Snooker: Ronnie O’Sullivan reeled off seven frames in a row to claim his fourth Welsh Open title in Cardiff last night. O’Sullivan stormed back from a 5-2 deficit to beat Neil Robertson 9-5, wrapping up victory in style with a clearance of 141. In typical fashion the 40-year-old said he planned to celebrate his win by taking a break from the sport until the World Championships in Sheffield in April. O’Sullivan said: “I feel shattered – I need a month of just relaxing to recharge the batteries and try to give Sheffield a good push.”
Cricket: Australia captain Steve Smith shook off a sickening blow to the back of his head and notched up his 14th test century, earning the praise of his team-mates and New Zealand opponents at the end of the second day of the second test yesterday. Smith was on 78 shortly before tea when he was hit by a Neil Wagner bouncer and dropped to his knees. “It certainly always a concern when you see someone get hit in the head, it got him quite flush as well,” Burns said after Australia finished the second day on 363 for four. “Fortunately the medical staff was out there very quickly, they gave him the all clear.”
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Basket, NBA: The Brooklyn Nets waived former No. 1 overall draft pick An-drea Bargnani (picture) yesterday, signaling a new direction for the team under their recently hired general manager Sean Marks. Bargnani signed with the Nets in the off-season but provided disappointing returns, averaging just 6.6 points and 2.1 rebounds for a Nets team that is 15-40. Brooklyn announced that Marks would take over from Billy King earlier this week, and parting ways with Bargnani was his first move.
Tennis: Juan Martin del Potro’s return to tennis fell short of a fairytale ending on Saturday as the Argentine lost to American Sam Querrey 7-5 7-5 in the semi-final of the Delray Beach Open. The former US Open champion Del Potro made his comeback at Delray Beach after an 11-month layoff following two surgeries on his left wrist. He had looked strong in his run to the semi-finals but Querrey checked his momentum by breaking his powerful serve in each set at 5-5 – the only two breaks of the match.
Athletics: Nikita Kamayev, former head of Russia’s Anti-Doping Agency, approached the Sunday Times before his death offering to expose the country’s secret development of performance-enhancing drugs, the newspaper reported. Ten weeks before he passed away, Kamayev said he wanted to write a book that would reveal the complete extent of doping in Russia, the Sunday Times said in a front-page article. “I want to write a book about the true story of sport pharmacology and doping in Russia since 1987 while being a young scientist working in a secret lab in the USSR Institute of Sports Medicine,” he told the newspaper in an email. “I have the information and facts that have never been published.” Russia was suspended from international athletics in November after a special commission of the WADA exposed widespread state-sponsored cheating and corruption.