La Liga leaders Real Madrid could move one step closer to winning a record 31st Spanish title if they can win at Racing Santander tomorrow.
The failure of their bitter rivals Barcelona to take advantage when they have dropped points has meant Real have established a nine-point lead at the top of La Liga with just six games remaining.
“I think we can wrap up the league title when we play Barcelona [on May 7] with three games to go. I’d love to win the league by beating Barca,” Real’s rejuvenated Dutch winger Wesley Sneijder said on Thursday.
After struggling with niggling injuries since the start of the year, Sneijder has returned to his best form in recent games. His superb strike to give ten-man Real a 1-0 win over Murcia last Sunday could, in retrospect, be viewed as a pivotal point in the season, when Madrid mentally clinched the league in their own minds and the heads of their rivals.
However, despite Sneijder’s bubbling optimism at the prospect of Real soon being crowned champions, club captain Raul Gonzalez erred on the side of caution.
“Each day we are getting closer [to the title], but we still have to take each game as it comes. We’ve got a big lead, but the run in is also complicated and Racing will be out to win,” Raul said on Thursday.
One issue that should calm any chance of Real getting carried away as they travel to the north of Spain is that coach Bernd Schuster has a number of suspension and injury problems to deal with.
Real will be without the services of defender Miguel Torres and influential playmaker Jose Maria “Guti” Gutierrez who are both suspended.
Training sessions on Thursday suggested Schuster is about to spring a surprise and ask Raul to drop back into Guti’s role and, in the absence of the injured Ruud van Nistelrooy, start with the unsettled Javier Saviola.
The Argentine international has only started three previous league games for Real this season. In addition, Schuster may be unable to call on the services of Saviola’s compatriot Fernando Gago because of a left knee knock picked up against Murcia.
Barcelona entertain Espanyol in a local derby today, a matched described by sports daily AS on Thursday as “a depression derby.”
Both sides have struggled over the second half of the season.
Espanyol have slipped from being in Champions League contention to eighth place, with UEFA Cup qualification also now probably being beyond their reach. The club’s fans left the players in no doubt what they thought of their team’s decline over recent months when they unfurled a huge banner at training on Wednesday.
“Pride, honor, courage, fighting spirit ... what don’t you understand,” questioned the banner.
One factor in Espanyol’s favor is that Barca coach Frank Rijkaard may well have his mind on Wednesday’s Champions League semi-final and rest several players.
At the other end of the table, bottom club Levante could be relegated tomorrow if they lose at home to Getafe and Recreativo Huelva manage to get a point at Real Zaragoza today.
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