CRICKET: Australia captain Michael Clarke is hoping seamer Ryan Harris will be fit for the third Ashes Test in Perth after his possible replacement James Faulkner was ruled out with a fractured thumb. Harris has been struggling with a knee injury but did eventually work up to full pace yesterday after a slow start to the net session. If he was ruled out, Australia would not be able to call on Faulkner, who was 12th man in Brisbane and Adelaide, matches the home side won to establish a 2-0 series lead over England with three games to play. Although Faulkner has found chances at Test level hard to come by, he is a key member of Australia’s limited-overs side and was expected to feature heavily in the one-day series which follow the Ashes.
SWIMMING: Head coach Bill Furniss has revealed that four-time Olympic medallist Rebecca Adlington would start in a mentoring role with British Swimming in January. “Rebecca will be working as a mentor. She has already done a session with the coaches. It will be with a selected group of juniors. She has experience and we want to use that expertise,” Furniss said.
SNOOKER: Thailand’s Dechawat Poomjaeng (picture) scored his first official maximum break during the German Masters qualifiers in Barnsley on Tuesday. The break came in the fourth frame of Poomjaeng’s match against Zak Surety and put him 3-1 ahead. It’s worth £2,500 from the rolling prize for ranking event qualifiers providing it is not equalled at this stage of the tournament. Poomjaeng’s maximum is the 101st in snooker history, following Mark Selby’s at the UK Championship last Saturday which brought the total into three figures. Maltese cuemen Tony Drago and Alex Borg were eliminated from the German Masters qualifiers. Drago lost to Ryan Day 5-0 while Borg was beaten by Mark King 5-3 yesterday.
MOTOR RACING: Only four teams will take part in next week’s Pirelli Formula One tyre test in Bahrain after McLaren and Force India said they would not be attending. “The timescale was just too tight to make it, unfortunately,” said a Force India spokesman. McLaren, 50 per cent owned by Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund Mumtalakat, confirmed separately that they were not going either. A Pirelli spokeswoman said Ferrari, Mercedes, champions Red Bull and sister team Toro Rosso would attend the Dec. 17-19 session at the Sakhir circuit to test the Italian supplier’s 2014 tyres.
HORSE RACING: Gerard Butler has lodged an appeal against the five-year ban imposed by the British Horseracing Authority over the use of banned steroids on some of his horses. The results of a BHA inquiry held in November were released last week, with Group One-winning trainer Butler having admitted all seven charges against him relating to samples of an anabolic steroid found in horses in his care. Nine horses produced positive samples, five cases of which were identified as the joint treatment Sungate, which contains the banned ana-bolic steroid stanozolol. However, con-sidered even more serious was Butler’s admission of administering another sub-stance, Rexogin, to four horses himself.
FORMULA ONE: Mexican Sergio Perez will race for Force India next season, the British-based Formula One team announced yesterday. Perez joins the Vijay Mallya-run outfit after being replaced at under-performing McLaren by Danish rookie Kevin Magnussen, 21. The 23-year-old will team up with Germany’s Nico Hulkenberg, who competed for Swiss-based Sauber this year, in an all-new line-up that leaves Britain’s Paul di Resta and Germany’s Adrian Sutil seeking new employers. Sutil is expected to move to Sauber while Di Resta’s best bet could be the IndyCar series in America, where his cousin Dario Franchitti has just retired after winning the Indy 500 three times.