Time will tell who got the best haul of players in Kansas City from Thursday’s first round, but there were encouraging signs from Seattle, Houston and PhiladelphiaAfter months of rumor and speculation, Thursday night’s first round of the NFL draft featured less chaos than anticipated. There were few eyebrow-scorching picks and, instead, a steady stream of sensible selections.Let’s look at some of the winners from the opening night. Continue reading...
Tabbed for no higher than third in the AL East by most experts, the Rays have won 12 straight and are off to baseball’s hottest start in decades. How are they doing it and how long will it last?With their 9-7 win over the Boston Red Sox on Wednesday night, the Tampa Bay Rays became just the third team to win 12 straight games to open a baseball season since the dead-ball era more than a century ago. With one more win, the Rays will tie the 1987 Milwaukee Brewers and the 1982 Atlanta Braves as the only teams to begin a season with 13 consecutive victories since the 1880s.The winning streak is the latest achievement for a team known...
LIV rebel rolled back the years with a final round flourish but futures of the two biggest names in golf are up in the airMasters week in April is always a long one in Augusta. The Monday before the major, all the talk around the course was about Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, who were out playing a practice round together. Whether it really was or not, their pairing felt like a pointed rejoinder to the LIV golfers who were still arriving at the course. Woods and McIlroy aren’t just the two biggest names in the game, but the two most outspoken critics of the breakaway tour. And here they were, taking ownership of the biggest stage.Augusta National is a...
The player who won four majors in three years was an ice-cool closer but he has not yet fully recovered from kneecap accidentIt was just gone four o’clock when Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka made it to Juniper, Augusta’s precipitous little par-three 6th. The sun had come out, the clouds had scattered and the mercury was finally rising. Koepka had only just given up the lead he had been holding since he made a birdie to pull one shot clear on Friday morning. He and Rahm were tied in first place now, 10 under par, four shots clear of the field, and the gallery all around was waiting for Koepka to come back at him. Rahm had the honour. His...
The five-times champion had some good moments in his first round, but too many mistakes led to a two-over-par finishIt’s an odd truth that if you’ve got to ask someone who it is you’re watching at Augusta National then you already know the answer. At a quarter-to-ten, half an hour before Tiger Woods was even due on the 1st tee, the crowd was packed four or five deep down the length of the fairway, and three times as thick again up by the clubhouse. So anyone who arrived hoping to see him afterwards needed to be awfully comfortable up on their tip-toes, or else try to find a vacant pine tree root to perch on so they could peer over...