Cleanup hitter Chen Chin-feng's (
Both teams came into the match looking for the decisive second victory of the three-game tournament that would guarantee the winner a trip to Athens for the 2004 Olympic games. As expected, Japan walked away with the win.
Taiwan just came off of a dramatic 5-4 come-from-behind victory in 10 innings against South Korea the night before.
PHOTO: AFP
The game with Japan began with the Japanese taking a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the second on first baseman Ogasawa Michihiro's sharp grounder up the middle off Taiwanese starter Hsu Ming-jeh (
The hosts then pounded out two more runs against Hsu before he was pulled from the game in the bottom of the third inning.
Reliever Pan Wei-luen (
While the Taiwan pitching staff struggled against the Japanese hitters, starting pitcher Matsuzaka Daisuki he struck out a total of 12 batters in seven innings of play.
Besides yielding two harmless singles and a double, two of which were to Chen Chin-feng, Matsuzaka was nearly flawless.
The star of Taiwan's victory over South Korea, Chen Chih-yuan (陳致遠), whose game-tying single in the bottom of the ninth breathed life into Taiwan, was silenced by Matsuzaka as he stuck out in all four of his plate appearances.
"We knew this guy [Matsuzaka] was going to be tough, but no one expected him to be as dominant as he was tonight," Taiwan Manager Hsu Sheng-ming (徐生明) said after the game.
"The gap between what we had expected and what actually happened was simply too great."
If Taiwan can beat a much weaker Chinese team today, and Japan, as expected, beats South Korea in the night game, Taiwan should wind up with a second-placed finish, which would qualify them for a berth in the Olympics.
"We should just forget about this one [loss to Japan] and concentrate on the game against China, because that's the only game that we can do something about," Hsu Sheng-ming said.
When Paddy Dwyer arrived in China in 1976, crowds jostled to catch a glimpse of him and his companions — the first Western soccer team to play in the country. China was emerging from the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, and on the brink of market reforms that would take the country from economic stagnation to explosive growth. “All we could see was lines of people running beside our bus, trying to look in the windows, to see their first visual of a white person,” he said. “It was all bicycles,” he said. “There were very few cars to be seen.” Dwyer,
A new NZ$683 million (US$404 million) stadium that was a symbol of Christchurch’s struggle to rebuild after a deadly earthquake struck the New Zealand city is to host its first match tomorrow in front of a sellout crowd. A magnitude 6.2 earthquake killed 185 people in February 2011 and toppled or damaged buildings, including the city’s old Lancaster Park. The stadium, which hosted international rugby and cricket, and was home to the Canterbury Crusaders, was badly damaged and never reopened. It was bulldozed in 2019 and turned into sports fields, leaving the Crusaders without a permanent home. Government funding for a new stadium was
Some of Clearlake Capital Group’s largest investors are growing increasingly concerned about how much time the company’s co-founders are spending on sports investments as they have struggled to complete the fundraising for the private equity firm’s latest flagship fund. One of Clearlake’s co-founders, Behdad Eghbali, has been spending what some investors described as a disproportionate amount of time on the firm’s investment in Chelsea Football Club in recent months. Now, co-founder Jose E. Feliciano and his wife, Kwanza Jones, are nearing a record US$3.9 billion deal to acquire the San Diego Padres. That personal investment by Feliciano has set off the latest
The Philadelphia Flyers and the Pittsburg Penguins on Wednesday put a squeeze on the penalty box in Game 3 of their NHL playoff series — with 11 players cramped inside their designated punishment areas. Each could have snapped a team photo after a melee broke out in the second period of the Flyers’ 5-2 win over the Penguins in their Eastern Conference first-round series. “It was a party in there,” penalized Flyers defenseman Nick Seeler said. The celebration extended into the joyous locker room after the Flyers took a 3-0 series lead. Penguins forward Bryan Rust slammed Travis Konecny to the ice behind the
RSS