BRITISH BIKES
Marc Márquez is leading the MotoGP championship, currently 53 points clear of Valentino Rossi, but home fans attention for the British round of the championship at Silverstone will be focused on Cal Crutchlow (Sunday, BT Sport, 3.15pm). At Brno, two weeks ago, the rider from Coventry finally scored a win for Britain in the top flight after a 35-year wait since Barry Sheene took the 1981 Swedish Grand Prix. The win put the Honda rider into 10th place in the championship, ahead of fellow Brits Bradley Smith and Scott Redding, and he has followed up by claiming pole position in the wet. The British Superbike Championship reaches the final round of its regular season before the Showdown, at Oulton Park next Saturday and Sunday (Eurosport, 3.30pm and 12.30pm).
CRICKETING COMEBACK?
Going 3-0 down in a Test series to Sri Lanka will have been painful enough for Australia, but to rub salt in the wound the defeat biffed them from the top spot of the ICC Test rankings, to be replaced first by India and then by Pakistan, whose performances in England this summer have taken them to the top of the table, leaving the Aussies in third. They will be hoping for some relief in the shorter form with two T20 matches in Kandy (Tuesday, Eurosport 2, 2.15pm) and Colombo (Thursday, Eurosport, 2.15pm). History, however, is not on their side. Their previous two meetings have been won by Sri Lanka, 2-0 at home in 2011 and 2-0 in Australia in 2013.
SUPER BOWL STARTER
Groundhog Day for the NFL as the new season begins with a rerun of the close of the last. Having beaten them 24-10 in the Super Bowl, Denver Broncos will face the Carolina Panthers at the Mile High stadium on Friday – the first time since 1970 that the opener has matched the previous finale (Saturday, Sky Sports 1, 1.30am). Denver will be without quarterback Peyton Manning, who retired after taking his second title, while Carolina’s QB Cam Newton, last year’s MVP who took his side to 15-1 regular season record, will be looking to open with a win in an attempt to capture the trophy that eluded him last season.
NORTHERN UPROAR
More Olympians in action as the Great North CityGames takes place on the banks of the Tyne (Saturday, BBC1, 2.15pm). 800m gold medallist in Rio, David Rudisha, runs over 500m, while Greg Rutherford will come back from the disappointment of bronze at the Games in the long jump and Mo Farah is on hand to preview the Great North Run that follows on Sunday (BBC1, 9.30am).
BIG BOUT
Britain’s Kell Brook makes his debut as a middleweight, having dominated the welterweight category, in a huge contest against Kazakhstan’s Gennady Golovkin on Saturday, with the WBC and IBF middleweight titles and WBA supermiddleweight titles at stake (Sky Box Office, 6.30pm). Quick and agile, Brook will have to be at his best to beat Golovkin who has stopped 32 of his previous opponents inside the distance with ferocious power. Both fighters are undefeated but while Golovkin, who has never been knocked down in more than 30 fights, starts favourite at London’s O2 Arena, Brook is more than capable of causing an upset.
LOOK OUT FOR … Anfield’s new main stand
It’s finished, then? It opens on Saturday: 4,800 tonnes of steel supporting 8,500 extra seats. It cost £114m, and rows of houses made way for it.
Not without controversy, then? It’s not been easy, PR-wise. The club started buying up neighbouring homes and leaving them “tinned-up” back in the mid-90s. The result was, depending on your viewpoint, either a) years of dereliction/decline/vandalism and social breakdown, or b) years of progress towards housing regeneration and new street furniture. Either way, what with that and the quickly dropped plan for new £77 tickets, Liverpool’s “heart of the community” image took a bit of a knock.
So was it all worth it? Even without those £77 tickets, the extra revenue will be immense, with a total of 18,000 seats plus more burger shops, boxes and bars. Engineers built it around the existing stand, taking the total capacity to 54,167.
How have fans reacted? Home fans have been upbeat – @M_Jones_82 tweeting from the preview match: “Can’t get over how brilliant this is. They couldn’t have done it any better. Absolutely amazing #mainstand.” Everton fans, meanwhile, took issue with a plaque inside the ground reading: “This line marks the historic northwest boundary of our Anfield 1892-2014.” The word “our” is pretty pivotal there – Anfield having opened in 1884, as home to Everton.
And what do the locals make of it? Two years ago, one of the last residents to hold out against the development told the Independent: “It’s just so sad to think what it used to be round here. All these houses were lived in when we moved here. Now, people come to the football ground and they look at you when you go out to walk the dog – they think you’re scum because you live like this. But we’re only living like this because of that.”
