New York Yankees against Boston Red Sox will draw a bigger attendance for each game than the weekend’s two Cricket World Cup blockbusters combinedNearly seven years’ worth of Saturday nights have passed since what was then London’s Olympic Stadium played host to an exhibition of British sporting magnificence – which lasted a good half-hour. On Saturday comes the precise reverse: a weekend of something even more un-British than winning: the Yanks are coming – to play the most alien sport of all.In the 1980s, suborned by Channel 4, a sizeable minority of British sports followers became infatuated with that strange sport for sizeable people, American football. Basketball, being simple to organise and economical on space, has long been played in...
The Warriors still want to be the newcomers, the radicals shaking up the sport. But they’re the establishment nowAfter Detroit’s Chauncey Billups-inspired demolition of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2004 finals, perhaps the NBA’s greatest post-season upset of the early 2000s came in the first round of the 2007 Western Conference playoffs. The Dallas Mavericks, owned by billionaire Mark Cuban and led by MVP-in-waiting Dirk Nowitzki, had come off a record-breaking regular season in which they’d won 67 games and lost just 15. The Golden State Warriors had not made the playoffs since 1994; their squad included a number of oddballs and castoffs from other teams such as small forward Stephen Jackson, who was traded by the Indiana Pacers...
The heavyweight cartel that includes Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury has been broken but the Mexican is still Joshua’s best friendEddie Hearn has a problem: how to repackage a beaten champion. When Anthony Joshua was led away from his disastrous American debut at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night minus his world championship belts, he slipped out of the informal cartel that included Deontay Wilder and Tyson Fury – temporarily, perhaps – into a lesser arrangement with the fat man who lives five miles from Tijuana and who had just knocked him down four times in seven rounds, Andy Ruiz Jr. Related: Andy Ruiz Jr shocks world with knockout of Anthony Joshua for heavyweight championship Related: Andy Ruiz Jr beats...
Earn three more points than Fiji in Paris and Mike Friday, Perry Baker and the rest of the Eagles will be in sevens heavenIf the USA men’s sevens team earns three more points than Fiji in Paris this weekend, they will be crowned world champions. Related: 'We were attracted by the aggression': how rugby rescues lives in America Related: Major League Rugby expands with care – is the Premiership watching? Continue reading...
Sport often welcomes back a bad boy turned good but some offences lie so far beyond the pale a return is almost impossible despite protestationsSteve Smith and David Warner were booed during Australia’s warm-up fixtures against West Indies and England in Southampton. The Aussies won both matches, and Smith got runs in both, so perhaps they won’t care about a phenomenon that seems likely to continue throughout the World Cup, even if they get to the final on 14 July.According to Smith, who spoke after taking a ton off England’s bowlers at the Hampshire Bowl on Saturday, the chants of “Cheat! Cheat! Cheat!” are like “water off a duck’s back – it doesn’t bother me”. But it should, because it...