Rugby Union: Rob Andrew has resigned as the Rugby Football Union’s director of professional rugby and will step down at the end of the season, the RFU announced. The former England fly-half, who has been at the RFU for a decade, will be replaced in his role by former team-mate and another former England captain Nigel Melville, the current chief executive of USA Rugby. Andrew has resigned after months of talks with RFU chief executive Ian Ritchie but will stay on until the season’s end to finish work on an agreement between Premiership Rugby and the RFU that will run through to the 2023 World Cup.

Basket, NBA: Luke Walton, the new head coach of Los Angeles Lakers, will leave the league’s hottest team to take charge of an acclaimed NBA franchise that has fallen on hard times and currently occupies the other end of the spectrum. Despite being tasked with an unenviable rebuilding job, it is an opportunity he felt he could hardly turn down. Currently in his second season as assistant coach at reigning NBA champions Golden State Warriors, Walton was confirmed as Byron Scott’s replacement yesterday. Scott was ditched after the Lakers went 17-65 in the recently-completed season, otherwise known as the Kobe Bryant farewell tour.

Athletics: Kirani James produced a hot performance in cold weather on Friday when he clocked the fastest time of the year to win the 400 metres in Iowa. The 23-year-old Grenadian showed he was on track to defend his title in by clocking 44.08 seconds in swirling winds at the meeting in Des Moines. In a battle between the last two Olympic champions, James beat American LaShawn Merritt by 0.14 seconds. James’s time was not far off the 43.94 he ran to win in London four years ago, when he made history as the first ever Olympic Games champion from the tiny Caribbean island nation of barely 100,000 people.