Schalke 04 came from a goal down to beat bottom side Kaiserslautern 4-1 on Sunday to stay in the hunt for a Champions League spot.
Goals from Lewis Holtby and Klaas-Jan Huntelaar late in the first half turned the game around for the visitors after Kaiserslautern, who have not won in 16 consecutive games, had taken a third-minute lead through Rodnei.
Spaniard Raul then ended any lingering hopes the hosts may have had when he rifled in from 19m with an unstoppable left-footer for his 12th goal of the league season and Jefferson Farfan tapped in another nine minutes from time after a quick break involving Holtby.
Photo: AFP
“It would great if we could finish fourth this season,” Schalke coach Huub Stevens said. “We said we wanted to get a quick third goal after the break and after Raul’s superb goal everything was easy.”
The win lifted Schalke, who will face Athletic Bilbao in the Europa League quarter-finals, to 50 points. They lie one behind third-placed Borussia -Moenchengladbach and 10 ahead of fifth-placed Bayer 04 Leverkusen.
The top three Bundesliga finishers qualify for the Champions League group stage, while the fourth team plays in the competition’s preliminary round.
Kaiserslautern dropped five points off the relegation playoff spot, with the future of coach Marco Kurz in doubt.
“If we want to stay up we have to play differently than we did today,” Kurz told reporters. “Now we need to get back up and we will get back up.”
In the only other Bundesliga game on Sunday, Europa League -quarter-finalists Hannover 96 beat Cologne 4-1 — Hannover’s first win in their last four league games — to move into seventh place and stay in the running for a European spot.
January signing Mame Diouf scored twice after goals from Lars Stindl and Jan Schlaudraff. Cologne’s Kevin Pezzoni had briefly leveled just before the break.
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