Timing is everything in the mad rush of the play-offs and although Crystal Palace had not looked like promotion candidates for most of the season, their impressive revival under Iain Dowie proved enough to take them all the way to the Premiership.
West Ham must have had a sneaking feeling it might, since Palace were in Cardiff in the first place only courtesy of Brian Deane's last-minute equalizer away to Wigan this month in the last match of the regular season. Had Wigan won that game, Palace would not have made the play-off cut and West Ham would have been rewarded with two more games against Paul Jewell's team.
Dowie, who took over as Palace manager in December, when the team were 19th in the table, had said he needed to win this game or risk losing his best players to bigger clubs.
In another irony the winning goal was scored by veteran captain Neil Shipperley, one of the few players who has not recently been attracting the attention of Premiership scouts.
The decisive moment arrived just after the hour. West Ham inexplicably stood off Andy Johnson until he was within shooting distance, then still seemed surprised by his shot. Although there was no real power in the low drive, it was well placed and Stephen Bywater could only push the ball out to Shipperley, who might be a few kilos above his fighting weight these days and need a few more feet in which to turn, but he is not in the habit of refusing gifts from two yards out.
Meanwhile, Brighton bounced straight back into the English first division with a 1-0 victory over Bristol City in the second division playoff final at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium on Sunday.
A Leon Knight penalty seven minutes from time was enough for them to return to England's second flight, from which they were relegated last year.
After 83 minutes of deadlock, City defender Daniel Coles clearly brought down Brighton striker Chris Iwelumo and Knight, who had scored 26 goals in all competitions this season before Sunday, calmly put the ball past Steve Phillips.
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