Cagliari sack coach: Serie A strugglers Cagliari have sacked coach Marco Giampaolo following Saturday's 3-1 defeat to Udinese. Cagliari have won just two games all season and the pressure had been growing on Giampaolo. The likes of Luigi De Canio and Franco Colomba are the early front-runners for the position vacated by Giampaolo. Giampaolo is the third boss to lose his job in Serie A this season following the departures of Attilio Tesser, at Ascoli, and Bepi Pillon, at Chievo.
Bundesliga: Werder Bremen beat Wolfsburg 2-1 yesterday thanks to an 86th-minute free-kick from Brazilian defender Naldo to claim the Bundesliga's unofficial "winter championship". Werder, the league's top-scoring side with 47 goals, finished the first half of the season with 36 points, ahead on goal difference from Schalke 04, who beat Arminia Bielefeld 1-0 on Saturday. Champions Bayern Munich, who crushed Mainz 4-0 away on Saturday, are third on 33 points, ahead of Stuttgart who slipped to fourth on 32 points after their goalless draw at Energie Cottbus. Other result - Bor. Dortmund vs Bayer Leverkusen 1-2.
Tense match: Troubled Paris SG were held to a 0-0 home draw by fellow strugglers Nice in a tense Ligue 1 match yesterday. The Paris club, playing their first home league game since one of their fans was killed by a policeman last month, kept trying but failed to breach a tight Nice defence. The Parisians, whose 4-0 UEFA Cup win over Panathinaikos on Wednesday had suggested they were improving, looked nervous against opponents desperate not to lose. Some 2,000 police were on duty around Parc des Princes, which was half empty with the lower section of one stand still closed after the incidents that followed last month's UEFA Cup defeat by Hapoel Tel Aviv. Other results - Auxerre vs Lorient 2-1; Lens vs Lyon 0-4.
Tevez surprised: Carlos Tevez has said he was surprised sacked West Ham manager Alan Pardew held on to the job for as long as he did. "In Argentina or Brazil he would have been out long ago," Tevez was quoted as saying . "It was clear the team did not react as he wanted, it wasn't going right." Meanwhile, West Ham executive chairman Eggert Magnusson told the BBC that new manager Alan Curbishley would be given money to bring in players in the January transfer window.
Match-fixing fear: The Israeli FA postponed a second division game last weekend for fear of match fixing after three players said they had received payment to fix its result. The players, all of second division side Hapoel Beer Sheva, appeared in court for a remand hearing on Saturday and were ordered to be detained for three more days while the police investigation continues. Beer Sheva club officials invited police to investigate after some players alerted club coach Gil Landau that they had been approached and offered large sums of money to throw the match.
Zambrotta: Barcelona full-back Gianluca Zambrotta will be out of action for around a month after tearing a muscle in his left leg. Zambrotta sustained the injury during his side's 1-0 defeat to Internacional in the final of the Club World Cup in Yokohama.