COVID-19 cases on the rise among athletes as leagues prepare to restart - The Globe and Mail | Canada News Media
Connect with us

Sports

COVID-19 cases on the rise among athletes as leagues prepare to restart – The Globe and Mail

Published

 on


Toronto Maple Leafs forward Auston Matthews (34) skates during the second period of the team’s NHL hockey game against the Buffalo Sabres, in this file photo from Feb. 16, 2020, in Buffalo, N.Y.

Jeffrey T. Barnes/The Associated Press

As more professional sports get closer to restarting, a number of COVID-19 cases in athletes were confirmed on Friday in everything from baseball to hockey to golf.

Reports indicate that Auston Matthews, the Toronto Maple Leafs star, is among them. The 22-year-old had been training in Arizona with teammate Frederik Andersen and players from the NHL’s Coyotes.

In a busy day of COVID-19-related developments, the Toronto Blue Jays closed down their training facility in Dunedin, Fla., after one player tested positive for the novel coronavirus. A few hours earlier, the Philadelphia Phillies shut down their complex in Clearwater after five players and three other staff members tested positive.

Story continues below advertisement

Dunedin and Clearwater are fewer than 10 kilometres apart, and Florida reported a record number of 3,822 new cases on Friday. Arizona is also among the states with surging numbers, with a record-high of 3,246 new cases.

The Blue Jays said everyone at their camp has been tested. The club said it was following protocols established by its medical team and Major League Baseball.

In nearby Tampa on Thursday, the Lightning shuttered their facility after three players and additional employees also tested positive.

General manager Julien BriseBois said in a statement that the players are self-isolating and are asymptomatic, “other than a few cases of low-grade fever.”

BriseBois said the facility would be closed until a safe environment existed for reopening.

The sudden closing occurred two weeks after NHL players had begun to return for voluntary workouts, skating in groups of six at a time. The league, which suspended play on March 12 because of the spread of the virus, hopes to be able to resume with playoff games at the end of next month or the beginning of August.

Friday’s troubling news came as the federal government announced that it was willing to work with the NHL to help create a postseason hub city in Canada. The league has said it would prefer to resume with games played by 24 teams at only two sites.

Story continues below advertisement

Arrangements are being made to allow players from American teams to cross the border without having to go into quarantine for 14 days. That removes a potential hurdle to bids being made by Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver to act as a host city.

Baseball players had only begun to work out recently as they try to reach a deal with owners over how to start the season amid the pandemic, including health protocols. The sides hoped to begin testing players on Tuesday and then begin a second round of spring training on June 26.

In the NHL, the Coyotes announced last weekend that one staff member had tested positive for the infectious respiratory illness.

An American golfer, Nick Watney, withdrew on Friday from the RBC Heritage in South Carolina ahead of the second round after he tested positive for COVID-19. Watney, who travelled privately to Hilton Head Island for the tournament, is the first player on the PGA Tour known to test positive.

The PGA said Watney reported he had symptoms Friday morning and was withdrawn from the event. He played the first round on Thursday in a group with fellow Americans Vaughn Taylor and Luke List.

Two Major League Soccer players also tested positive. One is a member of Inter Miami and the other plays for Atlanta United. Teams are preparing for the July 8 start of the MLS is Back Tournament in the Orlando area.

Story continues below advertisement

Matthews scored a team-high 47 goals for the Maple Leafs during the regular season and finished third in the league in that department, only one behind David Pastrnak of Boston and Alex Ovechkin of Washington.

Matthews would become the highest-profile player in hockey to come down with the infectious respiratory illness, and the second highest-profile player in any sport after Ezekiel Elliott of the NFL’s Dallas Cowboys. The All-Pro running back was diagnosed earlier in the week.

The Maple Leafs would not confirm if Matthews has been found to have COVID-19, although the NHL did confirm on Friday night in a statement that 11 players have tested positive since clubs opened their facilities on June 8.

“Per the National Hockey League protocol, [we] will not be commenting on reports surrounding testing for any of the club’s players or staff,” the organization said in a release Friday night. “A person’s medical information in this regard is private.

“The club will defer to the NHL’s policy on handling the disclosure of positive test results, in that the league will provide updates on a regular basis with aggregate totals of the number of tests conducted and number of positive tests reported without disclosing either the identities of affected clubs or players.”

Let’s block ads! (Why?)



Source link

Continue Reading

Sports

Soccer legend Christine Sinclair says goodbye in Vancouver |

Published

 on

 

Christine Sinclair scored one final goal at B.C. Place, helping the Portland Thorns to a 6-0 victory over the Whitecaps Girls Elite team. The soccer legend has announced she’ll retire from professional soccer at the end of the National Women’s Soccer League season. (Oct. 16, 2024)

Source link

Continue Reading

Sports

A German in charge of England? Nationality matters less than it used to in international soccer

Published

 on

 

The question was inevitable.

At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.

“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”

The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.

Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.

“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”

Not everyone agrees.

English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.

“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”

“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”

That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”

While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.

And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.

Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.

“I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”

For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.

Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.

Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.

Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality.”

The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.

The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.

Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.

That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.

“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.

___

AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.

___

AP soccer:

Source link

Continue Reading

Sports

Maple Leafs winger Bobby McMann finding game after opening-night scratch

Published

 on

 

TORONTO – Bobby McMann watched from the press box on opening night.

Just over a week later, the Maple Leafs winger took a twirl as the first star.

McMann went from healthy scratch to unlikely offensive focal point in just eight days, putting up two goals in Toronto’s 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday.

The odd man out at the Bell Centre against the Montreal Canadiens, he’s slowly earning the trust of first-year head coach Craig Berube.

“There’s a lot of good players on this team,” McMann said of his reaction to sitting out Game 1. “Maybe some guys fit better in certain scenarios than others … just knowing that my opportunity would come.”

The Wainwright, Alta., product skated on the second line with William Nylander and Max Domi against Los Angeles, finishing with those two goals, three hits and a plus-3 rating in just over 14 minutes of work.

“He’s been unbelievable,” said Nylander, who’s tied with McMann for the team lead with three goals. “It’s great when a player like that comes in.”

The 28-year-old burst onto the scene last February when he went from projected scratch to hat-trick hero in a single day after then-captain John Tavares fell ill.

McMann would finish 2023-24 with 15 goals and 24 points in 56 games before a knee injury ruled him out of Toronto’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins.

“Any time you have success, it helps the confidence,” he said. “But I always trust the abilities and trust that they’re there whether things are going in or (I’m not) getting points. Just trying to play my game and trust that doing the little things right will pay off.”

McMann was among the Leafs’ best players against the Kings — and not just because of what he did on the scoresheet. The forward got into a scuffle with Phillip Danault in the second period before crushing Mikey Anderson with a clean hit in the third.

“He’s a power forward,” Berube said. “That’s how he should think the game, night in and night out, as being a power forward with his skating and his size. He doesn’t have to complicate the game.”

Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz knew nothing about McMann before joining Toronto in free agency over the summer.

“Great two-way player,” said the netminder. “Extremely physical and moves really well, has a good shot. He’s a key player for us in our depth. I was really happy for him to get those two goals.

“Works his butt off.”

ON TARGET

Leafs captain Auston Matthews, who scored 69 times last season, ripped his first goal of 2024-25 after going without a point through the first three games.

“It’s not going to go in every night,” said Matthews, who added two assists against the Kings. “It’s good to see one fall … a little bit of the weight lifted off your shoulders.”

WAKE-UP CALL

Berube was animated on the bench during a third-period timeout after the Kings cut a 5-0 deficit to 5-2.

“Taking care of the puck, being harder in our zone,” Matthews said of the message. “There were times in the game, early in the second, in the third period, where the momentum shifted and we needed to grab it back.”

PATCHES SITS

Toronto winger Max Pacioretty was a healthy scratch after dressing the first three games.

“There’s no message,” Berube said of the 35-year-old’s omission. “We have extra players and not everybody can play every night. That’s the bottom line. He’s been fine when he’s played, but I’ve got to make decisions as a coach, and I’m going to make those decisions — what I think is best for the team.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

___

Follow @JClipperton_CP on X.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Source link

Continue Reading

Trending

Exit mobile version