Brazil midfielder Renato Augusto trimmed Borussia Dortmund’s Bundesliga lead to nine points with a superb strike on Sunday to give second-place Bayer Leverkusen a 1-0 win at Mainz.
With the game heading towards a goalless draw, Augusto dispossessed Mainz’s Danish defender Bo Svensson on the edge of the penalty area and drilled home his shot on 82 minutes to poach three points for his team.
“We found things difficult in the first half, particularly in midfield,” Leverkusen coach Jupp Heynckes said.
“In the second half, the team showed passion, great morale and team spirit, so that we took our chances when they came,” he said.
After Dortmund lost 1-0 at Hoffenheim on Saturday, Leverkusen made up some ground on the leaders, while defending champions Bayern Munich are up to fourth, 16 points behind Dortmund, after they hammered Hamburg.
Former Germany captain Michael Ballack played the full 90 minutes for Leverkusen, but failed to make his mark and the 34-year-old looked short of fitness as he tries to win back his place in the national side after injury.
On Sunday night, Stuttgart hauled themselves out of the relegation zone with a 2-1 win at St Pauli.
Substitute Sven Schipplock —making his Bundesliga debut —scored an 88th-minute winner that left St Pauli in the bottom three.
Schipplock, promoted from Stuttgart’s reserves, had only been on the pitch five minutes when he popped up with the winner, which moved his side up to 13th and left the bottom six sides separated by just six points.
“We had a pinch of luck today,” Stuttgart coach Bruno Labaddia said. “I must pay a big compliment to St Pauli, they played really well.”
“We came here under a bit of pressure, because two or three players in my team weren’t quite fully fit,” he said.
INJURY TURMOIL: Despite stunning French Open champions Paolini and Errani to advance, Chan was forced to pull out after her partner’s tearful women’s singles defeat Last year’s mixed doubles champions Hsieh Su-wei of Taiwan and Poland’s Jan Zielinski on Monday crashed out of the quarter-finals at Wimbledon, leaving the Taiwanese star focused on pursuing a fifth women’s doubles title in London, while a partner injury forced compatriot Chan Hao-ching to give up on her doubles campaign. Hsieh and Zielinksi, who last year also won the Australia Open title, narrowly lost their opening set 7-6 (9/7), before Britain’s Joe Salisbury and Brazil’s Luisa Stefani stunned the former champions 6-3 at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. The Taiwanese-Polish duo had been dominant in the first two
‘SU-PENKO’: Hsieh and Ostapenko face a rematch against their Australian Open final opponents, the same duo Hsieh played in last year’s Wimbledon semi-finals Taiwanese women’s doubles star Hsieh Su-wei and Latvian partner Jelena Ostapenko on Wednesday survived a near upset to the unseeded duo of Sorana Cirstea of Romania and Russia’s Anna Kalinskaya, setting up a semi-final showdown against last year’s winners. Despite losing a hard-fought opening set 7-6 (7/4) on a tiebreak, the fourth seeds turned up the heat, losing just five games in the final two sets to handily put down Cirstea and Kalinskaya 6-3, 6-2. Nicknamed “Su-Penko,” the pair are next to face top seeds Katerina Siniakova of the Czech Republic and Taylor Townsend of the US in a reversal of last
The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) has overturned French Olympic fencer Ysaora Thibus’ four-year suspension for doping, ruling that her positive test for a banned substance was caused by kissing her then-boyfriend, American fencer Race Imboden. Thibus, a silver medalist in team foil at the Tokyo Games, had tested positive for ostarine, a prohibited muscle-building substance, during a competition in Paris in January last year. However, CAS concluded there was no intentional wrongdoing, finding it scientifically plausible that repeated kissing over several days with Olympic medalist Imboden — who was taking ostarine at the time — led to accidental contamination. The court
Switzerland’s Riola Xhemaili on Thursday scored a last-gasp goal to salvage a dramatic 1-1 draw with Finland that sent the joyous hosts through to the quarter-finals at Euro 2025, and heartbroken Finland home. Switzerland, who needed only a draw to advance based on goal-difference, finished second in Group A behind Norway to go through to the knockout round for the first time and are to face the winners of Group B, which would be world champions Spain as things stand. “I think we set ourselves a goal on the pitch, to write history, to go into the knockout stages, which we’ve never
RSS