE Growing up as a football fan in the 1980s and into the 1990s, when most games were not telecast live, Mr Paul Antony Fernandez, 59, a part-time security officer, relied on The Straits Times for reports of the lead-up to matches, the matches themselves, and – most crucially – the scores. 'There was no internet in those days,' says Mr Fernandez. 'Any news we wanted about the Lions, we got it through the newspaper. If there was a match on Saturday, I would make it a point from Wednesday morning to get The Straits Times and The New Paper every day to find out who's injured, who's playing. Everything about the team.' His wedding in 1994 took place on Dec 17, the very day the Lions were playing Pahang in the Malaysia Cup final at Shah Alam Stadium in Selangor. To ensure that his guests – many of them die-hard football fans like himself – would turn up for the wedding dinner at the former Great Eastern Hotel in MacPherson, he hooked up his parents' 17-inch Nordmende colour TV in the wedding hall. Just like those Lions fans, The Straits Times did not hold back on the euphoria when Singapore won that final, 4-0. The photo of the triumphant captain, Fandi Ahmad, holding the trophy aloft, was accompanied by the headline 'Lions crowned soccer kings' on the next day's front page while the sports section was filled with more stories and graphics recreating two of the goals. Abbas Saad saluting Lions supporters at the Shah Alam Stadium after Singapore beat Pahang 4-0 to win the Malaysia Cup in 1994. PHOTO: ST FILE It was the Republic's first Malaysia Cup win since 1980 – that victory came with the front-page title 'A night to remember' – and also its last, as the Football Association of Singapore decided to withdraw from the competition in 1995. In a column headlined 'A special first in the techno-era of Cup', the sports desk's Yap Koon Hong proudly – and perhaps prematurely – declared: 'It is not hard to see why the Lions can drop defeat from their vocabulary like, well, a bad habit.' Despite football's ups and downs, the turn of the century marked a golden era for Singapore sport. From 2002 to 2006, Singapore won 44 Asian Games medals, only slightly less than half the number it had won in the previous 50 years. Then came a breakthrough team silver in women's table tennis at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the nation's first Summer Games medal since Tan Howe Liang in 1960. Two more Olympic medals followed in London 2012, thanks again to Feng Tianwei and her fellow table tennis players, before the defining moment for the country: swimmer Joseph Schooling's historic gold medal at Rio 2016 . Besides extensive coverage of Schooling's Olympic campaign in print, The Straits Times – in a sign of the online age – would add a gold medal to the masthead of its Facebook profile. It also produced several interactive graphics about the butterfly specialist, with one winning an Award of Excellence at the US-based Society for News Design's annual competition. As Schooling told the world's media after his race in Rio de Janeiro: 'Even people from the smallest countries in the world can do extraordinary things.' Indeed, the little red dot continues to punch above its weight. Yip Pin Xiu's dominance in the pool with seven Paralympic gold medals and counting, Loh Kean Yew becoming a badminton world champion, Shanti Pereira's 200m Asian Games gold, and Maximilian Maeder's kitefoiling bronze at Paris 2024 have all elevated Singapore sport to greater heights. Shanti Pereira's victory in the 200m final at the Hangzhou Asian Games in October 2023 was a breakthrough moment. It was Singapore's first athletics gold medal since 1974, when Chee Swee Lee won the women's 400m. ST PHOTO: CHONG JUN LIANG In all these triumphs, The Straits Times has had a front-row seat, telling the stories of sacrifice, hard work and perseverance. These stories became a nation's, too.

Straits Times
2 hours ago
- Straits Times
Italy set sights on bigger goals in Norway showdown
OBERENTFELDEN, Switzerland - Italy are putting the euphoria of making the knockout stages of the Women's Euros for the first time since 2013 to one side and aiming for even greater heights when they take on Norway in the quarter-finals in Geneva on Wednesday. The Italians lost their final Group B game to Spain but managed to go through in second place thanks to a 1-0 win over Belgium and a 1-1 draw with Portugal to set up a meeting with the Norwegians, who won Group A with three wins out of three. "The fact that we qualified in the quarter-finals gave us a lot of positive energy, (but) we immediately got back to work and we are preparing the game as we have prepared the others, taking care of every detail," Italy forward Sofia Cantore told reporters on Monday. "Once you reach a small goal like this, you think about doing your best to reach another, so let's say there is maximum concentration for the next game and, beyond tactics, I think we should put in everything we have in our hearts." After making it to the last four in six of the first seven Women's Euro competitions, Italy have struggled to reach those heights since. "They (Norway) are a great team, they have very important personalities, and it will be important to be perfect tactically and then to hurt them where they will give us the space to hurt them," Cantore said. "We have already shown during the whole competition ... we have character as a team. It's important to show our character in these games, I think we have a lot of it and we'll show it," she added. REUTERS Top stories Swipe. Select. Stay informed. Singapore HSA intensifies crackdown on vapes; young suspected Kpod peddlers nabbed in Bishan, Yishun Singapore Man charged over distributing nearly 3 tonnes of vapes in one day in Bishan, Ubi Avenue 3 Singapore Public healthcare institutions to record all Kpod cases, confiscate vapes: MOH, HSA Singapore Man allegedly attacks woman with knife at Kallang Wave Mall, to be charged with attempted murder Singapore Singapore boosts support for Timor-Leste as it prepares to join Asean Singapore UN aviation and maritime agencies pledge to collaborate to boost safety, tackle challenges Singapore High Court dismisses appeal of drink driver who killed one after treating Tampines road like racetrack Singapore 18 years' jail for woman who hacked adoptive father to death after tussle over Sengkang flat

Straits Times
2 hours ago
- Straits Times
Euro 2025 group games draw record crowds
Find out what's new on ST website and app. OBERENTFELDEN, Switzerland - The group stage of the Women's European Championship which finished on Sunday had record-breaking attendances with close to half a million fans attending games, and 22 of the 24 of them sold out. As well as 461,582 fans attending matches, there were several individual game records as well, according to European soccer's governing body UEFA. The Germany v Denmark match in Basel drew 34,165 fans, which was the highest attendance at a group game not involving the host nation and the most spectators to attend a women's football match in Switzerland. The more than 17,000 fans from Germany at that game was the most away fans to attend a women's Euro match ever while the crowd of 34,063 at Switzerland's game against Norway was a record crowd at a Swiss women's national team match. "If it was not clear before, it is undeniable now – women's football is unstoppable and here to stay," Nadine Kessler, UEFA's head of women's football, said in a statement. "This is more than a tournament; its' a movement, and the response from across Europe and beyond proves that women's football is not only here to stay – it is setting the new standard." Even before the tournament kicked off, Euro 2025 had sold more than 600,000 tickets to surpass the 574,875 sold in 2022 in England. Some 60,000 fans took part in fan walks to the stadiums, including 14,000 Swiss and Icelandic supporters who walked three kilometres to that game at the Stadion Wankdorf in Bern. The tournament has also been a success on digital platforms, with 8.4 million engagements across its social media platforms, a 55% increase over the same period in 2022. Spain and England scored 14 goals apiece in the group stage, matching the mark set by the English in 2022. Wales' Jess Fishlock became the oldest women's Euro goalscorer at the age of 38 years and 176 days. The quarter-finals begin in Geneva on Wednesday when Norway play Italy. REUTERS