Celtic striker John Hartson missed a last-minute penalty as Rangers lifted the Scottish League Cup for a record 23rd time on Sunday with a 2-1 victory over their fierce Glasgow rivals at Hampden Park.
Danish forward Peter Lovenkrands, who has a habit of scoring against Celtic, grabbed what proved to be the winner as Alex McLeish's side retained the trophy they won last season in dramatic fashion.
Lovenkrands, who scored twice in Rangers' 3-2 Scottish Cup final win over Celtic last season, created Rangers' first goal, scored by Argentine Claudio Caniggia after 23 minutes and 12 minutes later swept home the second from a Michael Mols pass.
PHOTO: AP
Swedish striker Henrik Larsson headed one back from a corner for Celtic after 57 minutes.
In England, meanwhile, Steven Gerrard set up two goals and scored the winner as Liverpool beat Tottenham 3-2 in the Premier League Sunday, its first win at White Hart Lane in seven years.
Liverpool manager Gerard Houllier kept faith with the team which drew 1-1 at Celtic in the UEFA Cup on Thursday. That meant Senegalese striker El Hadji Diouf, who faces an UEFA and police inquiry for allegedly spitting at a fan during that match, kept his place.
Also Sunday, Robbie Fowler scored his first Manchester City goal as the Blues beat Birmingham 1-0. Gianfranco Zola and Mario Stanic scored as Chelsea beat West Bromwich Albion 2-0.
Defending champion Arsenal slipped up in its bid to win back-to-back titles, losing 2-0 to Blackburn on Saturday.
Arsenal has 63 points, two more than Manchester United, although the Reds must go to Highbury in April for what could be the league decider. Newcastle is third with 58 points, followed by Chelsea (51), Everton (50), Liverpool (49) and Blackburn (46).
A goalkeeping blunder from Liverpool's Jerzy Dudek helped Tottenham's Argentine defender Mauricio Taricco score his first goal for Spurs in the 49th minute.
Taricco hit a low drive from 25m which Dudek dropped and the ball dribbled over the line.
Two minutes later, Michael Owen scored his 21st goal of the season to equalize from a Gerrard cross.
Emile Heskey, who overcame a hamstring injury to play, headed Liverpool's second in the 72nd minute, from Gerrard's accurate pass.
Gerrard made it 3-1 ten minutes later, taking the ball against the run of play to score 20m past Tottenham 'keeper Kasey Keller.
Spurs scored a consolation goal three minutes from time through Teddy Sheringham.
In Manchester, Fowler's 72nd minute strike, from an Ali Benarbia curling cross, was his first for City since he moved from Leeds on Jan. 30.
``In his first couple of games Robbie needed fitness and today he needed a goal -- and he deserved it today,'' Manchester City manager Kevin Keegan said.
``It was going to take something out of the ordinary to win it and Robbie supplied it.''
At West Bromwich, Zola's 58th-minute strike ended the resistance of Albion, which is almost certainly set to be relegated.
Mario Stanic had headed the Blues into a 38th-minute lead from Graeme Le Saux's corner.
ANFIELD BLUES: Kylian Mbappe arrived at Anfield on a run of 21 goals in 17 games, but he managed just three attempts in the match, none of them hitting the target Kylian Mbappe has been nearly unstoppable this season, but he hit a roadblock in their UEFA Champions League match at Anfield on Tuesday. For the second year running, the Real Madrid forward had a night to forget at Merseyside as Liverpool won 1-0. Mbappe looked a shadow of the player who has been tearing defenses apart all season. “We were lacking that threat in the final third,” said Madrid coach Xabi Alonso, without naming Mbappe individually. The FIFA World Cup winner for France rarely looked capable of finding a breakthrough against a Liverpool team who have been so defensively fragile for much of the
LOCAL SUCCESS: In the doubles, Taiwan’s Hsieh Su-wei and Jelena Ostapenko of Latvia defeated Italians Sara Errani and Jasmine Paolini in straight sets Elena Rybakina on Monday punched her ticket to the WTA Finals last four with an impressive 3-6, 6-1, 6-0 victory over second seed Iga Swiatek in round-robin play in Riyadh. After cruising past Amanda Anisimova in her opener on Saturday, Rybakina claimed her second win of the week to guarantee herself top spot in the Serena Williams Group. Anisimova on Monday rallied back from a set and a break down to triumph 4-6, 6-3, 6-2 in her all-American battle with seventh seed Madison Keys, who has been eliminated from the competition. “Madi was playing so well, it was quite a battle out there,”
For almost 30 minutes, Vitomir Maricic did not take a breath. Face down in a pool, surrounded by anxious onlookers, the Croatian freediver fought spasming pain to redefine what doctors thought was possible. When he finally surfaced, he had smashed the previous Guinness World Record for the longest breath-hold underwater by nearly five minutes. However, even with the help of pure oxygen before the attempt, it had pushed him to the limit. “Everything was difficult, just overwhelming,” Maricic, 40, told reporters, reflecting on the record-breaking day on June 14. “When I dive, I completely disconnect from everything, as if I’m not even there.
An amateur soccer league organized by farmers, students and factory workers in rural China has unexpectedly drawn millions of fans and inspired big cities to form their own, raising hopes China can grow talent from the ground up and finally become a global force. The nation of 1.4 billion people has about 200 million soccer fans, more than any other country, but it has failed to build world-class teams, partly due to a top-down approach where clubs pick players from a very small pool of prescreened candidates. The professional game is marred by a history of fixed matches, corruption, and dismal performances,
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