With the coronavirus pandemic grinding the global sports world to a halt, Major League Baseball is exploring ways to start the season as early as MayAccording to multiple reports this week, the season would start in May with teams traveling to play each other in Arizona. There are 10 ballparks within 50 miles of each other in the Phoenix area, and one Major League stadium: Chase Field, the artificial turfed, enclosed, air conditioned home of the Arizona Diamondbacks, that could host daily triple headers. The other venues are open-air, and will be stiflingly hot during the Arizona summer, so any games in those parks would presumably need to be played at night. Fans would not be allowed into the stadiums....
Game is in unique position to lay down a marker in a sporting world which will be reshaped after fighting Covid-19The release of a revised majors schedule arrived like a beacon of light. One isn’t scraping barrels of insensitivity to point out that thoughts of the return of sport, not just exclusively at its elite level, get many people smiling during these grim and uncertain times. Disappointment that there will be no Open Championship in 2020 was offset by the thought of a US PGA Championship in August, a September US Open, the Ryder Cup going ahead as scheduled and an utterly novel November Masters. Related: Golf's hiatus offers reminder of what the Open was before money talked | Ewan...
I was in Las Vegas on the night Mike Tyson bit his opponent’s ears twice in a fight that descended into jungle-grade anarchyAt the risk of undermining this admirable exercise in nostalgia, “game” is a towering misnomer when attached to the peculiar art of rendering a fellow human being unconscious. As the late Brendan Ingle famously said, you don’t play boxing; he also said it is the only sport in which it is legal to kill someone.There were no deaths the surreal Saturday night of 28 June 1997 at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. No knockout, even. But there was much blood, most of it pouring from an inch-long open wound running along where the top of Evander Holyfield’s...
If golf gets going again in time for Whistling Straits but too late for a meaningful qualification period, it could all come down to those Padraig Harrington and Steve Stricker take a shine toTommy Fleetwood, John Rahm, Rory McIlroy, Victor Perez, Tyrrell Hatton, Danny Willett, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Lee Westwood and Bernd Wiesberger. Brooks Koepka, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Reed, Gary Woodland, Xander Schauffele, Webb Simpson, Justin Thomas and Tiger Woods. If Ryder Cup automatic qualifying was settled today, those 17 individuals would be guaranteed a berth at Whistling Straits.It hardly represents a B-list of transatlantic golf – the United States, in theory, would be the stronger – but there are notable absentees. Fundamentally, of course, nothing at all should be decided...
This week’s roundup also features a Ronaldinho’s prison kickabout and a tribute to Martin Fourcade1) Whilst the rest of the sporting world is shutting down, the relatively low spread of coronavirus in Mexico means that Liga MX was one of the few major global football leagues still playing matches last weekend. As this parish has previously covered, the Mexican top flight is no backwater. It has been recently graced by the mercurial Ravel Morrison, the deadly Keisuke Honda and the, erm, Vincent Janssen.Perhaps the best-known Liga MX import is French international Andre-Pierre Gignac, who signed for the wonderfully-named Tigres five years ago and is still banging in goals aged 34. Related: Zlatan Ibrahimovic launches €1m fundraiser 'to kick coronavirus away'...