Sports
No Maresca, no problem? Chelsea’s late draw at Man City a blow for Guardiola & Co.
MANCHESTER, England — Chelsea snatched a dramatic late equalizer in potentially Calum McFarlane’s only game in charge as they held Manchester City to a 1-1 draw Sunday, just four days after parting company with Enzo Maresca.
McFarland, Chelsea’s under-21 coach, was on the touchline at the Etihad Stadium after the club announced Maresca’s departure on New Year’s Day. Chelsea are expected to unveil Strasbourg coach Liam Rosenior as the Italian’s replacement before the trip to Fulham on Wednesday. And in potentially his only game as boss, McFarlane watched Enzo Fernández grab a 94th-minute goal to dent City’s title hopes.
Tijjani Reijnders gave Pep Guardiola’s side the lead just before halftime with a fine close-range finish. City restricted Chelsea to relatively few clear-cut chances throughout, but they were made to pay in injury time when Fernandez got on the end of a cross from the right to stab the ball past Gianluigi Donnarumma at the second attempt.
– Report: Chelsea snatch late draw at Man City
– Olley: Why Chelsea, Maresca parted ways
It’s a damaging result for City, who have now dropped points for the second game in a row to slip six behind Arsenal at the top of the table. — Dawson
Reijnders in form when City need it
The Dutchman has been in and out of the Man City first team since his summer move from Milan, but he showed again against Chelsea what a goalscoring threat he can be. He got 10 goals in Serie A last season — a good return for a central midfielder — and after netting his fifth in the Premier League against Chelsea, he’s on course to do it again.
Reijnders started the season with a goal at Wolves, but he hasn’t always been in Guardiola’s starting XI. Back as a regular since mid-December, he has found the net in three of his past four games.
The 27-year-old played off the left against Chelsea and looked dangerous from early on with runs from deep, which were hard to pick up. He has likened himself to Kevin De Bruyne in the past, but in that respect at least, he’s far more like Ilkay Gündogan.
If he can keep scoring crucial goals and reach double figures before the end of the season, it will help take some of the responsibility off Erling Haaland to be City’s sole source. — Dawson
McFarlane gets a result against Guardiola
On Sunday, Etihad Stadium arguably witnessed the greatest managerial mismatch in Premier League history. Pep Guardiola has won 12 league title in three different countries in addition to three Champions Leagues, 16 domestic cups and is widely credited as the finest football mind of his generation. Chelsea U21 boss Calum McFarlane, meanwhile, was on the way to a light show in Windsor with his family when he got the call to take charge of Chelsea for this match, following the sudden departure of head coach Enzo Maresca on Thursday.
McFarlane, 40, made the point beforehand that Chelsea’s model dictates the under-21s play a similar style to the first team, so there was no surprise Chelsea were not radically different in style or shape. However, they were notably conservative out of possession, falling into a back five shape deep on the edge of their own box for long periods.
Despite a shaky opening period, both McFarlane and Chelsea grew in confidence in the second half. Substitute Liam Delap’s 68th-minute burst forward, denied by an apparent handball, was the trigger for McFarlane to become more animated, and he had the last laugh when Fernandez equalized. Guardiola gave McFarlane a warm embrace at full time — he may not have known him before kickoff, but Guardiola is unlikely to forget him now after a hugely damaging result for City.
McFarlane even had the honor of his name being sung by the Chelsea fans as the team went to acknowledge their travelling support at full time. — Olley
1:50
Tighe impressed by McFarlane’s proactivity in Chelsea’s draw vs. Man City
Sam Tighe explains why he was ‘impressed’ by Calum McFarlane’s tactical decisions that led Chelsea to get a last minute draw vs. Man City.
Rodri passes his test
At this point — nearly 18 months after his knee ligament injury — the biggest thing for Rodri is coming through a game unscathed.
There were a couple of nervous moments as he made his first City start for three months. He briefly went down after a challenge from Reece James midway through the first half and was on the end of an even heavier one in the second half. The midfielder looked in some pain after yet another challenge from James and for a while, there was some concern on the City bench.
It has been nearly 18 months since his knee ligament injury and he has already had so many setbacks. Understandably he’s not yet at his best after so long on the sideline. Against Chelsea, there were moments when he looked rusty, but also the usual clever positioning and sharp passing.
His understudy, Nico González, has made a step up this season, but Guardiola will know that he needs Rodri fully fit if City are going to chase down Arsenal at the top of the table. After playing 90 minutes, it will be a big positive if he’s able to be in the squad which faces Brighton on Wednesday. — Dawson
Gvardiol injury a blow for City
As much as Rodri was a positive for City, losing Josko Gvardiol for any length of time would be a massive blow.
The Croatian defender was forced off after a challenge with Malo Gusto in the second half. He was limping heavily as he came off and ultimately needed help from James and a member of City’s medical team.
Gvardiol was described as “a warrior” by Guardiola last season because he kept making himself available when the squad were going through an injury crisis. Now he needs the 23-year-old back as quickly as possible because if he’s sidelined for a while, it will leave Guardiola with problems in the center of his defense.
John Stones is injured and hasn’t started a league game since October, while Nathan Aké had had issues staying fit, picking up a knock of his own in the goalless draw with Sunderland last time out. Abdukodir Khusanov replaced Gvardiol on Sunday, but there are question marks about whether he’s ready for a prolonged run in the team, particularly at center back.
Problems in defense could be mounting for Guardiola after Rúben Dias was substituted late on and Nico O’Reilly ended the game holding his hamstring. It’s a bad sign for the City boss that his team looked in relative control before his makeshift defense conceded late on. — Dawson
Chelsea’s substitutions pay off — whoever was dictating them
Sources have told ESPN that one of Maresca’s major gripes was what he felt became undue influence from Chelsea’s medical staff in team selection and the use of players. Sources added that there was a feeling Maresca sometimes disregarded that advice and ignored those instructions, particularly relating to player load where he would be told specific individuals could only play for 45 minutes, an hour or 75 minutes in a game.
It therefore felt worthy of note that McFarlane’s only three changes took place at halftime — Estevao Willian replaced by Andrey Santos — and then on 62 minutes, as Delap and Jorrel Hato were introduced for João Pedro and Josh Acheampong. Had Cole Palmer come off on 75 minutes, that would have surely indicated a hat trick for the medical team, but in fairness to Chelsea and McFarlane, they improved notably after the break. Delap, in particular, proved much more of a handful for City than Pedro, while Santos helped even up the midfield battle.
McFarlane switched fullbacks Acheampong and Malo Gusto at the interval to nullify City’s threat in wide areas, and he also moved Fernandez into a No. 10 position. It all paid off at the other end, too. Gusto, operating on the right, crossed and Fernandez equalized in the fourth minute of added time. It was a goal that would not have happened had those changes not been made. — Olley
Nine freshmen, led by Duke’s Cameron Boozer and BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, headline the men’s Wooden Award midseason top 25 watchlist released Wednesday.
Boozer leads the nation in scoring at 23.3 points per game, with Dybantsa just behind him at 23.1 per game. Boozer has been arguably the most consistent player in college basketball since the start of the season, scoring at least 14 points in every game and tallying seven double-doubles to lead Duke to a 14-1 start. The 6-foot-9 forward is also averaging 9.7 rebounds and 4.2 assists.
Dybantsa, meanwhile, recently put together one of the most impressive stretches ever by a freshman. In the month of December, he averaged 27.8 points, 8.0 rebounds, 5.7 assists and 2.3 steals, shooting nearly 66% from the field.
North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson isn’t far behind the two stars, averaging 19.3 points and 10.9 rebounds with 10 double-doubles in his first 15 games.
The midseason list also included two talented freshmen with lingering injury issues. Kansas’ Darryn Peterson has played in only six games this season because of a hamstring injury, although he has started the Jayhawks’ past two games and had 32 points in 32 minutes Tuesday against TCU. Louisville’s Mikel Brown Jr. has sat out five games in a row because of a lower-back injury.
Those five freshmen made up the top five in ESPN’s latest 2026 NBA draft big board.
There also are a number of college veterans poised to make a second-half run at the award. Purdue’s Braden Smith entered the season as the favorite thanks to his status as an All-American last season and the top player on the AP’s preseason No. 1 team. He leads the nation in assists, averaging 9.6 entering the week, setting the Big Ten career record earlier this month. Should he maintain that average, Smith would be on pace to set the all-time Division I career assists record (1,076) held by Bobby Hurley.
Iowa State’s Joshua Jefferson and Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg have emerged as legitimate contenders for the award after an outstanding first two months of the season. Jefferson is the anchor for a 14-0 Cyclones team, averaging 17.5 points, 7.3 rebounds and 5.4 assists. Lendeborg, a former UAB transfer, leads the No. 2 Wolverines in scoring (14.7) and is second in rebounding (7.0) and assists (3.4).
Players not on Wednesday’s watchlist are still eligible for the late-season list and the final ballot whose voting determines the winner.
Wooden Award Midseason Top 25
listed in alphabetical order
Darius Acuff Jr., Arkansas
Nate Ament, Tennessee
Cameron Boozer, Duke
Jaden Bradley, Arizona
Mikel Brown Jr., Louisville
Tucker DeVries, Indiana
AJ Dybantsa, BYU
Kingston Flemings, Houston
P.J. Haggerty, Kansas State
Thomas Haugh, Florida
Graham Ike, Gonzaga
Joshua Jefferson, Iowa State
Alex Karaban, UConn
Trey Kaufman-Renn, Purdue
Yaxel Lendeborg, Michigan
Tamin Lipsey, Iowa State
Koa Peat, Arizona
Darryn Peterson, Kansas
Labaron Philon Jr., Alabama
Emanuel Sharp, Houston
Braden Smith, Purdue
Bennett Stirtz, Iowa
Bruce Thornton, Ohio State
JT Toppin, Texas Tech
Caleb Wilson, North Carolina
For ages, certainly as long as we have been in the College Football Playoff age, people have politely asked and desperately pleaded, when were some new bloods finally going to replace the blue bloods on college football’s biggest postseason stage?
Well, folks, the age of new is officially the age of now.
The promise of the four-team CFP versus the two-team Bowl Championship Series title game was to create more room for more teams to challenge the same old establishment. One year ago, the impetus behind the playoff’s further expansion to a dozen teams was to widen that door even further and perhaps interject a little March Madness into college football.
It’s working. At least for now, it is. And fittingly, it’s a basketball school that is leading the movement.
For the first time since the CFP debuted at the end of the 2014 season, the playoff’s final four lineup does not include Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State or Clemson. And over those first 11 editions, any team that did manage to break the big four’s big box déjà vu blockade to earn a spot in the semis or final … well, they weren’t exactly George Mason ’06 or Loyola Chicago ’18.
Notre Dame made it to the title game one year ago, following Michigan‘s 2023 run to the championship. But no one is going to mistake the Irish and Wolverines for UMBC and VCU. The closest we came to a true CFP Cinderella run was TCU in 2022, when the Horned Frogs crashed the big ball in Los Angeles, only to have Georgia take away their glass slipper and beat them over their horned heads with it 65-7.
However, this year’s fortuitous foursome — with Ole Miss facing Miami on Thursday night and Indiana taking on Oregon on Friday — is guaranteed to bring us a new-age champion, no matter who winds up standing atop the stage at Hard Rock Stadium on Jan. 19. And it won’t merely be the boldest new-blood dash of the CFP era, but also of nearly the entire BCS era that began in 1998. Or, honestly, even the Bowl Alliance, the Bowl Coalition or the plain old Bowl era that reaches back more than a century.
No matter your age, you know that Indiana has never had a football golden age until now. No offense to Coach Corso and the 1979 Holiday Bowl champs or Vaughn Dunbar and the 1991 Copper Bowl victors or even Antwaan Randle-El and Anthony Thompson, but that’s really as good as it ever got. The good people of Bloomington were content to let the Irish be the state’s football school with occasional loan-outs to Purdue, while everyone waited for hoops season to finally tip off.
IU has fielded football teams since 1887, but the Hoosiers hadn’t posted double-digit wins in a season until the past two years and hadn’t won an outright Big Ten title since 1945, nor had they won a Big Ten championship game or a Rose Bowl until these past six weeks. Should they win it all, someone needs to let the kids of the 1954 Milan High Indians and Jimmy Chitwood’s Hickory Huskers know that they are no longer the greatest underdog story in “Hoosiers” history.
If you are of a certain age, then you remember when Oregon was really bad at football. As in, most of the 20th century. From 1893 through 1993, the Ducks made exactly three Rose Bowl trips, two of those prior to 1920. They did win seven conference championships, but six of those were shared with other teams; their only outright title came in the four-game Oregon Intercollegiate Football Association campaign of 1895. When they made it to the 1992 Poulan Weed Eater Independence Bowl, it was a very big deal … and they lost that game to Wake Forest.
But the revolutionary football evolution that followed, fueled by Oregon grad Phil Knight and the little shoe company he started on the Eugene campus back in the day, was every bit the equivalent to what Indiana is doing now. They turned around a battleship in a bathtub. But even the dapper dayglo Ducks we’ve known since then — from Joey Harrington’s towering likeness in Times Square and Marcus Mariota’s Heisman win of 2014 to Chip Kelly, Earth’s funniest mascot and those bazillion uniform combinations — Oregon has yet to win a national title, despite two appearances in the BCS/CFP finals, the last coming a decade ago with Mariota behind center.
If you are of the Gen X age, then you knew the unstoppable machine that was The U. But your kids and grandkids have never seen the Miami Hurricanes on college football’s biggest stage. Unless you’ve shown them the Canes dynasty 30 for 30 films on the ESPN App or you’ve made them watch standard definition footage of Ed Reed, Jeremy Shockey & Co. winning the 2001 BCS title (shoutout to Larry Coker), then they only know Miami football as the embodiment of #goacc.
So many preseason predictions of “The U is back!” have ended with Sebastian the Ibis flat on his back in the Everglades mud. Miami’s biggest postseason victory since it beat Nebraska on that January night in Pasadena — so far back the Canes were still a member of the Big East — was, what? The 2016 Russell Athletic Bowl?
And speaking of ages, unless you were an Ole Miss student during the Space Age, you’ve never seen the Rebels fitted for a real championship ring. Fact: There are few, if any, Saturday college football experiences as glorious as strolling The Grove, red Solo cup in hand. The best food served by the most beautiful people beneath tents taken straight out of home decorating magazines beneath magnolia trees taken straight out of Southern Living magazine. We all know about Archie and Eli Manning, about Deuce McAllister and Jaxson Dart.
But also a fact: When you enter Vaught-Hemingway Stadium, you are struck first by how well everyone is dressed. Then you realize how naked that stadium’s walls are when it comes to addressing the program’s championship seasons. The 2003 SEC West Co-Division champions? The 1963 SEC champions? The ’62 national champions, a title bestowed upon the Rebels by the Litkenhous Difference by Score Ratings system (we’re not making that up!) while USC was dubbed the champ by the major polls? The Rebels’ last natty was their third in four years, but it was won so long ago that Johnny Vaught, the name that adorns their stadium, was still coach, and JFK was in the White House.
The point of this four-part, four-team history lesson is not to harp on those programs’ longtime struggles to insert themselves into college football’s most exclusive room, or return to that room after a generational absence, or to finally be able to take care of business once they do get in there.
Reliving the statistical pain of this year’s playoff survivors is to give us all the proper perspective on what it will mean for the one squad that manages to emerge from this quirky quartet to finally hoist the big gold trophy. Also, to fully recognize the realization of a much-demanded postseason team transfusion.
Y’all have been asking for it. Well, now we’ve got it. The new age of new CFP blood has arrived. Enjoy it now, folks, because 156 years of college football history tells us the blue bloods never stay out of power for long. Then again, that same history would have tried to tell us that this quadrumvirate was never going to happen in the first place. And that’s why, as the semifinal kickoffs loom, it feels like it could be, yes, one for the ages.
ISLAMABAD: Ali Tareen has decided not to take part in the Pakistan Super League’s upcoming franchise auction, opting out as the tournament moves toward a major expansion with eight teams and 10 qualified bidders set to participate in the process.
Tareen shared his decision on the X, reflecting on his journey with the Multan Sultans and his deep connection to South Punjab.
“After careful consideration, my family and I have decided not to participate in today’s PSL franchise auction,” Tareen wrote.
He emphasised that his involvement with the Multan Sultans was about more than just owning a cricket team.
“Our time with Multan Sultans was never just about owning a cricket team. It was about South Punjab. About giving a voice to a region that had been overlooked for too long. That’s what drove everything we built,” he said.
Looking ahead, Tareen indicated that any potential return to the PSL would remain tied to his passion for South Punjab.
“If I come back to PSL, it has to be for the same reason. South Punjab is where my heart is. It is home. This year, I’ll be in the stands, cheering for the players and celebrating with the fans. And when the Multan team is being sold, we’ll be ready,” he stated.
He concluded by wishing luck to prospective team owners at the auction.
“Wishing all the bidders the best. May the most outspoken owner win,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) announced that it will take temporary control of the Multan Sultans franchise for the 11th edition of the PSL, scheduled to be held between March and May.
PCB Chairman Mohsin Naqvi confirmed during a media conference that the board would operate the franchise for one season before initiating the auction process following PSL 11.
“Multan Sultans will be operated by the PCB this year. Once the PSL concludes, we will carry out the auction process and put the franchise up for sale. However, for this season, the board will run the Sultans,” Naqvi said.
He added that an interim management structure would be implemented soon.
“For this purpose, we will appoint an acting head within the next eight to ten days who will oversee the team. A professional cricketer will be brought in to manage Multan Sultans for this season,” he said.
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