Matawalu hairdo

Wise Muavono, Lautoka

Nikola Matawalu has not been his usual best against the Wallabies and Azzurris. Maybe he needs a haircut. Dan Urai and I could do with some hair.

Road hump

Lorima Tuni, Narere

Can the Land Transport Authority put road humps at Navola Village in Nadroga?

I don’t see why this village should be left out because every other village along the Queens Road in Nadroga have one. Besides, there is a school on one end of the road and the village on the other.

Drivers are speeding through the village despite the 50km/h road sign and camera mounted. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

The road humps will work better because drivers would have to slow down while driving through the village.

The ultimate goal is to keep the drivers, the villagers and most importantly the school children safe.

FIFA World Cup qualifiers

Nilesh Lal,  Suva

During the recent Oceania World Cup football qualifiers, Fiji failed to win a single match.

Interestingly, coach Christophe Gamel relegated Roy Krishna, Fiji’s best footballer and only professional player, to the bench in the final two matches against New Caledonia. Winning those games would arguably have improved Fiji’s current embarrassing ranking in Oceania.

Unsurprisingly, this caused a huge uproar on social media with fans questioning Roy’s exclusion. The usually very responsive Gamel failed to provide any reasons for his decision. This gave rise to a number of speculations.

Whatever the reason, Krishna’s exclusion did not do any good to the Fijian side. Arguably, in four years’ time when the next World Cup qualifiers would be held, Krishna would probably be past his prime and we will reflect back and lament the fact that he was not utilised enough when he could have contributed more.

No other player in recent times has displayed the outstanding ability which Krishna showed, so there is little chance that we will have another player of comparable ability to utilise in the next World Cup qualifiers.

Let’s hope we’ll have better luck next time, so that at the end of the qualifying round, we will not have the coach again saying that he was developing the team for 2026 World Cup!

Youth talents

Shiu Kumar, Ba

Our youths are endowed with abundance of talents apart from excellence in academic arena.

Thanks to our education system which gives equal opportunities to our young minds to take advantage of these opportunities to become vibrant citizens of this flourishing nation. At the same time many thanks to our existing Government who has provided volumes of opportunities to our youths to embark on the career of their choices to shape our nation into a unique model for other countries to follow, both large and small. I read with zeal about the Government’s plans to embark on film industry in Fiji with department of Culture, Arts and Heritage to foster vibrant and viable performing arts in Fiji.

To date no yester Governments had so much vision for our beloved nation than the existing one. On this note I take this opportunity to congratulate the MASTI Dance Group for organising lessons in dancing for our youths at various centres around the country. I urge parents and stakeholders to support this initiative to make it successful. We never know one day our nation will be overflowing with celebrities like our counterparts abroad. Economic vibrancy much depends on the shoulders of our youths and the more chances they have the more progress our nation can make in terms of development.

I end with this old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and you can feed him for a day teach a man how to fish and he can feed himself for a life time.