List of All Articles with Tag 'sports'

Brian Harman is in the hunt for his first major championship

Matej Mohorič has edged Kasper Asgreen in a photo finish to win the Tour de France’s 19th stage and defending champion Jonas Vingegaard has protected his commanding lead

England goalkeeper Mary Earps says Nike’s decision to not sell her kit during the Women’s World Cup is “hurtful” and “hugely disappointing”. England’s home and away kits are available for fans to buy, but the Lionesses goalkeeper kits have not been put up for sale by the team’s kit supplier. Earps was England’s goalkeeper when they won the Euros last summer and the Manchester United star was named Fifa’s Best Women’s Goalkeeper for 2022. Earps said England captain Millie Bright had told her she wanted to buy her kit for her niece, only to find it wasn’t available for purchase. "I can’t really sugar-coat this in any way, so I am not going to try," Earps told reporters ahead of England’s opening game against Haiti on Saturday. "It is hugely disappointing and very hurtful. "My shirt on the Manchester United website was sold out last season. It was the third-best-selling shirt, so who says it is not selling?" "It is the young kids I am most concerned about. They are going to say, Mum, Dad, can I have a Mary Earps shirt?’ and they say, ‘I can’t, but I can get you an Alessia Russo 23 or a Rachel Daly 9.’ “What you are saying is that goalkeeping isn’t important, but you can be a striker if you want." Meanwhile, the FA has confirmed England captain Millie Bright will wear armbands advocating for inclusion, Indigenous People and gender equality in the Lionesses’ respective first three World Cup matches. Players have the choice of wearing one or more of eight FIFA-sanctioned armbands at this tournament, but not the rainbow OneLove design that sparked the threat of sanctions being issued to countries – including England and Wales – during the 2022 men’s World Cup in Qatar. Should the Lionesses progress past the group stage, which begins with Saturday’s opener against Haiti, the player-led decision is for their skipper to switch out her armband to a new cause for each match. Bright said: “As a group, we felt really strongly about all the causes, and we couldn’t separate one from the other. We feel that they are all important and deserve recognition and our support. “We have only just come to a decision recently as we wanted to take time to process it all and to make sure we spoke collectively. “Supporting Indigenous People is massively important to us as a team, both staff and players. We wanted to come to this country and respect the past, the present and the future. We are aware of the past, but we want to move forward collectively and make the world a better place. It is something that we always pride ourselves on.” Read More Women’s World Cup 2023 LIVE: Spain open against Costa Rica after Canada held to Nigeria draw How to watch England vs Haiti: TV channel and start time for Women’s World Cup opener England make decision on armbands for Women’s World Cup matches Netherlands made to train on cricket pitch at Women’s World Cup: ‘It’s amateurism’ England Women’s squad for World Cup 2023 England women World Cup fixtures and route to the final

Caeleb Dressel failed to qualify for the biggest swim meet of the year

One of the Lionesses’s brightest prospects in Australia and New Zealand is Katie Robinson, a pacy winger who only made her debut for Sarina Wiegman’s side last November when she came on as a substitute in a friendly against Norway. The 20-year-old hails from Newquay in Cornwall where she had to play for Newquary Boys and Goldphin Boys until she turned 16 due the lack of girls’ football facilities in the south west. After honing her skills at the Cornwall Girls Advanced Coaching Centre and playing for the Plymouth Argyle Boys' Centre of Excellence, she lived with a host family in Bristol in order to be part of Bristol City’s youth system. She broke into the first team there in 2018 – a period in which she also starred for England at under-17 level, scoring eight in 11 – before joining her current club Brighton and Hove Albion in 2020. Her progress on the south coast was badly hampered by an anterior cruciate ligament injury in September 2020, however, which caused her to miss the rest of that season and subsequently sent out on loan to Charlton Athletic to continue her recovery. Wiegman clearly believes in Robinson’s potential though, having picked her for the World Cup squad ahead of much more established names like Manchester United’s Nikita Parris. How inclined the manager is to gamble on such an inexperienced prospect remains to be seen. Read More How to watch England vs Haiti: TV channel and start time for Women’s World Cup opener Women’s football world rankings: Who could take No 1 at the World Cup? FIFA Women’s World Cup fixtures and full schedule

Before being called up by Sarina Wiegman for the Lionesses squad to take part in the Arnold Clark Cup earlier this year, defensive midfielder Laura Coombs had not played for her country since October 2015. The manager was clearly persuaded to bring Coombs in from the international wilderness by her exceptional performances for Manchester City this season, watching her anchor a midfield that had seemingly been significantly weakened by the sales of Keira Walsh, Georgia Stanway and Caroline Weir the previous summer. The oldest member of the 23-strong England World Cup squad at a stately 32, Coombs has a reputation among her teammates as a grafter who will bring plenty of experience to a youthful side, even though her time on the world stage has been somewhat limited thus far. Originally from Gravesend in Kent, Coombs came through first the Charlton Athletic and then the Arsenal youth academies, breaking into the Gunners’ first team in 2007 aged 16 before being loaned out to Nottingham Forest and Los Angeles Strikers before finally being sold to Chelsea in 2011. There she played 52 times over six years and won the Women’s Super League and FA Cup in 2015 but was again loaned out to Barnet, the Strikers and eventually Liverpool, who made that deal permanent in 2017. A regular for the Reds for two seasons, she moved to City in 2019 and won the FA Cup in 2020 and league cup in 2021 before truly excelling as a starter this season. Like goalkeeper Mary Earps, Coombs has a business degree and harbours entrepreneurial ambitions once she hangs up her boots. Read More How to watch England vs Haiti: TV channel and start time for Women’s World Cup opener Women’s football world rankings: Who could take No 1 at the World Cup? FIFA Women’s World Cup fixtures and full schedule

Already one of the true legends of the women’s game, Lucy Bronze has been a regular for England since making her debut in 2013 and has played all across the park, although she is best known as a marauding right-back, overlapping Beth Mead in the Euros to often devastating effect. Born into a bilingual Portuguese-English family in Berwick-upon-Tweed, Bronze, now 31, played for Alnwick Town until she turned 12, when FA regulations prevented her from continuing to play for the boys’ team, a matter about which her coach felt so strongly he launched an unsuccessful discrimination case to challenge the rules, reluctant to lose his best player to an outmoded technicality. A multi-talented athlete in secondary school, she played at youth level for Blyth Town and Sunderland, graduating to the latter’s senior squad and winning the FA Women’s Premier League Northern Division in 2008/09 before relocating to the US to enrol at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to play for the Tar Heels, a path future LionessesAlessia Russo and Lotte Wubben-Moy would later follow. Returning to England to complete her sports science degree at Leeds Metropolitan University, playing for the institution’s women’s team while supporting herself by working at Domino’s Pizza, Bronze then commenced her senior career in earnest with Everton in 2010. After two years, she transferred to city rivals Liverpool where she won back-to-back Women’s Super Leagues, before moving to Manchester City in 2014, where she again won the title and the FA Cup in 2016. She then moved on to France to play for all-conquering Lyon in 2017, winning the Champions League, three successive league titles, two domestic cups and finishing second in the running for the 2019 Ballon d’Or before returning to City for further cup success. A final switch to Barcelona alongside long-time teammate Keira Walsh followed last summer and the Catalans duly won the title and Champions League in Bronze’s debut season. A hugely popular and respected member of the England set up with 105 caps to her name and counting, and an Instagram account for her West Highland Terrier Narla, it could all have been so different for Lucy Bronze. As the daughter of a maths teacher, she had reportedly planned to become an accountant had football not worked out. Read More How to watch England vs Haiti: TV channel and start time for Women’s World Cup opener Women’s football world rankings: Who could take No 1 at the World Cup? FIFA Women’s World Cup fixtures and full schedule

Colton Cowser hit a sacrifice fly in the 10th inning, and the AL East-leading Baltimore Orioles beat the Tampa Bay Rays 4-3 in the opener of a four-game series between the American League’s top teams

Georgia Stanway was one of England’s brightest stars at Euro 2022, her finest moment coming in the quarter-final against Spain when she blasted a long-range drive into the top corner early in extra-time to win the game and send the Lionesses roaring into the semis. Like international teammates Keira Walsh and Ella Toone, the girl from Barrow-in-Furness, now 24, progressed through the Blackburn Rovers youth set up before ending up at Manchester City, for whom she played 109 times between 2015 and 2022, scoring 39 goals and winning the PFA Women’s Young Player of the Year award for the 2018/19 season. Like Walsh and Lucy Bronze, she has since left the Barclay’s Women’s Super League to test herself at one of the European superclubs – in their case Barcelona, in her’s Bayern Munich. Winning the Frauen-Bundesliga in her debut season, the already reliably-cheery Stanway has since told The Guardian that the move has made her “so much more open”. “I went to a country where no one knew me and I could be whoever I wanted to be,” she said. “No one was going to judge me. I’ve developed so much. I was never the most sociable person but in a new environment I’ve wanted to go out for tea every night. In Germany, I’ve wanted to see people.” Stanway says the move to Bavaria has forced her to be more independent, seek help when necessary and emboldened her to become more of a leader on the pitch, although she admits that, like Walsh in Catalonia, she has struggled to learn the language. Read More How to watch England vs Haiti: TV channel and start time for Women’s World Cup opener Women’s football world rankings: Who could take No 1 at the World Cup? FIFA Women’s World Cup fixtures and full schedule

Environmental activists have briefly interrupted play at the British Open by throwing an orange substance to the side of the 17th green at Royal Liverpool

There are barely 100 miles between Doha and Dammam. One city in the Persian Gulf which, until recent years, relatively few football fans elsewhere had to consider, brought arguably the culmination of Jordan Henderson’s Liverpool career, the other a conclusion that feels both sudden and premature and yet comes 11 years after Brendan Rodgers infamously tried to offload him to Fulham to get Clint Dempsey. Three years before Doha hosted the World Cup final, it staged the Club World Cup final. Henderson, the fifth Liverpool captain to lift the European Cup, became the first to raise the trophy that gave them the mantle of world champions. The ‘Hendo lift’, a trademark shuffle before picking up the silverware, capped their rise from the doldrums and his own ascent. Henderson was the misfit who became the only Liverpool skipper to win the lot: Premier League, Champions League, Club World Cup, European Super Cup, FA Cup, League Cup and Community Shield. And now he has joined the retirement home for Liverpool captains in Saudi Arabia, reunited with Steven Gerrard at Al Ettifaq in Damman. Robbie Fowler is in the neighbouring city of Al Khobar. Perhaps Phil Thompson and Phil Neal, Alan Hansen and Ian Rush will pop up there too, though presumably not Graeme Souness, who has criticised Henderson’s decision. That Gerrard, the mentor who groomed Henderson as his successor, has now disrupted Jurgen Klopp’s plans to transition between generations may irritate: Liverpool’s history has been a burden before but two men who have made the right sort have now posed a problem in the present. For Henderson, a departure comes with less fanfare than his old sidekick James Milner’s move to Brighton and more questions if he has tarnished what otherwise looked a wonderful legacy. Contrasting statements can both be true. The midfielder has earnt the right to take whichever decision he chooses; his band of admirers can nevertheless be disappointed with the one he has made. Liverpool LGBTQ+ fan group Kop Out said they were “appalled and concerned”; Henderson had appeared an ally to them, and to many other communities, offering vocal leadership on the field and moral leadership off the field. Saudi Arabia is not the logical destination for a man who had taken principled stands. If nothing came easily to Henderson at Anfield, now there is the sense he is giving up something he worked so hard for. When the Wearsider signed his penultimate Liverpool contract, in 2018, he said: “There is no other place in the world I would rather play football. I want to be here for as long as I can be.” Times change, along with circumstances, opinions and priorities but a slogan Liverpool adopted – “this means more” – felt particularly true for Henderson; the tearful pitchside embrace with his father, Brian, after the 2019 Champions League final moved many who knew neither in person. Henderson represented a great feelgood story; he was the ugly duckling who became a swan at Anfield, part of the seemingly gruesome foursome of expensive British buys in 2011, with Andy Carroll, Charlie Adam and Stewart Downing. If none appeared good enough for Liverpool, Rodgers shared those doubts upon his appointment the following year; he was willing to let Henderson leave. Instead, the midfielder won him over to such an extent that he became captain. There was a sense, too, that Klopp was initially unconvinced by Henderson. In later years, he was happy to call him Liverpool’s “General”. Henderson, he reflected in 2021, was “essential to all the things we achieved in the last few years”. His Liverpool career was a triumph of character even as he could remain curiously underestimated or damned with faint praise. “If anybody does not see the quality of Jordan Henderson, then I cannot help them,” Klopp said in 2020; many remained blinded to it but Henderson was voted Footballer of the Year that year as the driving force in a team who won 26 of their first 27 league games and who ended Liverpool’s three-decade wait to become champions of England. Without ever oozing class, he proved a top-quality performer in two roles for Klopp: first, in the manager’s vernacular, as a No. 6 and then, after Fabinho’s arrival, as a No. 8 as well. He was an eager gegenpresser but that sometimes camouflaged his other qualities: he has often been a fine crosser, including from infield positions; many of his 33 Liverpool goals were spectacular. He had the tactical awareness to cover for Trent Alexander-Arnold in a way that meant the attack-minded right-back was rarely exposed for years. He was a valiant makeshift centre-back, including in the Club World Cup semi-final. He made 57 appearances as they came agonisingly close to the quadruple in 2021-22; perhaps that represented a last hurrah before the troubled 2022-23, the arrival of fellow midfielders Alexis Mac Allister and Dominik Szoboszlai, the reinvention of Alexander-Arnold, the prospect of a diminished role and, maybe, the passing of time persuaded him to move on when he had two years left on his contract and enduring importance. Or, alternatively, it was simply the Saudi millions. Henderson leaves with 492 appearances, level with Roger Hunt, one behind Ronnie Whelan, and eight years as captain, topped only by Gerrard, Ron Yeats and Alex Raisbeck. From unpromising beginnings, he became an all-time Liverpool great. But it is a shame he decided it had to end this way. Read More Liverpool agree £12m deal to sell Jordan Henderson to Saudi club Al Ettifaq Who could replace Fabinho? Liverpool transfer options analysed Liverpool transfer news: Latest Romeo Lavia and Federico Valverde updates as Dominik Szoboszlai signs

England extended its lead over Australia to 189 runs with two wickets left at lunch on the third day of the fourth Ashes test with a declaration likely to be imminent