Americans Alison Riske and Danielle Collins and Aussie Ajla Tomljanovic were among the winners on the opening day of a women's tennis mini-tournament in Florida that offered pros a chance to play amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The WTA women's tennis tour cancelled four more events this week and won't resume until at least July 20.
But four women ranked in the top 60 in the world turned out for the UTR Pro Match Series event in Palm Beach, which followed a similar event for men two weeks ago.
World number 51 Collins toppled 28th-ranked compatriot Amanda Anisimova in the opening match 4-1, 4-2 and said she was "grateful" to be back on court even with no fans in attendance on Friday.
"I'm familiar with playing without fans but I definitely miss it," she said.
"One of the things that makes it so special to be a professional athlete is having people supporting you." Tomljanovic, ranked 56th, defeated 19th-ranked Riske 4-3, 4-1 and in the final round-robin match of the day Riske beat ...

WTA pros take the court in Florida mini-tournament

PTI Automatic

Mauricio Pochettino has insisted that he was "happy" that Jose Mourinho replaced him as Tottenham coach.
Mourinho took over in November despite Pochettino having enjoyed a successful five-and-a-half year spell in charge of the London side.
"I am so happy that he is at Tottenham, replacing me," admitted Pochettino who is now officially off the payroll at Spurs after his six-month gardening leave ended.
That leaves him free to take other jobs without the worry of prospective employers having to pay compensation.
"And of course I am happy as well to leave the club in the way that we left it, with all the facilities that are the best in the world.
"For sure, he is very grateful for the way that we helped to build the club, which is now his club." Potchettino recalled how he and Mourinho had forged a close relationship during their days as rivals in Spain's La Liga.
"With Jose, we know each other for a long time," he explained.
"When I was the coach of Espanyol, and he was at Real Madrid, .

Pochettino 'happy' that Mourinho replaced him at Tottenham

"Homesick" players can go back to their natives but will have to serve a 14-day mandatory quarantine period before rejoining camp, according to the Hockey India SOP for the national teams based at SAI South Centre in Bengaluru.
With an aim to provide a safe training environment for the Olympic-bound players, Hockey India has devised a detailed Standard Operating Procedure in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Not just the senior teams, guidelines are being laid down for the junior national sides, too.
The purpose of the SOP is "to establish and maintain a safe training environment for the Indian hockey teams allowing them to prepare to the best of their ability for the Olympic Games in 2021 for senior teams and junior World Cup in 2021."
"This SOP is also recommended to keep the SAI campus free of the coronavirus and maintain the health and safety of the players while they are outside the campus," the document said.
It has been mutually decided by the government, Sports Authority of ..

Hockey players can visit home but will have to serve quarantine period upon returning: HI SOP

With traditional competition shut down by the coronavirus pandemic, athletics has begun experimenting with imaginative and unusual ways to ensure that, somehow, the show goes on.
The Olympics and European Championships have been postponed and there no traditional meetings are scheduled until the Diamond League in Monaco on August 14, yet there has been a steady stream of creative initiatives to allow competition.
There have been long-distance pole-vault showdowns and solo races against the clock.
Micro meetings are planned and, in a sport built on direct competition, promoters of traditional meetings are looking at ways to stage meaningful one-runner races in arenas where no hands are clapping.
"In this period when nothing is happening, there is no bad idea, apart from taking health risks," Remy Charpentier, the organiser of the Monaco meeting, told AFP.
The postponed London Marathon launched the 2.6 Challenge in which participants attempted solo events based on that number. Some sat .

Seeking the spotlight, athletics takes a leap in the dark

Euro 2020 may have been swept from the calendar due to coronavirus, but UEFA's video-game eTournament version kicks off on Saturday regardless.
Instead of Kylian Mbappe, Harry Kane or Cristiano Ronaldo racing around the pitch, gamers will slug it out, contesting the first ever eEuro from their armchairs.
"The weight of the whole thing is on our shoulders," said 21-year-old Frenchman Lotfi Derradji, who comes from the Paris suburbs but 'plays' for Monaco where he was crowned French champion in 2018.
"We will represent France not on the pitch but on the console, we're getting huge amounts of support," said Derradji's international and club teammate, Walid Rachid Tebane, who won the individual European title in June 2019.
"We are disappointed that the Euros have been postponed but at the same time it switches more attention on to us," added Derradji, who has been playing with international French striker - and gaming enthusiast - Antoine Griezmann.
These two bespectacled eSports ...

'Not on pitch but on console': Euro 2020 kicks off without footballers

The Indian Premier League (IPL) has helped English cricket grow, feels batsman Jos Buttler, admitting that the cash-rich T20 tournament is the best in the world after the ICC World Cups.
Butler said he was desperate to be a part of this year's IPL, which now has been indefinitely suspended owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The World Cup-winning England wicketkeeper batsman, has been a part of two franchises in the IPL. After playing for Mumbai Indians in the 2016-17 season, Buttler moved to Rajasthan Royals in 2018.
"There's no doubt that it (IPL) has helped English cricket grow and the numbers of players who were involved in the last few years," Buttler said in the BBC Podcast 'The Doosra'.
"It was something I was desperate to play. For me it's the best tournament in the world, taking out the World Cups," he added.
Buttler, who made massive strides as a white ball player after a few seasons of IPL, said the league is like the fantasy cricket he aspired to play as kid, with the top ...

IPL has helped English cricket grow, best in the world after World Cups: Buttler

US President Donald Trump's daughter and senior White House adviser Ivanka Trump has praised 15-year-old Jyoti Kumari, who cycled down 1200km carrying her ailing father during the nationwide lockdown in India, terming her act as a "beautiful feat of endurance and love".
Stuck in Gurugram in Haryana due to the COVID-19-induced travel restrictions and lockdown, a tenacious Jyoti asked her father to sit on the rear side carrier of her cycle and took him to his native place in Bihar, covering 1200km in seven days.
Ivanka took to Twitter on Friday to highlight the story of the Indian girl, a class eight student, whose journey has become an extensive talking point even on social media where there has been talk about whether she has it in her to pursue cycling as a career.
"15 yr old Jyoti Kumari, carried her wounded father to their home village on the back of her bicycle covering +1,200 km over 7 days.
"This beautiful feat of endurance & love has captured the imagination of the Indian ...

Ivanka praises Indian girl who cycled down 1200km carrying ailing father

Australia's premier fast Pat Cummins is well aware of Chesteshwar Pujara's capabilities, insisting that they will need to "take their medicine" to outlast the Indian middle-order mainstay in the home series this summer.
Pujara's exploits with the bat in India's series win in 2018-19 is still fresh in Cummins' mind and he would like to avoid a repeat of the same in the upcoming tour.
Pujara was the star of India's breakthrough 2-1 series win over Australia, amassing 521 runs from four Tests at an average of 74.42 with three centuries and one fifty.
"He (Pujara) had a mammoth series for them (in 2018-19). He's one of those players that'll take his time, he's in his own little bubble and he doesn't get disturbed by too much," Cummins told cricket.com.au.
"We've got to find a way to outlast him if he bats the way he did last time. There wasn't too much in the pitch so you couldn't manufacture anything. So I think (we need to) take our medicine a bit more and try and outlast him."
Cummins .

Need to find a way to outlast Pujara in summer series: Cummins

Bianca Andreescu and Sofia Kenin, winners of the past two Grand Slam titles, headline a 16-player field for an invitational women's tennis tournament in Charleston, South Carolina in June.
The Tennis Channel is set to air the event and a release on Tennis.com said 16 WTA players would take part, divided into teams and playing 16 singles matches and eight doubles matches.
The tournament starts June 23 and is so far the largest scale tennis event to be confirmed since the ATP and WTA tours were shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic with the French Open postponed and Wimbledon cancelled outright.
Canada's Andreescu, the reigning US Open champion, and Australian Open winner Kenin head the field, but it will be Americans Madison Keys and Bethanie Mattek-Sands serving as team captains.
Former world No. 1 Victoria Azarenka, 2017 US Open champion Sloane Stephens and 2016 Olympic gold medalist Monica Puig are also scheduled to compete.
Charleston has long hosted a WTA tournament, but this ...

Slam winners Andreescu, Kenin headline June tennis invitational field

Formula 1 teams have agreed to cap spending at $145 million next season as the sport attempts to counter the financial fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, media reports claimed.
With the 2020 season yet to get underway and with 10 of the scheduled 22 races already either cancelled or postponed, the 10 teams hammered out the new agreement.
The BBC reported that the teams voted to lower the budget cap to be introduced in 2021 by $30m to $145m.
This will be reduced again to $140m in 2022 and $135m for the period 2023-25.  Other measures were also agreed, said the report, including a research-and-development handicap system.
Friday's agreement still needs to be officially approved by the world motorsport council of governing body the FIA next week.
Initially, a spending cap of $175 million was set to be introduced next year in a bid to help even up the competition.
But that was before international sport was halted by the global pandemic.
Earlier this month, F1's managing director Ross 

F1 teams agree to cut costs with budget limit of $145m - report

Bayern Munich will not activate a 120-million-euro ($130 million) option to buy on-loan Brazilian star Philippe Coutinho from Barcelona, the German champions' chairman Karl-Heinz Rummenigge told Der Spiegel magazine.
The option expired and "we haven't activated it," said Rummenigge.
"Now we're going to draw up squad planning internally (for next season) and we'll see if he still has a role to play with us or not." Coutinho joined Bayern last August but has failed to shine on a consistent basis.
He featured in 23 of 25 league games before the season was halted in March due to the coronavirus but started just 15 times.
Coutinho, who has eight goals and six assists to his name, sat out last weekend's resumption of the season having undergone ankle surgery in April.
Rummenigge also said there will be a tightening of belts in the transfer market once the crisis had passed.
So much so that paying a club record fee for a player would not be an option.

Bayern won't exercise 120-million-euro option to buy Coutinho

Tiger Woods couldn't resist a little last-minute needling before Sunday's charity showdown with Phil Mickelson, with a deadpan prediction that he and partner Peyton Manning would dominate.
"At the end of the day, our team's going to win, it's just a matter of how much we're going to win by," 15-time major champion Woods said in an interview posted on Golf Digest's YouTube channel.
"Do we keep it close, do we blow them out ... we don't want to have viewers turn off if we're 9-up through nine, that's probably not going to be good. So we'll just be 8-up through nine -- something like that."
Reigning Masters champion Woods will team with Manning, a superstar NFL quarterback who retired in 2016 after winning his second Super Bowl title.
Five-time major winner Mickelson will team with Tom Brady, who recently signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after winning six Super Bowl titles in 20 years with the New England Patriots.
The 18-hole match will include nine holes of four-ball and nine holes 

Woods vows victory in star-studded charity match

Formula One's hopes of hosting two races at Silverstone were dealt a blow as elite sport was not handed any exemption to the UK government's plans to introduce a 14-day quarantine period for those entering the country.
The measures will be introduced from June 8 to help curb the spread of coronavirus, but will reviewed every three weeks meaning an agreement could still be found in time for the two races at Silverstone to go ahead in July.
F1 stressed the need earlier this week for a quarantine exemption by highlighting the impact the new rules will have on "tens of thousands of jobs linked to F1 and supply chains."
However, Silverstone managing director Stuart Pringle is hopeful that an agreement can be reached that allows both races to go ahead.
"I am very clear that the importance of the industry is understood by government," he told Sky Sports.
"So I remain optimistic that a sensible and pragmatic solution, which puts the onus on the sport quite rightly to come up with the right ...

No quarantine exemption puts British Grand Prix at risk

A Paris court has rejected an appeal from relegated French Ligue 1 clubs Toulouse and Amiens as well as rivals Lyon who claimed the season had wrongly been abandoned last month.
While Toulouse and Amiens were both relegated, Lyon fell short of European qualification when time was called on the campaign due to the coronavirus.
When the LFP, which runs the top two divisions in French football, decided late last month to call an end to the season, there were still 10 of the 38 scheduled rounds of games to play.
That was after the French government ruled out any prospect of matches returning before August.
The decision confirmed Paris Saint-Germain as champions and also meant that the bottom two, Amiens and Toulouse, were condemned to Ligue 2.
Lorient and Lens have been promoted in their place.
The judge of the Paris administrative court "has logically retained...that the decisions taken by the league's board of directors on April 30 could only be challenged before the Council of State," .

Court rejects appeals against ending French football season

NASCAR had been planning sweeping changes for 2021 in hopes of finding new fans and adding some energy to a staid, stale schedule.
The coronavirus pandemic put those plans on hold and NASCAR is frantically trying to recover from a 10-week layoff.
So far, the stock car series is succeeding.
NASCAR came up with a health plan that allowed it to resume racing last Sunday at Darlington Raceway, the first of 20 events scheduled in seven Southern states through June 21.
Although spectators are not permitted, making for eerie, empty venues, the racing itself has delivered.
Kevin Harvick scored his 50th career victory in NASCAR's first race back with seemingly everyone watching to see if the safety protocols would work. The next event was the first Cup Series race on a Wednesday in 36 years and it was about as good as it gets for a series dependent on miles upon miles of left turns.
Reigning champion and resident villain Kyle Busch angered fan favorite Chase Elliott, who flipped off his ...

NASCAR grabs much-needed momentum in return to live racing

Mexico's top flight Liga MX cancelled its Clausura campaign with no title winner in a bid to protect the football community in the country.
Mexico has two championships per year, the Apertura and the Clausura, and the latter was halted by coronavirus in March with 10 of the 17 rounds of matches completed.
At a general meeting Liga MX decided to end the term "to make sure nobody in the football family, players, coaches, directors, referees, fans or media, get hurt".  No start date for the next Apertura has been decided.
"Guidelines from the Ministry of Health will establish the date," a statement said.
The move comes a day after attempts to restart the league were hampered when eight Santos Laguna players tested positive for coronavirus.
In mid-April the league had already decided to tackle issues of stability by suspending promotion and relegation for its top two divisions for five years.  With more than 6,000 fatalities, Mexico has the second highest COVID-19 death toll in Latin ...

Mexican season cancelled with no champion to protect 'football family'

Premier League chief executive Richard Masters is confident the top-flight season will resume in June as 'Project Restart' gathers pace.
Clubs returned to socially distanced training in small groups this week and the league hope to begin playing the remaining 92 matches on June 12 or 19.
Premier League players and staff have been checked for the coronavirus, with six people testing positive including Watford defender Adrian Mariappa.
"We've taken the first step. It's great for everybody, including the fans, to see our players back on the training ground," Masters told BBC Sport on Friday.
Masters said he was "as confident as we can be" that teams would be able to start in June.
Asked if the Premier League had an exact date for a return, Masters said the organisation had to be "flexible".
While the top tier is taking baby steps towards emulating the Bundesliga's return to action, leagues in France, Scotland and the Netherlands have been abandoned because of the pandemic.
Masters said ..

Premier League chief 'confident' of June restart

Hosts Hertha claimed the Berlin derby bragging rights over Union with a convincing 4-0 victory in their almost empty 74,000-capacity Olympic Stadium.
Hertha moved up to 10th place after the opening match of the second round of games since the Bundesliga restarted last week under strict coronavirus measures thanks to second-half goals from Vedad Ibisevic, Dodi Lukebakio, Matheus Cunha and Dedryck Boyata.
"It would have been fantastic if we could have played a game like that in front of 75,000 spectators. But I hope that the fans at least had fun in front of their TVs," said Hertha coach Bruno Labbadia.
"In the first half we played very well against well-organised opponents. I had to make that clear to my team at half-time because they were feeling a bit negative.
"By the end we were happy because these were important points in the relegation battle." Labbadia started Czech Republic midfielder Vladimir Darida in the only change from last Saturday's win at Hoffenheim in his first home ...

Hertha hammer Union at empty Olympic Stadium

Alex Hales deserves a "second chance" with England after being sent into international exile as a result of recreational drug use, according to Chris Woakes.
Opening batsman Hales was dropped from the World Cup squad shortly before last year's tournament after it emerged he had tested positive for drugs.  England went on to win the event on home soil in dramatic fashion without him and he has not played international cricket since.
Despite his months in the wilderness, there is speculation Hales could be in line for a white-ball recall.
England are set to announce separate Test and one-day squads as they bid to complete a full international home programme against the West Indies, Pakistan, Australia and Ireland despite the coronavirus pandemic.
And the Twenty20 World Cup in Australia is still scheduled to take place later this year.
Warwickshire all-rounder Woakes, asked about the prospect of Hales playing for England again, told reporters on Friday: "I don't know 100 percent if it's .

Hales deserves 'second chance', says England's Woakes

The coach and 10 players from a Peruvian football team tested positive for the new coronavirus just before they were due to board a humanitarian flight, the ministry of health said on Friday.
The 11 members of the third division Credicoop San Roman have been placed in quarantine in a hotel in the southeastern city of Juliaca, near Lake Titicaca.  They were due to board a flight from Juliaca, where they are based, to the capital Lima.
"A total of 66 rapid COVID-19 tests were administered, 12 gave positive results, 11 are male patients that are part of a football team," the ministry said in a statement.
Amongst them is 52-year-old coach Juan Carlos Bazalar, a former player for Peru's two biggest clubs, Universitario de Deportes and Alianza Lima.
"We're isolated and ready to begin the two weeks (of isolation) as the protocols demand," said Bazalar, who won the Copa Sudamericana -- the South American equivalent of the Europa League -- as a player with Cusco's Cienciano in 2003.
"Yet again 

Coach and 10 players at Peruvian club have coronavirus

Watford defender Christian Kabasele says restarting the Premier League on June 12 would be "impossible" because it would put players at risk of injury.
Premier League chiefs have set their sights on a mid-June resumption and clubs went back to training in small groups this week.
But Kabasele believes the timescale means players will not have enough time to get to peak fitness.
"We speak about June 12," he told the Counter Attack podcast. "I think it is impossible because it would be less than three weeks' training after a long period without doing anything. It's a risk for us.
"I'm not sure, I don't have any information but I think we are not going to start June 12.
"The most obvious choice for me is the end of June. Like this you have at least four weeks to train with the team if it's possible."
Premier League chief executive Richard Masters this week described the June 12 date as a "staging post" and said there would be flexibility in fixture scheduling.
Watford defender Adrian ...

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