Joe Cole supplied a magnificent assist after coming off the bench to set the seal on Lille’s 3-1 victory over 10-man Saint-Etienne on his Ligue 1 debut on Saturday.
Eden Hazard had threatened to eclipse Cole with a superb second-half brace, but the Englishman set up the third goal for Ludovic Obraniak with a brilliant dribble through the home defense.
“It was very, very good,” Cole said in a post-match interview with Canal+.
“I enjoyed playing with my teammates. The way they play is very beautiful. [Hazard] is a very, very special player.”
Marseille, in contrast, slumped to a 1-0 home loss to Rennes, for whom Jires Kembo-Ekoko fired home the only goal 14 minutes from time, leaving Marseille on a meager three points, just two off the foot of the table and winless from their opening five matches.
A second straight loss for last year’s champions upped the pressure on coach Didier Deschamps ahead of a midweek Champions League meeting with Olympiakos, while Rennes are joint fourth and only a point off the summit.
Lille, meanwhile, had fallen behind in sorry fashion in the seventh minute, with David Rozehnal inadvertently guiding Fabien Lemoine’s low cross beyond his own goalkeeper Mickael Landreau.
The momentum tipped in favor of the visitors in the 35th minute, however, when Saint-Etienne right-back Loris Nery was shown a straight red card for a dangerous, ankle-high foul on Franck Beria.
Hazard equalized in the 54th minute, wriggling past a posse of defenders before beating goalkeeper Stephane Ruffier.
Elsewhere on Saturday, Ajaccio claimed their first three points since returning to the top flight, with a 3-1 defeat of Valenciennes that left the beaten side rooted to the bottom of the table.
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