Table Tennis: Sweden’s 50-year-old former Olympic table tennis champion Jan-Ove Waldner played his final competitive game on Thursday to end a glittering career in which he won a slew of world and Euro titles and became a household name in Asia. A career spent traversing the globe and beating the best players in his sport ended with a modest league match for his club Sparvagen against BK Rekord in Stockholm. Waldner won a number of Swedish and European titles, but is best known for his Olympic gold at Barcelona in 1992 and his decades-long struggle against the best players from table tennis-obsessed China.

Tennis: Top seed Venus Williams advanced to the semi-finals of the Taiwan Open after beating Latvia’s Anastasija Sevastova in straight sets yesterday. Williams has not dropped a set all week and needed just 72 minutes to complete a 7-5 6-2 victory, although the opening set did feature seven breaks of serve. The 35-year-old American will face Kazakhstan’s Yulia Putintseva in the last four after the third seed beat Switzerland’s Stefanie Voegele. Putintseva had taken the first set 6-3 when Voegele was forced to retire due to an injury.

Cricket: Pakistani umpire Asad Rauf was handed a five-year ban by the Indian Cricket Board (BCCI) yesterday over his involvement in an illegal betting scandal that blighted the 2013 Indian Premier League (IPL) season. Controversy plagued the sixth edition of the lucrative Twenty20 League with former India paceman S. Sreesanth and two other Rajasthan cricketers arrested on suspicion of accepting money to concede a fixed number of runs. All three were given life bans by the BCCI. The Chennai and Rajasthan franchises were subsequently suspended from the IPL for two years after key officials from both teams were found guilty of illegal betting.