Didier Drogba and John Terry made history as Chelsea withstood a late Liverpool onslaught to seal their fourth FA Cup final victory in six seasons on Saturday with a 2-1 win at Wembley.
A goal in each half from Brazilian midfielder Ramires and veteran striker Drogba clinched a narrowly deserved win for Chelsea, with substitute Andy Carroll scoring for Liverpool.
Watch both goals on video and note there is a good article about the goal in the first video there.
Police say no suicide note was left behind by football star Junior Seau, who was found dead Wednesday in his Oceanside home from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound to his chest.
Though few details were available, police confirmed no suicide note was left behind, no foul play was suspected and his girlfriend discovered his body in bed Wednesday morning when she returned from the gym.
Later in the day, as police walked in and out of Seau’s beachfront home, his family members could be seen huddling in the garage, weeping. Earlier, his mother appeared distraught.
In 2008, a High Court ruling opened the door for bookmakers to sell beyond their state border.
The aftermath represented a kind of Wild West in the Australian betting landscape. The big companies swaggered into town, staking claims, crossing boundaries and making a killing.
They really pushed their luck with the promotion of live odds. One Anzac Day, no sooner had the bugler wrapped up the Last Post than the market for the upcoming contest flashed on the scoreboard….
It all came down to one momentary defensive lapse. But City outplayed United today. Congratulations to them.
When it was over, and the balloons had shriveled and the whistles had faded away, Lionel Messi put his hands to his head. Messi, the slick, slippery forward, was rooted to his spot: it was as if he could not believe what he was seeing.
He was not alone. Around him, the Chelsea players threw their arms over one another, hugging in equal parts glee and exhaustion, while the Barcelona players only stared, as if overwhelmed by two sobering truths: on this day, Messi, perhaps the greatest player in the world, could not score. And Barcelona, perhaps the greatest team in the world, could not win.
Instead it was Chelsea, despite playing a man short for nearly an hour in front of a frenzied crowd at the Camp Nou stadium, that advanced to the Champions League final.
As the president of N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton could certainly teach any course he wanted. And as the former dean of its law school and clerk to a chief justice of the United States, he might have been expected to hold forth on jurisprudence. However, as a child of Brooklyn, as a scholar whose academic robe bears the number 42 in homage to Jackie Robinson, and as a practicing Catholic with a doctoral degree in religion, Dr. Sexton has for more than a dozen years chosen baseball and God as his professorial focus.
“The real idea of the course,” he put it in an interview, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ”˜the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ”˜a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”
Barring some kind of cataclysmic collapse””aliens landing at the training ground and kidnapping half the squad might do the trick””Real Madrid will win its 32nd Spanish title this year. Saturday’s 2-1 win at archrival Barcelona left Jose Mourinho’s crew with a seven-point lead and four games to play, which means arithmetic is the only factor delaying Real’s coronation.
Real Madrid could well have lost at Camp Nou and still won La Liga. But actually defeating its eternal rival is something of a game-changer. Mourinho may not admit it, but he didn’t just get a monkey off his back, he banished a whole pack of screaming orangutans.
Along with their 3-10 record, the Cubs entered Thursday ranked last in National League home runs, 14th in slugging percentage, 13th in runs scored and 15th in pitching.
“You never want to start out poorly,” baseball President Theo Epstein said. “There are a lot of things we can improve upon, and we will. But you also don’t want to read too much into one homestand and one road trip. Certainly crystalize some areas we need to continue to strive to get better at.”
KSH<-----Worried.
In a largely claustrophobic game at the Allianz Arena, Bayern Munich dramatically defeated Real Madrid 2-1 thanks to an 89th-minute strike by Mario Gomez, giving Jose Mourinho endless cause for concern heading into the second leg at the Bernabeu on April 25.
Many wondered how Real Madrid would handle its first truly top-class opponent in the Champions League knockout stages — having sparred with CSKA Moscow and cruised past plucky APOEL in the round of 16 and quarterfinals — and I suppose this dispiriting defeat gives us plenty of indication….
Manchester United blew open the Premier League title race by slumping to a surprise 1-0 loss at lowly Wigan on Wednesday, allowing second-place Manchester City to close the gap to five points with a 4-0 win over West Bromwich Albion.
Shaun Maloney scored the winner in the 50th minute at the DW Stadium, leaving United five points clear at the top after second-place Manchester City beat West Bromwich Albion 4-0.
“You wish the lead was better but considering where we were a few months ago, you have to take it,” United manager Alex Ferguson said. “I said both teams would drop points.”
Arkansas fired football Coach Bobby Petrino on Tuesday, saying he engaged in reckless behavior that included hiring his mistress and then intentionally misleading his bosses about their relationship and her presence at the motorcycle accident that ultimately cost him his job.
“He made the decision to mislead the public, [and it] adversely affected the university and the football program,” Athletic Director Jeff Long said at an evening news conference, choking up at one point as he discussed telling players the news. There was a “pattern of misleading and manipulative behavior to deceive me.”
Manchester United surged closer to a 20th English league title on Sunday, opening an eight-point lead by beating Queens Park Rangers 2-0 while floundering neighbor Manchester City lost 1-0 at Arsenal.
Having spent most of the season in City’s shadow in the Premier League, United has eclipsed its big-spending rival to take control of the Premier League title race.
Watson (69-71-70-68) made his charge to reach the play-off with four consecutive birdies on the back nine from holes Nos. 13-16. On the par four 14th, he hit a wonderful high approach that fed back near the cup while on the par five 15th, he hit it so long off the tee that he needed just a short iron to reach the green for a two-putt birdie.
Perhaps, his defining shot was on the 17th when he carved his drive left into the trees. His recovery from the trees off a lie that had been flattened all week by fan traffic was superb and gave him a settling par to stay in a share of the lead.
Antonio Valencia and Ashley Young scored late goals to give Manchester United a 2-0 win at Blackburn on Monday, extending the defending champion’s lead to five points in the Premier League.
With seven rounds left, United is clear of crosstown rival Manchester City and favourite to win its 20th league title.
(All this was brought to mind this week when Manchester City manager Roberto Mancini said that Sergio Aguero was out and unable to play because of a “stupid” injury–but didn’t elaborate–KSH.)
Chief among them, inevitably, is Dave Beasant, whose salad cream jar disaster in the 1993-94 season caused him more embarrassment and pain than any other injury in his career. ‘I can remember it very clearly,’ he says. ‘It was pre-season and I was going into a pantry cupboard at home to get something out, and my elbow knocked over this jar of salad cream. Both my hands were holding on to things, so my natural reaction was to stick out my foot to stop the jar hitting the floor. Unfortunately I wasn’t wearing any shoes or socks, and so when the jar hit my foot I got a nasty cut. It went right down to the bone and injured the ligaments underneath.
‘It sounds funny but it ended up the most serious injury I had in my entire career and I was out for two-and-a-half months.’
Episcopal Bishop Terry White of Louisville and his colleague Bishop Chilton Knudsen of Lexington have set a wager on Saturday’s Cardinals – Wildcats game. The amount of the wager is shrouded in sacred mystery. If the Cats win Bishop White makes a donation to the Cathedral Domain Camp and Conference Center for the Diocese of Lexington. If the Cardinals win, Bishop Knudsen makes a donation to All Saints Camp and Conference Center for the Diocese of Kentucky.
The sanctions for individuals were more harsh than most people probably expected, and perhaps lighter in terms of money and draft picks lost.
New Orleans Saints’ Super Bowl winning head coach Sean Payton has been suspended for a year without pay by the National Football League (NFL) after an investigation into ‘bounty’ schemes which rewarded players for hurting opponents.
Former Saints defensive co-ordinator Gregg Williams was also suspended, indefinitely, while the team was fined $500,000 and will forfeit their selections in the second round of the 2012 and 2013 NFL drafts.
“Let me be clear. There is no place in the NFL for deliberately seeking to injure another player, let alone offering a reward for doing so,” NFL commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement on Wednesday.
Bolton midfielder Fabrice Muamba was critically ill in a hospital’s heart attack unit Saturday night after collapsing during a match at Tottenham.
Muamba fell face-down to the field near the halfway line without any players near him. Medics rushed onto the field with a defibrillator and treated the 23-year-old, pumping his chest for around six minutes of treatment before he was rushed to a hospital….
Update: Fabrice Muamba ‘showing small signs of improvement’ as his heart beats unaided–read it as well.
Show an empty tournament bracket to a random sample of Americans and they’re likely to make the same instant association: NCAA basketball.
This simple design, which is used whenever a competition needs to winnow a large group of contestants to a single winner, has become a much-admired cultural meme. If there were a hall of fame for sports graphics, the bracket would be the first inductee.
But as ubiquitous as brackets have become, they’re also the center of a surprising mystery: Nobody knows for sure where the idea came from.
‘That was the most bitter and painful experience of my life,” observes Tom McMillen. “What happened in Munich was the most controversial and tragic sports competition in modern times.”
Mr. McMillen is a former college and NBA basketball star, Rhodes scholar, three-term Democratic member of Congress, and now successful businessman. We’re in his Northern Virginia office reminiscing about the continuing impact of the 1972 Olympic Games, held 40 years ago this summer. Overshadowing it all is the tragedy of what TV announcer Jim McKay called “the worst day in the history of sports.”
That was the hostage crisis in the Olympic Village, which culminated in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian terrorists (linked to the Fatah group that we now know enjoyed Soviet funding and training for many years). Four days later was the disputed basketball game between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, in which Mr. McMillen played a pivotal role.
It was a very tough and closely fought home and away match set against Napoli.
Lionel Messi scored five goals, a Champions League record, as Barcelona thrashed Bayer Leverkusen 7-1 at the Camp Nou to win their last-16 tie 10-2 on aggregate.
Messi netted with two lobs, a fine low drive, a close-range finish and a long-range screamer to make history for the umpteenth time in his short career.
Watch it all. Clint Dempsey rocks.
I turned it on to see England trailing 2-0. They tied it up 2-2 with two late goals and then Robin got a spectacular winner off his left foot for the 3-2 victory. Quite the finish.
Watch it all–my oh my; KSH.