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Manuel Pellegrini on Man City penalty: ‘Soft is being a little generous’

Manuel Pellegrini accused Manchester City’s Bernardo Silva of throwing himself to the floor to win the decisive penalty in West Ham’s 1-0 defeat to the title challengers.

The Portuguese forward went down under a challenge from Felipe Anderson in the second half and Sergio Aguero converted the spot-kick as City kept the pressure on leaders Liverpool.

“Soft is being a little generous — it wasn’t a penalty,” the former City boss told a news conference. “It was a play that happens a lot of times inside the box.cheap nike nfl jerseys wholesale

“In the other box Manuel Lanzini had exactly the same and he didn’t throw [himself] to the floor. If we had lost this game with another action then maybe we could accept it, but not that penalty.2

“They didn’t score another goal and we defended very well. The first save of [West Ham goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski] was in minute 61. After that, they had a couple of chances. If you lose the game with those options maybe you can accept it more.

“We played very well in defending and not so well in attacking because we didn’t have the possession we wanted to have — especially when we played this game with eight players injured and four players we rested for the game on Saturday.

Pep Guardiola said before the game that he would be able to tell if his side had what was required to maintain their title challenge and he was happy with his side’s display.

“We played so well,” he said. “When you see the result it looks like it could be better but we created an incredible amount of chances — after five minutes it could be 2-0.china nike nfl jerseys cheap

“Of course we didn’t score as many goals as we needed but the performance in terms of how we won second balls … we did everything.

“We conceded one shot on target — it was an important chance for them. After 120 minutes and all the tension, the performance was amazing and I’m so delighted with the way we played today.”

Giannis or Harden? The MVP question that’s dividing the NBA

Based on a sampling of attitudes on the topic over All-Star Weekend, there’s a chance the coming Most Valuable Player race could morph into a bit of a basketball culture war.

Just to be clear, there are no hard feelings. Everyone, particularly the dozen-plus players surveyed on the matter, agrees the Houston Rockets’ James Harden and Milwaukee Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo are having brilliant seasons — with many nods toward Paul George, who has taken an unexpected leap in Year 2 with the Oklahoma City Thunder. Just because someone might favor one over the other doesn’t make it an inherent dis.

While players acknowledge Harden’s mastery, some are put off by the style: both the way the Rockets play and the way Harden expertly uses the current rules to his advantage. The enforcement of freedom of movement rules and the relaxing of travel calls on his step-back — and to be clear, most of the time he executes the devastating move within the rules — have helped supercharge Harden’s season in a way that can irritate his opponents.cheap nike nfl jerseys china

“Guys can say he gets away with travels on the step-back or he flings his body into people to get fouls, but honestly, a lot of us get away with stuff like that,” said one All-Star who wished to remain anonymous because he didn’t want to court controversy.

“Just speaking for myself, and I don’t know how others feel, but what he does isn’t always team basketball. If you look at how Giannis plays, that’s more the way I was raised in the game. Just my opinion,” he said.1

Based on admittedly unscientific conversations, there are many players who agree. Earlier this season, Harden scored 304 consecutive points that were unassisted. That streak was tracked with awe by fans and media. For some players, though, it created eye-rolling because it represented the opposite of team play.cheap nfl nike jerseys china

The Harden counterpoint is simple. With the Rockets badly banged up and missing co-creator Chris Paul for weeks, Harden felt he was doing what he needed to keep the Rockets afloat in the highly competitive Western Conference.

It wasn’t unlike the 2015 NBA Finals when the Cleveland Cavaliers were missing Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, and LeBron James was forced to dominate the ball and score. James came close to being the first Finals MVP from the losing team since Jerry West in 1969, but Andre Iguodala edged him out in the vote.

“We played the same exact way last year and we almost made it to the Finals,” Harden said, defending the Rockets’ style this season. “I don’t even care about the points, I’m just trying to win.

“We had a funky first half of the season. I just did whatever it took to keep our head above water. I was getting double-teams and triple-teams and I was doing whatever it took.”

Harden is getting plenty of credit for that by the media, which have the votes for the official award. He’s now at 31 consecutive games with 30 or more points, tying Chamberlain for the second-longest streak ever. He’s averaging 41.5 points during the run and the Rockets are 21-10.

The Timberwolves’ cool new uniforms, featuring Prince

When Tyus Jones first heard that the Minnesota Timberwolves were designing an alternate jersey in honor of Prince, he knew how important it was that the team and Nike get it right.nike nfl jerseys cheap paypal

Jones is 22, too young for Prince’s heyday, but he grew up about half an hour from Minneapolis — Prince’s hometown — and understands the musical superstar’s connection to the region and its basketball teams.

“Being from here, you know,” Jones says. “He’s obviously an icon, but he’s even more of an icon and a legend here.”

Prince and other local music legends, including Jimmy Jam, Prince’s longtime friend and occasional touring partner, often sat courtside during the early years of the Timberwolves and the high points of the Kevin Garnett era. As the franchise receded into lottery contention, Prince the fan receded into the background. He rarely attended games. When he did, he preferred to do so in such a private fashion, most fans would not even know he was there, says Ted Johnson, the team’s chief strategy officer.

When Prince’s camp sent word he might attend a game, several staffers would drop everything to plan for his appearance. There were many false alarms. I was in Minneapolis on Nov. 12, 2015, when Prince’s people alerted the Wolves he might come that night to their game against the Warriors. A thrilled panic ensued. Staffers arranged private entrance and exit pathways for Prince, and a method of whisking him into a suite without attracting attention.2

He didn’t show. But Prince was always watching Minnesota hoops. He played basketball in junior high and high school, and in pickup games both on tour and at his home in Paisley Park — as memorialized in perhaps the most famous “Chappelle’s Show” skit ever. When the WNBA’s Minnesota Lynx won the 2015 championship, Prince invited the team to Paisley Park for a private three-hour concert.

When Prince died in April 2016, Nike pitched the Wolves an alternate “city edition” jersey for the 2017-18 season that would honor him. The Wolves concluded it was too soon. They were already finalizing their 2017-18 jerseys, which would kick off a full-on rebrand — new jerseys, new logo, new court, tweaked color scheme.nfl nike jersey cheap

But they decided then to prioritize a Prince jersey for this season. They set aside some of Nike’s other proposed Minnesota-centric motifs: jerseys paying homage to Bob Dylan, the Mississippi River (which runs through Minneapolis), and the original Minneapolis Lakers, Johnson says. (You might see some of those ideas down the road.)

In the spring of 2017, Cyrus Coleman, a product designer for Nike’s basketball division, pitched the Wolves a mockup that looked very much like the final Prince jersey the team will unveil later today:

Gary Payton: ‘People don’t know, [Jason Kidd] was the first LeBron’

Long before the social media era, when anyone can find the next basketball star’s mixtape with a simple click, Jason Kidd was creating a buzz as a bona fide phenom even before delivering his first college basketball assist.

“People don’t know, J was the first LeBron [when it came to the attention surrounding one player] coming out of high school,” fellow Oakland Bay Area native and Basketball Hall of Famer Gary Payton said. “He was good. Really, really good. In the Bay Area, that’s what all the talk was about — J-Kidd.”cheap nike nfl jerseys wholesale

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, Kidd was considered the next great basketball phenomenon. The teenager with a mouth full of braces but a 6-foot-4 NBA-ready body was drawing national attention and comparisons to Magic Johnson and Bob Cousy.

Kidd was also being compared to another legendary local passer on the other side of the Bay.1

“Joe Montana was doing the things in the ’80s, winning Super Bowls,” Payton said. “I had left [for college] in ’86 and then J came in and all of the sudden, they [Montana and Kidd] were the biggest things in the Bay Area at the time.”

Fittingly, Kidd will have Payton with him on stage to present him when he is enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame on Friday night. It was Payton who mentored Kidd in Oakland, but it was also The Glove’s brutally tough love and psychologically demoralizing practice sessions that often sent Kidd to the brink of quitting basketball as an underclassman in high school.cheap nfl jerseys china nike

Finding himself at the mercy of The Glove’s legendary suffocating defense and soul-crushing trash-talking, Kidd said he was unable to score a single basket against Payton, who is five years older, during games and drills for two years.

“Oh, there were tears,” Kidd told ESPN. “My parents would ask me, ‘What’s wrong?’ I would be like, I think I should pick a different sport because I am not very good at it. He wouldn’t let me score. [And] he would tell me you are not going to score … that I was soft and that I wasn’t good enough. And for a kid in high school that was built up to be this great high school player, it was very humbling and hard to swallow.

Midseason awards, bad All-Star positions and MLB’s next big thing

The first half of the season has gone as expected and has been completely surprising. It’s been thrilling, and it’s been staid. It’s been heartening and disappointing. It’s been just another season — unlike any before it, but somehow very much familiar.

It feels like there has been more chatter than usual about the state of baseball, with attendance down and debates over tweaks to the game popping up almost daily. The drop in attendance is real, though the theories about it are not. The fact is, we don’t know why attendance is down. We suspect the likely factors — the weather, the stratification of the leagues, the lack of action generated from balls in play — but we don’t really know what is behind the slowly clicking turnstiles. We also don’t know if it’s a trend or a blip.cheap nfl jerseys china

It’s always good to take these wide-lens surveys of the game, whether you’re a writer, a fan or the commissioner. We should always be open to discussion about baseball’s place in the culture and its bid for your disposable dollars. Baseball has always been subject to evolutionary forces, is evolving right now as these words sink into your left cerebral hemisphere, and will evolve in the future even after we’ve all tapped into the universal subconscious. You can’t stop it.

While we’ve been preoccupied with the possible directions of this evolution, it feels like a couple of key parts have been overlooked.14

One: The game is still really fun and compelling. Sure, you run into contests where the strikeouts and pitching changes seem interminable. There are a few markets where there are currently too many low-stakes games, an unfortunate by-product of too many teams rebuilding at the same time. But in a few years, those same teams will be all-in trying to win.

And two: There are legions of people all over the world who still totally dig it.official nfl jerseys cheap

With that lullaby out of the way, let’s run through some first-half awards. All of them are made up. There will be no ceremony and no cash prizes. Recognition is its own reward.

Angels face unique challenge in trying to get Shohei Ohtani right

One hundred years had passed since a major league player simultaneously handled pitching and hitting the way Ohtani did during his first 10 weeks with the Los Angeles Angels. Now Ohtani is nursing a tender elbow that saps his ability to pitch without actually affecting his ability to hit, igniting a recovery process for which there are no parallels.

In other words, the Angels have unintentionally taken on the responsibility of crafting the blueprint for rehabilitating two-way players.nike nfl jerseys cheap china

They don’t seem to mind.

“It actually kind of fits the way that we prefer to operate here,” Angels general manager Billy Eppler said. “It pushes us more into a mindset of staying present rather than trying to worry about the future or trying to obsess over the past and things like that. It keeps us, really, present-focused.”

That present, from which Eppler refuses to stray, looks like this: Ohtani has a Grade 2 sprain of the ulnar collateral ligament of his right elbow, which basically constitutes a partial tear. In hopes of avoiding Tommy John surgery, the Angels — specifically Steve Yoon, an expert in the field of orthobiology — injected Ohtani’s ligament with platelet-rich plasma and stem cells, part of a low-risk, conservative treatment plan that uses a patient’s own blood to accelerate regeneration.

The Angels plan to re-evaluate Ohtani on Thursday, three weeks after the procedure. But a detailed plan for his recovery may take even longer to map out.70

Staying flexible, Eppler said, is “critical” in this circumstance.

Ohtani, with a .907 OPS and a 3.10 ERA as a rookie, could conceivably help as a hitter while recovering as a pitcher, a concept the Angels seem to be open-minded about. But the possibility of Tommy John surgery, which typically knocks pitchers out for at least 14 months, complicates everything.

“I think that’s kind of jumping,” Eppler said, “and the only reason why is because nobody has said ‘surgery’ to me. So I’m not going to think about it until somebody who’s a qualified M.D. tells me to think about it.”

For now, the Angels seem to at least be thinking about giving Ohtani a chance to hit. The 23-year-old has spent more than a week swinging a bat with his left arm in order to keep his hips active. On Friday, he stood in for Felix Pena’s bullpen session to track pitches and maintain some semblance of timing.cheap nfl nike jerseys from china

Eppler claims he has not yet spoken to Ohtani about the possibility of hitting while he recovers as a pitcher.

Sergio Ramos is Real Madrid’s ultimate big-game player in Europe

I’m not being cheeky or doubting you, but you do know Sergio Ramos’ red-card record, don’t you? The infamous story about Real Madrid’s captain and how many times he gets sent off, yes?

No. Wait! Not the one about how another expulsion would land him squarely on a quarter-century of orderings-off for Los Blancos. That’s an entirely different side to Madrid’s belligerent captain. I mean, instead, the one where this combative, all-or-nothing, hell-for-leather centre-half/hero/hooligan has actually scored twice as many goals in European club semifinals and finals as he has seen red cards in his entire UEFA career?cheap nfl authentic jerseys

That’s right. This bull of a man, who some people probably believe has a hyphenated surname (Sergio Ramos-SentOff) has only been red-carded three times in over 120 UEFA matches for Sevilla and Real Madrid. It’s almost angelic and sits in truly stark comparison to his all-time record for Los Blancos, which shows that nobody in the history of top-level Spanish club football has been sent off more often.

Twenty-four dismissals (and counting) is his slightly embarrassing “landmark.” But the massive disparity between Ramos the “restrained European” and Ramos “Spain is my fiefdom and I’ll act exactly as I wish” is still greater once you examine more closely.277

Of his three Champions League red cards, one was simply for following Jose Mourinho’s streetwise instructions. Ramos and Xabi Alonso deliberately got themselves sent off for time-wasting second bookings in the final moments of a win against Ajax in 2010, so that they’d have a lesser chance of suspension in the knockout rounds. Subtract that ordering off, which admittedly caused one heck of a row at the time, and Ramos actually has three times more goals in UEFA semis and finals than he has European red cards.

These are remarkable stats in so many ways. The most obvious, of course, is that Saturday’s Champions League final will be Ramos’ fourth and he has yet to taste defeat. Yet it presents Real Madrid’s captain with not just a test of football, but the ultimate test of judgement and restraint.

Let’s not beat about the bush here: The prospect of Marcelo suddenly deciding to prioritise defending or positional discipline is as likely as Cristiano Ronaldo voting for Lionel Messi in the Ballon d’Or. And while Liverpool’s strengths do not begin and end with Mohamed Salah — the Egyptian is far from the only the principal Red menace — he plays down their right. Right where Marcelo should be, but won’t.cheap nfl jerseys from china

Now, it’s a nuance missed by many that although Ramos is firmly right-footed (he won Euro 2008 and World Cup 2010 at right back) he prefers to play left-sided centre-back for Madrid. This puts him right in the danger zone that will be clearly marked on the Kiev pitch with the words, “Oh bloody hell, where’s Marcelo? Wait… here comes Salah at a hundred miles per hour!”

Even at 32 years old, this athlete from Andalusia, may well be able to match the brilliant Egyptian partly because Ramos is a terrific footballer, partly via his encyclopedia of experience and partly because Madrid’s captain is notably streetwise. However the last thing he wants to see is Salah with the ball at his feet, careering towards him at pace. Because this is the split-second moment when a defender has to commit. The position in which Ramos will undoubtedly find himself, whether to “jockey” the player and try to herd him into a space where he doesn’t want to go, or lunge into a tackle and risk yellow or red — this is the nightmare scenario for most defenders.

Bucs’ message to Jameis Winston: Stop trying so hard

The big message that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ coaching staff gave to quarterback Jameis Winston when he returned to the facility this offseason had nothing to do with cutting down on turnovers or throwing more touchdowns in the red zone.

Those are unquestionably areas where he has to improve,nfl jerseys free shipping  but the real message the coaches wanted to impart entering his fourth year, as offensive coordinator Todd Monken put it: “Stop trying so hard.”

They could see it in his performance on the field, but they could also really see it in the locker room with how he tried to lead his teammates.

“I think the best way to put it is, in our league, there’s so much pressure put on coaches and [on] that [quarterback] position,” said Monken, now in his third year with the Bucs. “Nobody gets the credit either way, winning or losing, [more] than the quarterback or the coaches. That’s fine. That’s the way it is.241

“No one is going to blame [wideout] Mike Evans for why we haven’t made the playoffs; they’ve got the quarterback in there, and that’s part of it. We get that. That doesn’t mean we don’t all own it. But I think the biggest thing is, ‘OK, Jameis, it’s OK to be yourself. You don’t have to try so hard. The guys know you are naturally our leader.’

“But at times, it’s hard. It’s hard when you’re hurt. It’s hard when you’re not winning the way you want and you’re trying so hard to get the guys because [you] want to win so bad — we all do. I try too hard sometimes, because I want it so bad.”

Winston suffered a sprained acromioclavicular joint (AC joint) in the throwing shoulder of his right arm in Week 3 last season against the Minnesota Vikings. He didn’t appear on the injury report until Week 7, after he left a game against the Arizona Cardinals with the injury, but sources close to him have said the injury initially occurred against the Vikings. It forced him to miss three games, and in the games he did try to play, it impacted his velocity and accuracy downfield.

Dealing with the injury during the first of two five-game losing streaks, cheap nfl jerseys authentic Winston was still trying to give some of his “rah-rah” pregame speeches, like the one in Week 9 before the Bucs played the New Orleans Saints about “eating W’s.” Winston stuck his fingers in his mouth to form the shape of a W and asked teammates, “How many of you want to eat a W tonight? How many of you want to eat a W?”

After having lost four games in a row, the response from teammates caught on camera was less than enthusiastic — as it appeared Winston was acting more like the Bucs were riding a four-game win streak — and the quarterback was widely criticized in the media for appearing out of touch. Wide receiver DeSean Jackson empathized with Winston.