Juventus fired coach Claudio Ranieri on Monday and replaced him with junior team coach and former player Ciro Ferrara, the club said in a statement.
Ranieri’s future had long been the source of speculation and two weeks ago Italian media had reported that he would definitely be fired at the end of the season, and sooner still if Juve lost to AC Milan.
Juve battled to a credible 1-1 draw at the San Siro just over a week ago, but Sunday’s 2-2 home draw against Atalanta meant they have now gone seven league matches without a win.
PHOTO: AP
They sit third in the table again, but seven matches ago they were Inter Milan’s closest title challengers and now they face a fight to hold onto a top-three finish with fourth-placed Fiorentina just one point behind with two matches to play.
A fourth place finish would mean they would have two qualifying rounds to reach the Champions League group stages.
General manager Jean Claude Blanc, who a month ago had announced Ranieri would still be Juve manager next season, said the club had to act.
“It’s the standings which have changed. They [the players] must absolutely start doing things differently and as of tonight Cira Ferrara will be pushing them,” he said.
Former center-back Ferrara, 42, was a long-time Juve stalwart and played more than 250 matches for the club from 1994 to 2005.
He won the Serie A title eight times during a 20-year career, but the last of those with Juve in 2005 was annulled because of the calciopoli match-fixing scandal.
New Taipei Kings guard Jeremy Lin on Friday was named the Taiwan Professional Basketball League’s (TPBL) Player of the Month, the first domestic player to win the award, while the Hsinchu Toplus Lioneers are to welcome their third head coach in less than a year. Lin averaged 22 points, 5.4 rebounds and 6.6 assists over five games in October and last month, helping the Kings to second in the standings with a 4-2 record as of Friday. The Kings last night defeated the Lioneers 96-78 to move level with the top-of-the-table Formosa Dreamers (5-2), while in the night game, the New Taipei
TO NO AVAIL: The Denver Nuggets’ Serbian center Nikola Jokic surpassed his 53-point performance in the 2023 Western Conference semi-finals against Phoenix The Washington Wizards withstood a 56-point explosion from Denver star Nikola Jokic to beat the Nuggets 122-113 on Saturday and snap their 16-game NBA losing streak. Jokic, who won his third NBA Most Valuable Player (MVP) award last season, posted a career scoring high — surpassing a 53-point performance in game four of the 2023 Western Conference semi-finals against Phoenix and a 50-point regular-season best against Sacramento in 2021. The Serbian big man added 16 rebounds and eight assists, but it was all to no avail as Washington, buoyed by 39 points from Jordan Poole, won for the first time
Taiwan on Wednesday finished with 15 medals at the World Taekwondo Poomsae Championships in Hong Kong, taking home four gold, five silver and six bronze medals across the age group divisions. Taiwan ranked third on the medal table after South Korea with 17 golds and the US with eight golds at the five-day competition. “Your athletes have proven themselves as the best in the world,” World Taekwondo president Choue Chung-won said at the closing ceremony of the martial art contest that was attended by a record 1,727 athletes from around the world. On the first day of the competition at the Hong Kong
Taiwan’s Lin Cheng-jing won a bronze medal in the clean and jerk in the women’s under-49 kg division at the 2024 IWF World Weightlifting Championships in Bahrain on Saturday. Lin won her first medal at a World Weightlifting Championships for lifting 107kg in the clean and jerk in her weight class, 2kg more than Rosegie Ramos of the Philippines. However, Ramos won bronze for the combined lift after topping Lin by 5kg in the snatch. Ri Song-gum of North Korea won gold in the division’s combined lift with a total of 213kg, while Xiang Linxiang of China took silver with
RSS