SS Lazio on Tuesday shot into one of Serie A’s UEFA Champions League spots after hammering AC Milan 4-0 to leave the champions’ title defense hanging by a thread.
Lazio breezed up to third on goal difference ahead of Inter and local rivals AS Roma and a point behind second-placed AC Milan, who gave a disastrous display at the Stadio Olimpico in Rome.
Sergej Milinkovic-Savic put Lazio ahead after 3 minutes with a first-time finish, and by the time Mattia Zaccagni bundled in the hosts’ 38th-minute second they could have already been up by three.
Photo: Reuters
Luis Alberto ended the match as a contest by smashing home a penalty midway through the second half, and his beautifully disguised pass set up Felipe Anderson to roll in a deserved fourth in the 75th minute.
“If we play like we have in the last few matches, we can really go far,” said Milinkovic-Savic, who thinks a title bid under manager Maurizio Sarri is a possibility.
“Why not? If we play like this against the champions, why can’t we go for the league?” he asked.
AC Milan are 12 points behind runaway league leaders SSC Napoli at the season’s halfway point, and have lost their aura as the country’s top team.
Three league matches without a win have allowed Napoli to skip away practically unopposed to a huge lead, while AC Milan have four teams breathing down their neck for second place.
Lazio are one of three sides trailing them by a single point while in-form Atalanta BC are a further two points back in sixth, as the race for the top four hots up.
AC Milan can also be happy that Juventus were docked 15 points for illicit transfer activity on Friday, otherwise they would be trailing the Turin giants on goal difference.
“Right now a lot of things aren’t working, mentally and tactically, because we’re in situations, above all for the first two goals, that we should have dealt with differently,” AC Milan head coach Stefano Pioli told DAZN.
“Things aren’t going well, that’s for sure ... we need to start playing like we know how, that’s our first objective and we need to do it as soon as possible,” he said.
Lazio were missing star striker Ciro Immobile, but had no problem getting at an AC Milan defense that have conceded 12 goals in their past five matches in all competitions, losing three and drawing two.
Pioli lost France’s Theo Hernandez ahead of the match and starting centerback Fikayo Tomori to injury in the 24th minute before fullback Davide Calabria hobbled off in stoppage time.
Those were more blows for a team that have the Milan derby coming up in less than two weeks — against the sides that gave them a lesson in the Super Cup last week — and a Champions League tie with Tottenham Hotspur on the horizon.
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