Chelsea’s German midfielder Michael Ballack, only a substitute for Saturday’s 2-1 FA Cup final win over Everton, has agreed to a one-year contract extension, the BBC reported on Sunday.
“I haven’t signed yet but I have agreed for another year,” the 32-year-old said, adding he expected AC Milan’s Carlo Ancelotti to succeed Guus Hiddink as coach next season at Stamford Bridge.
“I haven’t worked under him and I don’t know him very well, but you can see from the work he has done at Milan that he is a successful manager,” Ballack told BBC Sport. “It’s not done yet but it looks like he will be coach.”
PHOTO: EPA
Ancelotti was set to reveal if he is to take charge after the Serie A season ended yesterday evening as interim manager Hiddink, who replaced the sacked Luiz Felipe in February, returns to his job as Russia coach following four months in London.
Signed by Jose Mourinho in 2006, Ballack has seen Chelsea win two FA Cups since but insisted that next season he wants to target bigger prizes, with Manchester United having dominated the Premiership since his arrival.
“What we need at Chelsea is consistency,” he insisted. “There is not much that we need to change to win the Premier League next season. We have a great team, which is the most important thing, but we have to change the manager again and we will need a bit of time to adapt.”
“Every coach works with different methods and the players have to get to know him — hopefully we won’t need too much time because if we do we will be a little bit behind,” he said, adding he did not think the team needed to go on a spending spree.
“I don’t think we need to buy anybody because we already have a lot of good players on the bench,” he said. “That is for the club to decide but, if you look at the performances over the last couple of years in reaching finals, we have a really good squad and are heading in the right direction.”
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