Eleven Premiership managers gathered at a football stadium in London last week to watch a friendly international match — and it was not England vs Germany. To a man, they rejected the New Wembley game in favour of a trip to the nether-end of south-east London to witness Ghana play Senegal at the Den, the forbidding home of Millwall FC.
United States President George Bush will outline reforms on Friday to help struggling subprime mortgage borrowers and his central bank chief will deliver a speech which will be pored over for hints of a looming rate cut. Federal Reserve chairperson Ben Bernanke speaks on ”Housing and Monetary Policy” at around 2pm GMT.
After a lavish ceremony to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Althea Gibson’s first United States title, Venus and Serena Williams, the two women who carry the hopes of the nation at this year’s US Open, played their first-round matches back-to-back in the Arthur Ashe Stadium.
Ten seconds should not be long enough to change the course of a lifetime, but for 100m athletes that is all it takes. Tyson Gay is now a world champion — a man of stature assured of his place in sporting history, with a reputation enhanced by his generous nature.
The retail price of all grades of petrol will fall by 10 cents per litre from Wednesday September 1, the Department of Minerals and Energy announced on Friday. This follows a 15 cents fall on August 1 and an eight cents decrease on July 4.
With a script as strange and uncanny as that penned by a fiction writer, Orlando Pirates secured a frenzied 2-1 extra-time victory over SuperSport United in the SAA Supa8 semifinal at Durban’s King’s Park Stadium on Thursday night, with much-maligned coach Bibey Mutombo emerging the unlikely hero.
Maria Sharapova produced another display of fearsome big hitting to roll into the US Open third round on Thursday, while top American hopes Andy Roddick and James Blake struggled to stay on course. The 20-year-old Russian glamour girl opened her shoulders to blast past overmatched Australian Casey Dellaqua 6-1, 6-0 in just 51 minutes.
Stuart Broad returned career best figures with both bat and ball as England beat India by three wickets in the fourth one-day international at Old Trafford on Thursday. When Broad, who’d earlier taken 4-51 as India were dismissed for 212, came to the crease England were in dire straits at 114-7. But they still needed fewer than a run-a-ball to win.
In a perfect world the Springboks would be sunning themselves in the south of France, fine-tuning a few of the more cerebral moves cooked up by the coaching team and ingratiating themselves with the locals. After all, we are just one week away from the beginning of the Rugby World Cup 2007.
Princes William and Harry were to lead tributes on Friday to their late mother, Princess Diana, on the 10th anniversary of her death at a service attended by senior royals and Diana’s friends and family. William and Harry, who were just 15 and 12 when their mother died following a high-speed car crash in Paris, have spent months arranging the service.