RUGBY UNION
Portugal lose Pinto
Portugal won a case and lost a case on Tuesday when they faced the judiciary for two acts of foul play in their 28-8 loss to Wales at the Rugby World Cup in Nice, France, on Saturday. Winger Vincent Pinto was suspended for three games for his red card, while No. 8 Rafael Simoes was cleared to play immediately. Pinto made a leaping catch in the 77th minute and as he came down, one of his boots clipped Wales wing Josh Adams in the face. The referee issued him a yellow card and a bunker review upgraded it to red. At his hearing, Pinto denied he committed foul play, but the panel said it was reckless, involved poor decisionmaking and showed a lack of care for Adams. The head contact involved a high degree of danger and there were no mitigating factors, the panel said. Simoes was cited after the match for a dangerous tackle. At his hearing he admitted to an act of foul play, but said he did not think it reached the red-card threshold. The panel agreed, saying that the force of the head contact was not sufficiently high enough. The citing was not upheld, and he was freed to play.
FOOTBALL
Punches preceded death
A man who died at a New England Patriots home game last weekend was punched at least twice in the head during a fight in the stands with a rival fan, a witness said on Tuesday. Police and safety personnel responded to the upper deck at Gillette Stadium shortly before 11pm on Sunday and found Dale Mooney, 53, of Newmarket, New Hampshire, “in apparent need of medical attention,” the Norfolk County district attorney’s office said in a statement on Monday. Mooney was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The Massachusetts State Police are investigating what the district attorney termed an “incident” at the stadium. Witness Joey Kilmartin shot video of what he said was a brutal fight. In interviews with local media firms, Kilmartin said he saw Mooney, a Patriots fan, confront a Miami Dolphins fan who he had been arguing with during most of the game, which the Dolphins won. “He basically engaged in mutual combat with another fan,” Kilmatin told the Boston Globe. “A lot of people started trying to pull them apart... It looked like somebody was in the middle of them, and then a man in the Dolphins jersey reached over and he connected with two punches to the victim’s head. It wasn’t something crazy or out of the ordinary until, 30 seconds later, the guy wasn’t getting up.”
SOCCER
Urawa banned from Cup
Asian club champions the Urawa Red Diamonds on Tuesday were banned from Japan’s domestic Emperor’s Cup competition next season after their fans rioted following a game last month. A group of Urawa supporters ripped down barriers, shoved over a security guard and threatened opposition fans after a 3-0 loss away to the Nagoya Grampus in the last-16 stage of the competition on Aug. 2. The Japan Football Association’s disciplinary committee handed down an unprecedented one-season ban. The association late last month had already given 17 Urawa fans indefinite bans from domestic games. Urawa have won the Emperor’s Cup eight times. They won the Asian Champions League for a third time last season, beating Saudi Arabia’s al-Hilal in the final.
North Korea’s FIFA Under-17 Women’s World Cup-winning team on Saturday received a heroes’ welcome back in the capital, Pyongyang, with hundreds of people on the streets to celebrate their success. They had defeated Spain on penalties after a 1-1 draw in the U17 World Cup final in the Dominican Republic on Nov. 3. It was the second global title in two months for secretive North Korea — largely closed off to the outside world; they also lifted the FIFA U20 Women’s World Cup in September. Officials and players’ families gathered at Pyongyang International Airport to wave flowers and North Korea flags as the
Taiwan’s top table tennis player Lin Yun-ju made his debut in the US professional table tennis scene by taking on a new role as a team’s co-owner. On Wednesday, Major League Table Tennis (MLTT), founded in September last year, announced on its official Web site that Lin had become part of the ownership group of the Princeton Revolution, one of the league’s eight teams. MLTT chief executive officer Flint Lane described Lin’s investment as “another great milestone for table tennis in America,” saying that the league’s “commitment to growth and innovation is drawing attention from the best in the sport, and we’re
Coco Gauff of the US on Friday defeated top-ranked Aryna Sabalenka 7-6 (7/4), 6-3 to set up a showdown with Olympic champion Zheng Qinwen in the final of the WTA Finals, while in the doubles, Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching was eliminated. Gauff generated six break points to Belarusian Sabalenka’s four and built on early momentum in the opening set’s tiebreak that she carried through to the second set. She is the youngest player at 20 to make the final at the WTA Finals since Denmark’s Caroline Wozniacki in 2010. Zheng earlier defeated Wimbledon champion Barbora Krejcikova of the Czech Republic 6-3, 7-5 to book
For King Faisal, a 20-year-old winger from Ghana, the invitation to move to Brazil to play soccer “was a dream.” “I believed when I came here, it would help me change the life of my family and many other people,” he said in Sao Paulo. For the past year and a half, he has been playing on the under-20s squad for Sao Paulo FC, one of South America’s most prominent clubs. He and a small number of other Africans are tearing across pitches in a country known as the biggest producer and exporter of soccer stars in the world, from Pele to Neymar. For
RSS