Nigeria had to wait until four minutes from the end to grab the winner and beat South Africa in the final of the women’s football tournament at the eighth All-Africa Games on Thursday. Midfielder Blessing Igbojionu’s scrambled effort on 86 minutes earned the hosts a deserved victory as well as the gold medal.

Cameroon retained their All-Africa Games title with a 2-0 defeat of Nigeria on Thursday courtesy of prolific Canon Yaounde striker Marcus Mokake Mwambo. He opened the scoring after 42 minutes when he pushed a rebound from Nigeria goalkeeper Rotimi Sunday into the net.

South Africa scored 320 in its first innings of the first cricket test against Pakistan on Friday. While batsman Gary Kirsten got a nasty blow off a Shoaib Akhtar bouncer, Mark Boucher hit 72. Pakistan will begin its first innings on Saturday half an hour early after bad light stopped play five overs before the scheduled close.

Mils Muliaina scored his first four tries in All Blacks colours as the New Zealanders romped to a 68-6 victory over Canada at the World Cup on Friday after failing to score for the first 18 minutes.

The omens were there after the first day: a flat pitch, an attack for which the word modest would be hyperbole, and the undisputed batsman of the decade in his pomp and already closing in on a double century. Now Matthew Hayden stands at the top of the mountain, having eclipsed Brian Lara as Test cricket’s highest individual scorer.

Premier Soccer League champions Orlando Pirates must be wondering what they must do to get beyond the first round of cup competitions. This season Buccaneers failed to advance in the Super Eight, when they were ousted by Jomo Cosmos, and on Sunday they take on Manning Rangers at Chatsworth in the Coca-Cola Cup.

Before last week an educated guess would have offered a script something like this: the South Africans, buoyed by their unlikely triumph, go eagerly into their first Test at Lahore reinforced by the arrival of Gary Kirsten, and out-bat the brittle (and Inzamam-less) Pakistani top six, winning by four or five wickets halfway through the last day.

So now Michael Schumacher stands alone at the summit of grand prix racing, his sixth world championship finally taking him clear of Juan Manuel Fangio and a 46-year-old record that few who were alive in Fangio’s time ever thought to see equalled. But Schumacher will never unite the sport’s followers in the way that Fangio did.

The Liberian faction sympathetic to exiled former president Charles Taylor has named five ministers in the West African country’s post-war power-sharing government, officials said on Thursday.