Chelsea's amazing pre-season spending spree paid immediate dividends on Sunday when they opened their league campaign with a superb 2-1 victory at Liverpool thanks to a late winner by Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink.
With champions Manchester United thrashing Bolton 4-0 and Arsenal beating Everton 2-1 on Saturday, Chelsea needed a fast start to their season and delivered it in style before onlooking billionaire Russian owner Roman Abramovich.
PHOTO: REUTERS
Newcastle, third last season, drew 2-2 at Leeds United thanks to two Alan Shearer goals, while Manchester City thrashed 10-man Charlton Athletic 3-0 in Sunday's other matches.
Abramovich, who has spent more than ?70 million (US$112 million) on new players since taking over Chelsea in July, leapt for joy in the director's box as his expensive team completed only their third win at Anfield since World War II.
Hasselbaink, on as a second-half substitute, might not have played at all had Romanian striker Adrian Mutu received his international clearance in time.
But the Dutch striker signalled he will fight for his place amid all the new arrivals when he sped on to a through ball and beat Jerzy Dudek to score the winner after 87 minutes.
"It was a great start for us," Chelsea head coach Claudio Ranieri told Sky Sports television. "It was fantastic, Jimmy is a great champion. He is a strong man. It's a new Chelsea with a lot of new players but I saw our old character."
Eight minutes before Hasselbaink's winner Chelsea were fuming after the referee allowed Liverpool striker Michael Owen to retake a missed penalty because Chelsea keeper Carlo Cudicini had stepped off his line.
Owen made the most of his second attempt, smashing it high into the net to make the score 1-1, cancelling out Argentine midfielder Juan Sebastian Veron's 25th-minute opener for Chelsea.
At Elland Road Shearer also scored late to give title aspirants Newcastle their draw against Leeds.
Shearer pounced after 88 minutes to avert a disappointing defeat for Bobby Robson's team.
The 33-year-old former England captain put Newcastle ahead from the penalty spot in the first half before Mark Viduka and the excellent Alan Smith gave Leeds a 2-1 advantage.
The draw was the least Newcastle deserved for a pulsating second-half display and made for a satisfactory end to the day for their two ex-Leeds players, Lee Bowyer and Jonathan Woodgate.
Goals by Frenchmen Nicolas Anelka and Antoine Sibierski and Chinese international Sun Jihai gave Manchester City their emphatic victory at Charlton Athletic.
South African defender Mark Fish was sent off in the second half for Charlton, who were without new Italian signing Paolo Di Canio because he is not yet match fit.
Meanwhile, a 19 percent rise in soccer-related arrests in England and Wales last season shows that tough legislation and targeted policing is working, the British government said yesterday.
Statistics published by the Home Office showed that 4,793 arrests were made at domestic games in England and Wales, European cup competitions and international matches from August last year to June.
They compared to 4,035 the season before.
"Our tough football legislation is working -- 1,794 fans are banned from attending matches and the number is set to rise significantly in the run up to Euro 2004," said Home Office minister Hazel Blears.
The figures equated to an average of less than two arrests per game from a total attendance of more than 33 million. League attendances of 28.3 million produced 3,695 arrests -- a rate of 0.01 percent.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier