Borussia Dortmund maintained a two-point lead at the top of the Bundesliga with a 1-0 win at home to Bayer Leverkusen on Saturday as title rivals Bayern Munich beat Kaiserslautern 2-0 to keep pace.
Dortmund scored on the stroke of halftime when Japan international Shinji Kagawa shook off two defenders with a fine solo run and slotted the ball home with a clever left-foot shot from a tight angle.
The champions, who have won all four of their Bundesliga games this year without injured playmaker Mario Goetze, are now unbeaten in 15 straight league games since early September last year.
The result lifted Dortmund to 46 points from 21 games, still two ahead of Bayern, with Leverkusen stuck in sixth place on 31 and looking lackluster ahead of their Champions League round of 16 first leg against Barcelona on Tuesday.
Surprise package Borussia Moenchengladbach moved above visitors Schalke 04 into third on 43 points after taking them apart in a 3-0 win with Marco Reus, Mike Hanke and Juan Arango on target before the break. Schalke are fourth with 41.
Bundesliga top scorer Mario Gomez headed Bayern into a sixth minute lead with his 18th league goal of the season and Thomas Mueller added a second with another powerful header on the half-hour.
The Bavarians, who also reached the German Cup semi--finals in midweek and are also still in the Champions league, seem to have recovered from an erratic start to the year following one win in their previous three games.
Mid-table VfB Stuttgart crushed 10-man Hertha Berlin 5-0 with four goals in a 17 minute spell in the first half to put visiting coach Michael Skibbe under more pressure after his team’s fifth defeat in his five games in charge.
The Berlin side are 15th, two places and three points above the automatic relegation spots.
Hoffenheim’s new coach Markus Babbel, sacked by Hertha in December, thought he would celebrate a winning debut until Werder Bremen’s Marko Arnautovic snatched a 90th-minute goal to earn his side a 1-1 draw.
Hanover 96 also had to wait until the end to spoil Mainz 05’s afternoon with Artur Sobiech equalizing in the 89th minute to secure a 1-1 draw.
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