Having arrived with Genoa 17th in the Italian top flight, Vieira won eight and drew nine of his 26 games last season to guide them to safety and a 13th-place finish.
However, his only two wins this campaign have come in the Coppa Italia, with six defeats in nine games – including five in the past six – in Serie A.
“The club would like to thank the coach and his staff for the dedication and professionalism they have shown throughout their work and wishes them all the best for their future careers,” Genoa’s statement read.
During his playing career, midfielder Vieira won three Premier League titles and four FA Cups at Arsenal, as well as silverware with AC Milan, Inter Milan and Manchester City.
He helped France win the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000.
Vieira retired in 2011 and became the manager of New York City in 2016.
He returned to Europe with Nice and led them to seventh in Ligue 1 in his first season but was sacked in December 2020.
Vieira became Crystal Palace manager in 2021 and guided them to the FA Cup semi-finals.
He was sacked in 2023 after a 12-game winless run, before joining RC Strasbourg as their first appointment following a takeover by BlueCo, the company which owns Chelsea. He left Strasbourg by mutual consent in July 2024.
NOTHING brings the country together like football.
But there are some people who have more than a little insight into the game and the hype surrounding it – the WAGs.
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Belinda, now 60, was the spouse of the Welsh football coach Chris Coleman – but in 2011, their 19-year relationship came to a bitter end following cheating accusationsCredit: Getty
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Belinda has revealed what life is like when your millionaire marriage ends, the money disappears, and you go from the A-list lifestyle to having the bailiffs at your doorCredit: Getty
Belinda Coleman was also once one of them, having a front row seat to all the money, the pleasures – and pitfalls – of life as a Premier League wife.
She was the spouse of the Welsh football coach Chris Coleman – but in 2011, their 19-year relationship came to a bitter end following cheating accusations.
The divorce ended in Chris, now 55, giving Belinda just two months to leave the two bedroom flat she shared with their four kids, Sonny, Christy, Faraday and Georgie – all whilst he planned his marriage to blonde TV presenter Charlotte Jackson.
Belinda previously lifted the lid on how their dream marriage turned into a nightmare – and how his flings led to their split after 19 years together.
Belinda then said. “He’s an adulterer and I just became bored of his indiscretions.
“His affairs were into double figures. And I’d even confronted three or four of the women. I never ranted at them. I just told them they weren’t the first and they wouldn’t be the last.
“And I told him if he wanted to be with them, he should just walk out and leave us alone to get on with our lives.”
Now, over a decade later, Belinda has revealed what life is like when your millionaire marriage ends, the money disappears, and you go from the A-list lifestyle to having the bailiffs at your door.
By 1991, when she met Chris, then a player with Crystal Palace, Belinda owned a flat of her own and was managing a hotel health club.
“I’d been invited to a match by a player who’d come to the health club for physiotherapy. The first time I spoke to Chris in the lounge after the match it was so natural. I had no idea this man would change my life forever,” Belinda told The Telegraph.
Husband given £325k of wife’s £60m fortune in divorce WINS bid to get more cash
Just six months later the pair tied the knot – and according to Belinda, it felt like a fairy tale.
As Chris’ career began to climb, they went from a two-bedroom rental to purchasing a small house before Chris moved to Blackburn – ”and suddenly, there was so much money”, Belinda said.
There were luxurious holidays, shopping sprees galore and private school education for their four kids.
“I decorated our lovely home in the country, called the Old Stables, with all the top-of-the-range equipment I could find.”
But with so much money coming in, there was no planning for their financial future – something Belinda looks back at now and cringes at how ”financially irresponsible” the two were.
Meet the WAGS of the England footballers
England Wags range from childhood sweethearts to recently blossoming love stories.
The fitness instructor has been married to the England captain since 2019 and joined him in Germany with their four children after he joined Bayern Munich.
“I couldn’t be sensible about it because I couldn’t bear to think about it. There was a lot of guilt at having money when people I loved didn’t, so spending it as quickly as I could on myself and others seemed to make sense.”
Of course, there was also the pressure to look the part, which came with a hefty price tag – the scrutiny of Premier League wives and girlfriends was intense.
There were amazing times together, she explained – the fun of supporting their men at their games, the lavish getaways abroad, the luxurious parties and the fun of watching their children grow together.
But the lifestyle also came with lots of troubles to share, such as woman ”falling over” their husbands, which ”took a huge psychological and emotional toll” on Belinda.
As rumours of Chris’s infidelity became louder, with headlines everywhere, the trust between the couple crumbled.
While Belinda was trying her best to pretend everything was okay for the sake of her children, it was just a mask – and in reality, she was losing her mind.
It eventually led the mother-of-four to do things that she wasn’t proud of, including hiring a private detective and hiding a tracker in Chris’s car – something, she now thinks, created ”suffering”.
As for why the separation and then divorce meant swapping a millionaire pad for a two-bed flat, Belinda is frank.
“Despite once having millions, the money had run out. It was my fault too, of course, but suddenly I was facing financial ruin.”
Bailiffs knocking on door
But the worst was yet to come.
One day, Belinda, now 60, heard loud banging at the door – it was two men who turned out to be bailiffs.
Paralysed with fear, she didn’t dare to move, and when the two finally left, she collapsed.
Following their visit, Belinda’s car was repossessed, and then an eviction notice arrived.
Eventually managing to find a private rental she could just about afford, this was the first of 11 forced moves in ten years for Belinda and the children, Sonny, now 32, Christy 30, Faraday, 27, and Georgie, 25.
While she did eventually receive spousal and child maintenance, the money was nothing compared to her previous lavish lifestyle and Belinda felt as if she ”was depriving the children of the life they’d become accustomed to”.
On one occasion, she remembers, her card was declined at the supermarket checkout, despite calculating everything in the trolley to the penny.
Now raising four kids as a single mum, Belinda took whatever jobs she could fit around their schedule, working nights, weekends and 12-hour shifts.
“I packed boxes for a removal company, worked in a call centre and cleaned. One day in 2016, a year after our divorce was finalised, I drove through the wrought-iron gates of the Old Stables. I was there to clean the house we’d once owned.
Standing in the beautiful home, the memories of the happy times came flooding back and Belinda realised just how much her life had changed.
But she refused to feel sorry for herself. Instead, she appreciated being alive and having four wonderful kids, friends and family who loved her.
Then in 2019, during yet another forced house move, she was packing a book – and things in her life were about to change.
The sentence read: ”Sometimes the universe is just waiting for you to say yes.’’
For Belinda, it was a sign – a sign that if she truly wanted something different in her life, she needed to do something different.
This was the start of Belinda’s journey with manifestation, journaling, meditating, visualisation and expressing gratitude daily that turned her life around – as did winning a legal case.
On a whim one day, the mum-of-four wrote herself a cheque for the amount she believed was achievable from an ongoing legal dispute, placing it beside her bed and acknowledging it every day.
In the end, she ended up winning that case against the odds, and the money meant she could finally achieve the dream of owning her very own home.
”The house I bought was listed for exactly the amount I’d written on the cheque.”
Now a qualified motivational coach and NLP (neuro-linguistic processing therapy) practitioner, Belinda has written a book about her journey.
Wag to Warrior, Every Woman’s Roadmap to Overcoming Life’s Challenges and Rewriting Her Story is a book that Belinda hopes will help other women who are struggling, including other WAGs.
Matthew: We keep with the same formation that has failed us consistently since November. Five wins in 32 league games is the sort of form that doesn’t give you any leeway. You can change personnel but it’s the formation that needs to change. Which he’s shown he won’t. Thanks for the cup, Jimmy, but times up I’m afraid.
Graham: The message is simple now. Thelin is not good enough for AFC. Must go unfortunately.
Aldo: Thelin has to go. The tactics are terrible, a squad of supposedly creative players create no chances whatsoever. Beating a few lower division teams and a terrible Hearts, then a flukey win over Celtic on pens should not keep him in the job.
SPB: The rather bizarre Scottish Cup final gave him a stay of execution. He won’t see out the year I’m afraid. His purple patch last year – when he blew a fantastic start – is all he has achieved in his tenure. He’s not the only one who should be walking at the club.
Ally: Awful! Lazy and slow. No passion, no heart. I’m afraid the bell tolls for the Aberdeen manager. Faith in your shape has failed! Thanks for the cup, Jimmy, but fare thee well!
Denis: Board must act now. Give Leven a few games as he was up for it last year when acted as interim manager.
Neil: Can someone tell Thelin that performing the same experiment (formation) over and over again, and expecting different results, is the definition of insanity! Adapt, or go!
Andy: There’s something much more wrong at Aberdeen than managers. Changing again will solve nothing. These players need to get honest.
PITTSBURGH — It was a pivotal moment, in a pivotal game, in what’s become a pivotal week for the Dodgers in the National League West standings.
Which, rather predictably given their recently floundering form, meant they found a new way to mess it all up.
In the top of the second inning on Wednesday night at PNC Park, the Dodgers appeared to be in optimal position.
Earlier in the day, the second-place San Diego Padres had been swept by the woebegone Baltimore Orioles, opening the door for the Dodgers to extend their 2½-game lead in the division. And despite trailing by a run in their own showdown against a last-place team, the Dodgers had the Pittsburgh Pirates on the ropes, loading the bases with no outs for a chance to take the lead.
The task, at that point, was simple.
Get the ball in play. Manufacture some early scoring. And, at the very least, set a positive tone for a night in which the NL West lead could grow.
“That’s a situation where you get shorter with your swing, use the big part of the field and you’ve got to drive in a run,” manager Dave Roberts said.
That approach, however, never materialized.
Over the rest of an inexplicable 3-0 loss to the Pirates, what happened next would instead loom large.
First, second-year outfielder Andy Pages came up, worked another full count against Pittsburgh starter Braxton Ashcraft … then went down swinging chasing a slider that would’ve been ball four.
Next, rookie infielder Alex Freeland again ran the count full, got an elevated slider up in the zone to hit … but kept the bat on his shoulder as the umpire rung him up for a called third strike.
A Kiké Hernández flyout would ultimately end the inning. But it was the first two at-bats that had Roberts fuming afterward.
“You never want to say that one inning kind of win or loses a game,” Roberts said. “But the second inning, bases loaded, nobody out — I just felt that we had two bad at-bats and didn’t come away with anything.”
“That flipped the game,” Roberts later added. “It flipped the momentum.”
Indeed, on a night the Dodgers (78-61) failed to score any of their 11 baserunners or record a hit in seven at-bats with men in scoring position, no sequence was more frustrating than their second-inning fizzle.
It was the latest epitome of the team failing to produce in a clutch situation. Another example of their roster flunking some basic fundamentals.
“We’ve got to collectively get all of us on board understanding the magnitude of each at-bat, each situation,” Roberts bemoaned from his office postgame. “I sound repetitive [about how] it’s got to get better. But I do believe that having the right approach, the right mindset, the right urgency in a particular at-bat lends itself to better results.”
This has been a recurring theme for the Dodgers during the second half of the season; the kind of fine-margin miscues that have haunted them during a perplexing 22-29 stretch since July 4.
Sometimes, it’s their big-name superstars that falter. In other cases, it’s younger contributors like Pages and Freeland who fail to execute when required.
The only constant: Every time the Dodgers seem to be turning a corner, they find another way to trip themselves up.
“I do believe that the guys that we have in the room are capable of putting together consistent team at-bats of urgency from the first pitch on,” Roberts said. “But at the end of the day — and I’m sure our players are echoing the same message — we just got to get it done.”
This week’s series at PNC Park (the fourth straight the Dodgers have dropped here over the last four years) has exemplified the club’s maddening current rut in other ways.
One night, they explode at the plate for seven runs … only for their pitching staff to give up nine as it did in Tuesday’s loss.
The next, they piece together a decent pitching effort (even after Shohei Ohtani was scratched from his scheduled start because of an illness) … only for the offense to squander every single opportunity they had to take control of the contest (and lose catcher Will Smith along the way to a bruised hand he suffered on an errant foul ball, though postgame X-rays came back negative).
“We haven’t really put it together at all for a while now,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said. “We need to start playing better.”
On Wednesday, the Pirates jumped in front in the first inning, when Bryan Reynolds homered in the 12th pitch of his at-bat off spot starter Emmet Sheehan. Andrew McCutchen doubled the lead in the second, adding to the sting of the Dodgers’ squandered bases-loaded opportunity with a line-drive home run in the game’s very next at-bat.
After that, “we just really couldn’t put anything else together,” Roberts said.
Or, more precisely, they failed to finish any other chances off.
The Dodgers loaded the bases again with two out in the third, before Alex Call hit a dribbler up the first-base line to retire the side.
The team had two runners aboard again in the fifth and seventh, but continued to come up empty each and every time.
“We had guys on, we just didn’t get the hit,” said Freeman, who rolled into a fifth-inning double-play to extinguish that threat. “Frustrating night.”
The only saving grace right now is that the Padres (who have lost four in a row while dealing with a string of deflating injuries) haven’t made up ground against them.
“I’m very much aware of that,” Roberts said. “But they’re feeling the same thing we are. We’ve got to control what we can control. And we’re certainly not.”
A different approach in Wednesday’s second inning might have changed all that. Instead, it served as another regrettable failure, turning a potentially pivotal chance to stretch the division lead into one of the season’s most dispiriting losses.
Smith update
Smith exited Wednesday’s game after the second inning, when a foul tip bounced off the dirt and hit his right throwing hand as it was hanging behind his right thigh.
Because Smith’s X-rays came back negative, Roberts said the club was hopeful he could avoid the injured list. However, given the swelling and soreness he was feeling postgame, the team was still planning to call up a third catcher on Thursday for more roster insurance.
While Northern Ireland’s skipper on the night, and their most capped player of all-time, Steven Davis remembers a performance where “not very much of it was good”, the odds of an unlikely upset had lengthened further when Martin Paterson fired the visitors into a 14th-minute lead.
Aurelien Joachim cancelled out that goal before half-time however and Stefano Bensi put the side, who had previously won only four World Cup qualifiers, into a shock lead.
Gareth McAuley appeared to salvage a face-saving draw with a late header, but Mathias Janisch struck three minutes from time to leave O’Neill reflecting on an “unacceptable” performance.
The manager went on to call his side’s game management “pathetic”, while local newspapers were even less kind, labelling the result against the part-timers ranked 140th in the world as the worst in the country’s history.
And yet, nine of O’Neill’s starting eleven that night, along with five members of his bench, were a part of the 23-man squad when Northern Ireland headed to Euro 2016 less than three years later.
“Sometimes when you hit rock bottom, there’s only one place to go and that’s to come back from it,” said McAuley when asked about the dramatic turnaround.
Even if hindsight shows how rash a decision it would have been, there were questions over O’Neill’s future after the result.
McAuley, whose goal against Ukraine in Lyon later gave Northern Ireland their first ever win at a European Championships, says such doubts never permeated into the senior playing group.
“It’s one of them things, there was probably a real transitional stage. There was the old guard and then there was new players coming in and Michael was coming in,” said the former West Bromwich Albion centre-back.
“It’s difficult really for an international manager when you think of how many actual training sessions you get, building relationships with players, getting your points across. These things do take time.
“But Michael had a way that he wanted to do things, and we could see that, we were behind it. It just got there, it just clicked. There were so many factors around it, but the belief that we had in what we were being asked to do was what really galvanised us to move that forward.”
SOUTH WILLIAMSPORT, Pa. — Lin Chin-Tse retired the first 13 batters he faced and gave up just one hit in five innings as Taiwan beat Nevada 7-0 in the Little League World Series championship Sunday, ending a 29-year title drought for the Taiwanese.
Taiwan won its first LLWS since 1996, although its 18 titles are the most of any country beside the United States, including five straight from 1977 to 1981.
Lin, a 5-foot-8 right hander, also smashed a three-run triple in Taiwan’s five-run fifth. The 12-year-old from Taipei hit more than 80 mph with his fastball multiple times during the tournament, which to batters looks much faster because the plate in this level of baseball is only 46 feet away. His velocity looked much the same Sunday.
Taiwan’s Jian Zih-De celebrates in front of Nevada’s Luke D’Ambrosio during the second inning of Taiwan’s 7-0 victory in the Little League World Series championship game.
(Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Lin’s longest start before Sunday was three innings in Taiwan’s opening game against Mexico. He gave up only one hit in a subsequent victory over Venezuela.
Garrett Gallegos broke up the perfect game with a single into left field in the fifth inning but was caught in a double play when Grayson Miranda lined out to second. Nevada was appearing in its first championship game.
Offensively, Taiwan capitalized on four wild pitches and a passed ball. Jian Zih-De worked a walk leading off the bottom of the second and later scored when he beat the throw home after the wild pitches.
Chen Shi-Rong scored Taiwan’s second run in the bottom of the third when he ran home on a Nevada throwing error to first base.
The last international team to win the tournament title was Japan in 2017.
Until the Angels rewrote it with a walk-off ending.
In the top of the ninth inning at Angel Stadium on Tuesday night, Shohei Ohtani lifted the Dodgers to the verge of a badly needed win, breaking a tie score with the kind of moment that could have jump-started the stretch run of their season.
With former Dodgers closer Kenley Jansen on the mound, and a split crowd in Anaheim rising to its feet, Ohtani blasted a go-ahead home run deep to right field. He flipped his bat. The Dodgers’ dugout went wild. After so many recent blown leads and late-game meltdowns in recent weeks, the team was three outs away from finally turning the tide.
Instead, the Dodgers found yet a new way to crumble.
Once again, they let a winnable game go meekly by the wayside.
In the bottom of the ninth, the Angels tied the score after Alex Vesia gave up a leadoff single, a walk and an eventual Nolan Schanuel sacrifice fly.
In the bottom of the 10th, they sealed their fifth-straight victory over the Dodgers this season on Jo Adell’s big-bouncing, walk-off RBI single.
Now, the Dodgers have lost three in a row and 20 of 32 since July 4. Now, what was once a nine-game lead in the National League West has been completely obliterated. The Dodgers and San Diego Padres are tied atop the standings. The Padres will come to Dodger Stadium this weekend with all the momentum, where a scuffling Dodgers club will await them.
Tuesday featured many more deflating subplots for the club.
Emmet Sheehan gave up five runs in a five-inning start. The team erased one early two-run deficit, only to go down two runs again. The lineup left the bases loaded with the score tied to end the top of the fifth inning. Ohtani lined into a soul-crushing triple-play with two aboard in the sixth.
But nothing will sting like the final two innings — when a potential turning-point moment instead resulted in more familiar heartache.
PHILADELPHIA — José Soriano limited Philadelphia to two runs in seven innings, Taylor Ward had a three-run double and the Angels beat the Phillies 8-2 on Sunday for a series victory.
Soriano (7-7) gave up six hits and struck out five. He was touched for a run in the second inning on an RBI single by Rafael Marchan, and the Phillies mustered little else until Otto Kemp’s two-out home run in the sixth.
The Angels scored five runs in the second against Ranger Suarez (7-4), who yielded six earned runs in 4 1/3 innings.
Zach Neto singled in a run in the second, and Ward followed with his three-run double. LaMonte Wade Jr. homered in the sixth.
Key moment: With a run in and the bases loaded in the second, Mike Trout worked a full count against Suarez. The next pitch looked borderline, and plate ump Steven Jaschinski called it a ball. That forced in a second Angels run to Suarez’s chagrin. He was really unhappy after the Angels’ next hitter, Ward, cleared the bases.
Key stat: The Phillies’ Kemp, replacing injured Alec Bohm at third base, committed two errors. That’s three errors in six starts at third for Kemp, who has split another 24 games between first base and left field with only one error.
Up next: The Angels take on the New York Mets in a three-game series beginning Monday night, with Tyler Anderson (2-6, 4.34 ERA) set to oppose the Mets’ Kodai Senga (7-3, 1.39). The Phillies host Boston for three beginning Monday night, with Zack Wheeler (9-3, 2.36) facing the Red Sox’s Walker Buehler (6-6, 6.12).
Nolan Schanuel injured
The Angels’ Nolan Schanuel was hit by a pitch and left the team’s game against the Phillies on Sunday.
(Matt Slocum / Associated Press)
Angels first baseman Nolan Schanuel was removed from the game after being hit by a pitch.
Schanuel appeared to take a changeup from Suarez off the upper wrist of his left arm in the first inning. He hurried down the first base line in obvious pain. After being checked by a trainer, Schanuel remained in the game.
Schanuel did not play the field in the bottom of the inning. Wade replaced him at first base, batting second.
The Angels said Schanuel was diagnosed with a left wrist contusion and is listed as day to day.
Schanuel is hitting .274 with eight home runs and 40 RBIs through 95 games in this, his third season.
Mike Trout homered and had a two-run single to close in on two milestones and Yusei Kikuchi overcame Eugenio Suárez‘s two home runs as the Angels beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 10-5 on Saturday night.
After the Angels took a 4-2 lead in the fourth, Trout followed Nolan Schanuel‘s leadoff single in the fifth against Zac Gallen (7-10) with his 17th homer. Trout capped a four-run eighth with the two-run single. He has 395 career homers and 994 RBIs.
Suárez hit his 30th and 31st homers, the first a 434-footer in the second into the rocks in center and the second to right center in the fourth to top his total from last season. He reached 30 homers for the sixth time.
Kikuchi (4-6) gave up three runs on six hits in 5 2/3 innings. He took a blow to his pitching shoulder in the sixth on Josh Naylor’s liner. The Japanese left-hander stayed in, but was done two pitches later when Randal Grichuk singled to make it 6-3.
Arizona scored twice in the eighth after loading the bases with one out against José Fermin. Zach Neto and Schanuel had RBI singles in the bottom of the inning against Juan Morillo before Trout’s single.
After Suárez’s homer in fourth, the Angels rallied with three runs in the bottom of the inning to take a 4-2 lead. Taylor Ward, Jo Adell and Travis d’Arnaud doubled in the inning.
Gallen gave up eight hits and six runs in five innings.
Arizona’s Andrew Saalfrank pitched two scoreless innings in his return from a one-year suspension for betting on MLB games. He was reinstated June 5 and was called up from triple-A Reno on Wednesday.
The Angels moved within a game of .500 at 47-48. The Angels beat the Diamondbacks 6-5 on Friday night.
Key moment: After Arizona pulled within a run in the eighth, Neto, Schanuel and Trout had their consecutive run-scoring singles to break it open in the bottom of the inning.
Key stat: Arizona has lost three straight and 12 of 17 to fall to 46-50.
Up next: Diamondbacks RHP Merrill Kelly (7-5, 3.41) was set to start Sunday opposite RHP José Soriano (6-6, 4.00).
MILWAUKEE — During the Dodgers’ season-long five-game losing streak this week, manager Dave Roberts cited a lack of “fight” from his lineup as the most troubling trend in the team’s recent skid.
On Wednesday in Milwaukee, more fight finally returned — only for the Brewers to still land the knockout punch.
In a 3-2 loss at American Family Field that extended the Dodgers’ losing streak to six games, the lineup once again scuffled in a five-hit performance while closer Tanner Scott blew a ninth-inning lead to waste Tyler Glasnow’s encouraging return from the injured list.
It was a grind of a game, with the Dodgers scoring their only runs on a bases-loaded walk following a hit-and-run play and a sacrifice fly that briefly gave them a 2-1 lead. Alas, Scott gave up a game-tying RBI single to Andrew Vaughn in the ninth, Jackson Chourio walked it off with another single against Kirby Yates in the bottom of the 10th, sending the scuffling Dodgers their longest losing skid since April 2019.
“Knowing the rough patch [we’re in], it’s really hard to take this one, because you just want to stop it,” veteran infielder Miguel Rojas said.
“We had them where we wanted them,” Roberts echoed. “We just couldn’t finish it.”
Indeed, even on a day the Dodgers struggled to score despite generating more baserunners and cutting down on their recent binge of strikeouts, Glasnow’s solid return from the injured list had the club in position to win for most of the day.
Making his first start since going on the injured list in April because of a shoulder injury, and just his 28th start in two years with the Dodgers since signing a $136.5-million contract two winters ago, the lanky right-hander pitched decently over his five innings, giving up two hits and three walks with five strikeouts.
Glasnow ran into trouble in the second inning, when Christian Yelich singled on a first-pitch fastball, Isaac Collins drew a full-count walk, and both executed a double-steal to move into scoring position. A 10-pitch walk to Caleb Durbin — ending on a curveball that never ducked into the strike zone — loaded the bases with one out.
However, Glasnow responded, jamming Jake Bauers with a sinker for a pop out before blowing Joey Ortiz away with an elevated 96 mph heater.
That sequence was Glasnow at his best: Going after hitters with his premium velocity, and showing no signs of the tentativeness — or, as Roberts described it in his pregame address, “search mode” — that has often derailed his Dodgers career.
“[I’m focusing on] going out and pitching, just toeing the mound and kind of getting into that rhythm and keeping the routine,” Glasnow said afterward. “Just going out, be athletic and trust the trainers, strength room, stay healthy and just keep pitching.”
As Glasnow settled into a rhythm, however, the Dodgers (56-38) continued to toil at the plate.
Having scored only one run in four of their previous five games, a shorthanded lineup, which got Tommy Edman back from injury but once again was without Teoscar Hernández in the starting lineup, struggled to get a beat on crafty veteran left-hander José Quintana.
With only a 90-mph fastball and a flurry of funky off-speed pitches, the 36-year-old navigated the first four innings without giving up a hit.
A breakthrough finally came in the fifth inning. After Rojas drew a leadoff walk (he also had two singles Wednesday), the Dodgers executed a well-timed hit-and-run play, drawing the second baseman out of position just as Esteury Ruiz lined a single through the hole he vacated. With two outs, James Outman then checked his swing just enough to draw a full-count walk, loading the bases for Shohei Ohtani to plate the game’s first run on a four-pitch free pass (benefitting from a couple of borderline ball calls).
And while that 1-0 lead didn’t last long — in the bottom of the fifth, Glasnow walked leadoff man Bauers, moved him to second with a balk, then watched helplessly as Bauers stole third and scored on a throw that bounced to the outfield — the Dodgers went back in front in the seventh when Mookie Betts lifted a bases-loaded sacrifice fly.
The Dodgers, though, squandered opportunities to stretch the lead from, leaving the bases loaded to end the seventh inning before stranding more baserunners in both the eighth and ninth.
“I thought the way we competed, I liked that,” Roberts said. “Took some good at-bats. I thought we fought. But couldn’t put a crooked number up.”
That left Scott with too little margin to complete a four-out save. While the left-hander stranded a runner at second base he inherited in the eighth, three ninth-inning singles from the Brewers tied the score, culminating with a broken-bat, bloop single from Vaughn that made it 2-2.
Then, after Brewers closer Trevor Megill struck out the side in the top of the 10th, Yates surrendered the game-winning single to Churio in the bottom half of the inning, dealing the Dodgers their second-straight series sweep and an ever-mounting sense of frustration entering the final days before the All-Star break.
“We can’t really feel sorry about ourselves, because there’s a lot of season left, and we know what we’re looking for,” Rojas said. “We’re looking to win another championship, and playing this kind of baseball is not gonna get us there.”
After a raucous night out in my 20s, the real afterparty was always at BCD Tofu House — hunched over bubbling Korean tofu stew and a sizzling-hot stone bowl of steamed rice. After I’d scooped most of it out, a server would pour warm tea into the bowl, loosening the rice clinging stubbornly to the bottom. Scraping up those crispy-chewy bits of scorched rice, known in Korean as nurungji, quickly became my favorite part of the meal.
Long before electric rice cookers, Koreans traditionally cooked rice over an open flame in an iron cauldron called a gamasot. As it steamed, the bottom layer would crisp up against the hot metal, forming golden-brown nurungji.
“Today, nurungji simply means the crispy layer of rice that forms at the bottom of any pot or cooking appliance,” says Sarah Ahn, who co-wrote the Korean cookbook “Umma” with her mother, Nam Soon Ahn. “Personally, and within Korean culture, I see nurungji as a deeply nostalgic food, especially for Koreans of my mom’s generation.”
Chef and cookbook author Debbie Lee adds, “Sometimes it’s intentional, sometimes it’s from overcooking — what I call a great culinary accident.”
Korea isn’t alone in its love for scorched rice. Persian tahdig is the crust that forms at the bottom of the pot, flipped and served with the crispy layer on top. Chinese guoba is crispy rice paired with saucy stir-fries to soak up every bit of flavor. In West Africa, kanzo refers to the caramelized layer left behind after cooking, often found in dishes like jollof rice. Spain’s socarrat forms the base of well-executed paella.
And in Korea, nurungji is endlessly versatile — enjoyed on its own, steeped in hot water or tea as sungnyung (thought to be a soothing palate cleanser and digestive aid), or transformed into nurungji-tang, where the rice becomes the crunchy base for a light broth with seafood or vegetables.
With its nutty, toasted flavor that highlights the grain’s natural aroma, nurungji is comfort food born out of practicality. “Like so much of Korean food, it represents our resourcefulness — nothing goes to waste! — and our ability to find flavor in humble things,” says Sarah. Rather than discarding it, Koreans embraced the crunchy layer as a snack or meal.
“My parents are from Pyongyang and fled during the war,” says Lee. “My mother told me that they’d find an abandoned house to rest in, and nine times out of 10, there was rice. They lived off porridge, steamed rice, and ultimately nurungji as a snack.”
SeongHee Jeong, chef and co-owner of Koreatown’s Borit Gogae, remembers eating it sprinkled with sugar — a delicious treat when sweets were scarce. While there’s no single way to make it today, Sarah and her mom swear by the traditional method. “Nothing compares to the flavor of rice cooked in a gamasot over a wood fire,” Sarah says. “That taste is so iconic, you’ll even find packaged snacks trying to replicate it.”
In L.A., some restaurants keep it old-school by serving nurungji simply steeped in tea or hot water, while others are getting creative with it. Think: nurungji risotto at Jilli, an iced nurungji crema at Bodega Park or a fried chicken and nurungi dish at Fanny’s. At her Joseon pop-up last year, Lee even spun it into a nurungji crème brûlée.
“It’s truly amazing how humble ingredients born from hardship always find their way back,” says Sarah.
Here are 13 of the best restaurants in L.A. serving nurungji in both traditional and unexpected ways.
Twenty-nine hours before his official return to the Dodger Stadium mound, Emmet Sheehan took a moment to get himself reacquainted with his home ballpark.
In an empty Dodger Stadium on Tuesday afternoon, Sheehan walked onto the field at Chavez Ravine, climbed up a slope he hadn’t toed since the 2023 season, and practiced his pitching motion a few times before returning to the clubhouse.
For Sheehan, such dry tosses are part of his normal pre-start routine. In any ballpark where he pitches, he likes to get a feel for the mound and its surroundings before the game.
The only difference this time: how long it had been since he’d taken the bump in a big-league stadium.
After an auspicious rookie season in 2023, in which his 4.92 earned-run average belied the potential he flashed with his low-arm-slot, high-velocity delivery, Sheehan missed all of last season and the first three months of this campaign after undergoing Tommy John surgery.
A former sixth-round draft pick who blossomed into one of the organization’s top pitching prospects during an impressive minor-league career, Sheehan became one of the many homegrown Dodgers pitchers to endure a major surgery after injuring his elbow in spring training last year.
In recent months, however, his relatively seamless recovery process had fueled excitement throughout the organization leading up to his return on Wednesday.
And over four sharp innings in the Dodgers’ 4-3 win against the San Diego Padres — one that ended on a walk-off home run by Will Smith in the ninth — the 25-year-old right-hander showed exactly why.
With his fastball sitting around 95 mph, and a tantalizing combination of sliders and changeups keeping Padres hitters off balance, Sheehan gave up just one run while striking out six batters in his big-league return.
He threw 65 pitches, 43 for strikes. He didn’t issue a walk, while yielding only three hits. And the lone score against him came when second baseman Tommy Edman failed to corral a hard-hit one-hopper with two outs in the top of the second.
Other than that, he posted nothing but zeroes.
Sheehan wasn’t the winning pitcher. That honor went to another former prospect, left-hander Justin Wrobleski, who followed Sheehan with five stellar innings of long relief, flashing his own promising signs (including a fastball that touched 99 mph at one point) after an up-and-down start to his big-league career.
For most of his outing, Wrobleski was protecting a 3-1 lead the Dodgers took in the bottom of the fifth, when Max Muncy hit a leadoff triple, Hyeseong Kim followed an Andy Pages sacrifice fly with a double, and slumping rookie catcher Dalton Rushing plated the game’s go-ahead runs on a two-run single.
But with the Dodgers’ bullpen worn thin from back-to-back bullpen games the previous two nights, Wrobleski went back to the mound in the ninth to try to finish things off. He couldn’t, giving up two runs after a Max Muncy throwing error put him in a jam.
However, Smith made sure it didn’t matter, coming off the bench in the bottom of the ninth to whack a walk-off home run just over the right-field wall.
Will Smith runs to first after hitting a walk-off home run in the ninth inning for the Dodgers against the Padres on Wednesday night.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Despite the late dramatics, it was Sheehan’s return that had the biggest future implications on the Dodgers’ season, giving their shorthanded rotation a badly needed, and highly intriguing, new option for the second half of the season.
While discussing Sheehan before the game, manager Dave Roberts said the Dodgers always “liked his makeup, his toughness, his ability to repeat his delivery, the swing-and-miss stuff, the preparation.”
But the way he navigated his Tommy John recovery — returning to action 13 months after undergoing the procedure last May — had added another element of optimism among team officials.
Roberts noted how Sheehan had seemingly increased his physical strength during his rehab, with the once lanky 6-foot-5 pitcher now possessing noticeably more mass. He also explained how Sheehan has “had a chance to watch a lot of baseball, learn and then now apply it.”
“I think that’s going to make him a better major league pitcher,” Roberts said.
One start back, signs of such growth were already becoming clear.
A ban on a “destructive” type of fishing that drags large nets along the seafloor could be extended across English waters, the government has said.
The proposal would expand the the prohibition of bottom trawling from 18,000km2 to 30,000km2 (around 11,500 sq miles) of the UK’s offshore areas that are already designated as protected. The plan is subject to a 12-week industry consultation.
The announcement comes as a UN Ocean Conference begins on Monday in France, and amid warnings from Sir David Attenborough that bottom trawling is destroying areas of the seabed and marine life.
Environment Secretary Steve Reed said “without urgent action our oceans will be irreversibly destroyed”.
The naturalist’s latest documentary Ocean With David Attenborough showed new footage of a bottom trawling net bulldozing through silt on the seafloor and scooping up species indiscriminately.
Last week, MPs on the Environmental Audit Committee renewed calls to ban bottom trawling, dredging and mining for aggregates on the seabed in what are known as Marine Protected Areas (MPAs).
The extension proposed by the government would cover 41 of the UK’s 178 MPAs, and would protect rare marine animals and the delicate seabed they rely upon.
It says it has carried out detailed assessments into the harms caused to habitats and species.
A 12-week consultation will run until 1 September and will seek the views of the marine and fishing industry.
Ariana Densham, head of oceans at Greenpeace UK, said the consultation was “ultimately a long-overdue completion of a process started by the previous government”.
The Wildlife Trust said it hoped the extended ban would be put in place “rapidly”.
It would be a “win-win for both nature and the climate,” added the trust’s director of policy and public affairs, Joan Edwards.
Pressure is also building for more countries to ratify the High Seas Treaty at the Ocean Conference in Nice.
The treaty was agreed by 193 countries two years ago to put 30% of the ocean into protected areas.
The treaty will not come into force until it is ratified by 60 countries, with the current number standing at 28. The UK is among those countries that has yet to ratify.
BOSTON — Ceddanne Rafaela curled a home run around the Pesky Pole in the bottom of the ninth inning on Wednesday and the Boston Red Sox rallied after trailing four different times to beat the Angels 11-9.
The Angels blew 4-0, 7-5, 8-7 and 9-8 leads, with Rafael Devers bouncing a chopper between the gloves of second baseman Chris Taylor and shortstop Zach Neto behind second base to tie it 9-9 in the eighth.
Each of the first three times the Red Sox scored, the Angels answered with runs of its own. But after walking Mike Trout to lead off the ninth, Cooper Criswell (1-0) got the next three batters out to give Boston a chance to walk it off.
In the bottom half, Abraham Toro singled with one out and Rafaela hit a 308-foot liner over the short wall that goes from the foul pole toward the bullpens in right.
Taylor Ward had four RBIs for the Angels, who were going for the three-game sweep.
Key moment
Before recording his first out, Red Sox starter Lucas Giolito allowed four runs on two doubles, two singles and a homer. Then Angels starter José Soriano gave up four singles and two walks to make it 4-3 before striking out Rafaela on his 25th pitch of the inning.
David Hamilton’s two-run double with one out gave Boston a 5-4 lead.
Key stat
Combined, the starting pitchers, allowed 14 runs in 5 1/3 innings.
Up next
The Angels are off Thursday, with RHP Kyle Hendricks (2-6, 5.34 ERA) slated to start the opener of a three-game series against Seattle on Friday night. The Red Sox are off Thursday before starting a three-game series in New York against the Yankees.
To say that St. John Bosco and Santa Margarita engaged in a championship baseball game on Friday night that will be remembered for a lifetime would be an understatement.
“This game was special, something I’ll remember for the rest of my life. You really had to fight for it,” said St. John Bosco left fielder Noah Everly.
It was a Southern Section Division 1 final filled with drama. Teenagers came through with big play after big play until finally in the bottom of the ninth inning, with the bases loaded, Miles Clark hit a walk-off single up the middle to give St. John Bosco a 3-2 victory and its first baseball championship before a sold-out crowd of 3,010 at Cal State Fullerton.
Incredible game ends with walk-off single by Miles Clark in B9. St. John Bosco wins D1 title over Santa Margarita 3-2. pic.twitter.com/ypUNfQqYra
“It hurts a lot,” Santa Margarita coach Chris Malec said. “It was a great effort by both sides. There were so many amazing moments.”
Unbelievable. The Great Escape in the seventh inning for Brennan Bauer. On 3-2 count with bases loaded fly out. End of 7, Bosco 2, Santa Margarita 2. pic.twitter.com/26mOk7XZOb
Let’s start with Santa Margarita pitcher Brennan Bauer, who threw five scoreless innings of relief and somehow escaped twice with the bases loaded in the bottom of the seventh to keep the game going. First he had a 3-and-1 count to Everly and got a pop fly with one out. Then he had a 3-2 count with Moises Razo and got a fly out to the warning track.
“That’s all Brennan,” Malec said.
In 22 1/3 playoff innings, Brenann won four games and gave up one earned run.
Then there was Everly coming through with a stunning catch on the run in left field in the top of the ninth inning to prevent a Santa Margarita extra base hit with a runner on first.
“That was an extraordinary catch,” Malec said.
Said Clark: “Oh my goodness, Noah came through.”
Coach Andy Rojo raises the championship plaque after St. John Bosco’s 3-2 win over Santa Margarita.
(Nick Koza)
So did Clark against relief pitcher Ethan Russell in the bottom of the ninth. Bauer had run out of innings, having reached his 10-inning max after throwing five innings against Crespi in the semifinals. Russell walked Razo on a 3-2 pitch to load the bases, setting the stage for Clark.
“We were locked in the whole game,” Clark said. “We didn’t lose our mental focus. I kept telling my guys we have to stay focused.”
Razo had a two-run double in the first inning to give the Braves an early lead. Santa Margarita took advantage of an error and closed it to 2-1 in the second on Brody Schumaker’s second hit. The Eagles tied tied it at 2-2 in the fifth with a squeeze bunt by Blake Ankrum, the third sacrifice of the game.
After Gavin Cervantes started on the mound and freshman Brayden Krakowski pitched into the sixth inning, St. John Bosco turned to its closer, Jack Champlin, who was magnificent. In four scoreless innings, he gave up one hit with four strikeouts. At one point, a Santa Margarita batter appeared to challenge Champlin after the count went to 3-0. Champlin struck him out, unleashing a fist pump.
St. John Bosco ended up being the most consistent team in the Southland for the 2025 season. The Braves went 27-4 and became the first Trinity League champion to win a Division 1 title. All the other Trinity League teams that have won Division 1 never won the league title. And beating top-seeded Corona 2-0 on Tuesday was quite an accomplishment itself.
Tuesday didn’t start as a game the Dodgers necessarily had to win.
But, by the time extra innings arrived on a nervy night at Dodger Stadium, the team was in a situation where they simply couldn’t afford to lose.
Not after entering the day with four consecutive losses, a season-long skid caused primarily by a banged-up pitching staff. Not after Yoshinobu Yamamoto looked like an ace, a stopper and a Cy Young candidate all wrapped in one, spinning seven scoreless innings in a nine-strikeout gem. And certainly not with his brilliance in danger of being wasted after closer Tanner Scott blew a one-run lead in the top of the ninth inning before yielding a two-run blast in the top of the 10th.
“I don’t know if it was a must-win,” manager Dave Roberts said, sidestepping such superlatives with the season still only two months old. “But certainly given Yoshi’s outing, you don’t wanna waste that … You just can’t lose on nights that Yamamoto throws [that well].”
Somehow, in a 4-3 walk-off victory over the Arizona Diamondbacks, the Dodgers didn’t; flipping the script, changing the narrative and snapping their losing streak with the most dramatic of endings.
Down by two runs entering the bottom of the 10th, the Dodgers immediately cut the deficit in half with a leadoff RBI double from Tommy Edman. Shohei Ohtani was intentionally walked, Mookie Betts advanced Edman with a fly ball, Ohtani stole second, and Freddie Freeman was intentionally walked with first base open. With the bases loaded, Will Smith got plunked by former Dodgers reliever Shelby Miller to force home the tying score. And then, finally, Max Muncy walked it off with a sacrifice fly to deep center, easily scoring Ohtani from third for a victory that felt both hard-earned and hardly deserved.
“I think it showed a lot out of us,” Muncy said afterward, standing in a celebratory clubhouse after what could prove to be a pivotal point in the season.
“We got punched in the mouth, and for us to punch right back, I think that was really big out of the group, out of the guys,” Muncy added. “Everyone not giving up, not hanging their head — we still had a chance to win the game. And guys went out there and did it.”
Yoshinobu Yamamoto reacts after striking out Arizona’s Pavin Smith to retire end the seventh inning.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Winning, of course, should have been a much simpler task for the Dodgers (30-19) on Tuesday night.
Yamamoto was spectacular, giving up no hits through his first six innings, stranding runners on the corners to complete his night in the seventh, and providing the Dodgers with the kind of outing that has been missing from their rotation amid a wave of crippling injuries over the last several weeks.
“Yoshi was fantastic,” Roberts said. “We needed every bit of it.”
An equally banged-up bullpen avoided disaster in the eighth, when Alex Vesia and Ben Casparius combined to work through a bases-loaded jam that preserved a narrow 1-0 lead.
“We just kept fighting,” Smith said. “That [was a] big shutdown inning.”
But all along, the Dodgers failed to open any cushion to fall back on late. Their only early scoring was courtesy of back-to-back two-out doubles from Freeman and Smith in the bottom of the fourth. In the seventh and eighth, they squandered opportunities for insurance, stranding a leadoff single from Muncy and a one-out double from Ohtani.
That meant, when Scott caught too much plate with an up-and-in fastball to Gabriel Moreno in the ninth, all it took was one swing to change the game, Moreno skying a solo blast that carried just far enough down the left field line.
“Just left it too much on the plate,” said Scott, who blew his third save in 12 opportunities.
Freddie Freeman scores on a double by Will Smith in the fourth inning.
(Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
After the Dodgers came up empty again in the ninth — Kiké Hernández struck out in what started as a 3-and-0 count with two runners aboard — Scott made the same mistake to Corbin Carroll in the 10th, serving up a belt-high fastball the undersized slugger whacked the other way for a two-run blast.
“You sit there in the [10th] inning, you’re down two runs, and your bullpen is completely taxed,” Roberts said, “those [kind of losses] really sting.”
Instead, the Dodgers rallied, with Anthony Banda limiting any further damage in the top of the 10th before the lineup rallied in the bottom half.
“It’s a big swing,” Roberts said. “To get a win tonight, I’m gonna sleep a lot better.”
Without Yamamoto, none of it would have been possible.
After giving up eight runs over 11 combined innings in his previous two starts, every part of the 26-year-old right-hander’s stuff played up on Tuesday night. His fastball averaged 96 mph. His curveball induced one helpless swing from the Diamondbacks (26-23) after another. And until Ketel Marte singled on a line drive off the wall to lead off the seventh, it was starting to seem like an elevated pitch count (Yamamoto began that inning with 90 pitches, and finished his outing with an MLB career high of 110) might be the only thing standing between him and a pursuit of a nine-inning no-no.
“I thought he was going to go the distance tonight,” Muncy said of Yamamoto, who dropped his ERA to 1.86 with his third career MLB start of seven scoreless frames. “I thought he had the stuff to get the no-hitter.”
That’s why, when the game started to spiral out of control later, and their losing streak seemed primed to continue in the most painful way possible, the Dodgers entered the 10th inning knowing they needed to respond, and wary of the repercussions that would have accompanied such a crushing, wasteful loss.
“They [tied it] and then flipped the game, but we came back,” Yamamoto said through his interpreter afterward, his no-decision not feeling so bad after what transpired in the bottom of the 10th.
“A win like this is great,” he added.
Echoed Roberts: “We just put some at-bats together, man. And it was much needed.”
Alexis Ramirez went three for four and drove in five runs and UCLA cruised to the NCAA Super Regionals with a 12-1 dismantling of UC Santa Barbara on Sunday in the Los Angeles Regional.
The ninth-seeded Bruins (52-10) travel to face eighth-seeded South Carolina next weekend. UCLA is chasing its ninth Women’s College World Series berth in the last decade. In going 3-0 in this weekend’s regional play, UCLA outscored it opponents 31-2. UCLA started the weekend with a 9-1 win over the Gauchos (36-26) on Friday.
Ramirez started the hit parade driving in the game’s first two runs. UCLA scored four runs in the first and second innings, three in the fourth and the game was mercy-ruled after the Gauchos came up empty in the bottom of the fifth.
Taylor Tinsley moved her season record to 14-4 pitching four innings, surrendering just three hits and one unearned run. She struck out six and didn’t give up a walk.
Malaya Johnson (24-12) took the loss for UC Santa Barbara giving up six hits and six earned runs in an inning of work.
Ainsley Waddell singled to center field to score Alexa Sams in the bottom of the second for the Gauchos’ run.
