Eden Hazard was sent off for kicking a ball boy as European champions Chelsea fell to Swansea City in the second leg of their English League Cup semi-final on Wednesday.
Leading 2-0 from the first leg, Swansea held out for a goalless draw at the Liberty Stadium to reach the first major final in their history, which will see the Welsh club meet fourth-tier Bradford City at Wembley on Feb. 24.
It was a bad day all round for the visitors, who had Belgian winger Hazard sent off for lashing out in frustration at a ball boy who was preventing him from retrieving the ball with 10 minutes of the game remaining.
Photo: Reuters
Hazard later met the 17-year-old ball boy — named locally as Charlie Morgan, son of the Swansea City director Martin Morgan — in the Chelsea dressing room and apologized for the incident.
Hazard said he had not intended to boot the ballboy.
“The boy put his whole body on to the ball and I was just trying to kick the ball and I think I kicked the ball and not the boy,” Hazard told Chelsea TV, according to the club’s official Web site.
“I apologize. The ball boy came in the changing room and we had a quick chat and I apologized and the boy apologized as well, and it is over. Sorry,” he said.
The red card will lead the 22-year-old to be banned for three games, though there may be scope for that sanction to be extended.
“They have apologized to each other,” Chelsea’s interim manager Rafael Benitez told reporters. “They knew they were both wrong. He [the ball boy] was wasting time. Hazard wanted to get the ball back quickly and he was kicking. They both made mistakes.”
“We will deal with this internally. He was frustrated and just wanted to get the ball back, but we will analyze it and see what happens,” Benitez said.
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