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Zander Fagerson will “come back stronger” from his British and Irish Lions heartache, Scotland head coach Gregor Townsend has predicted.

The 29-year-old Glasgow Warriors prop was one of eight Scots selected for the Lions tour to Australia this summer but has been ruled out because of injury.

“He picked up his injury on Thursday and it was a new injury,” Townsend told the BBC’s Scotland Rugby Podcast.

“He was in brilliant form for us in the Six Nations. He was in a real strong position to play Test rugby for the Lions, so to have that taken away, we know what happens in a sporting career and a rugby career, that you get injured at the wrong time, but he’ll bounce back, he’ll come back stronger.

“He has with previous injuries and he’s still young, young for a tighthead too, so if it doesn’t happen this time, I’m sure he’ll be an even better place to be a Test Lion in four years’ time.”

Townsend suggested that, while he was pleased with the Scottish representation in the Lions squad, even more Scots could have been involved.

The likes of Darcy Graham, Tom Jordan, Ben White, Jamie Ritchie and Rory Darge were all considered to be in contention and Townsend says those players have responded well to the disappointment of missing out.

With Scotland based in New Zealand and Fiji for their summer tour matches against the Maori All Blacks, Fiji and Samoa, the head coach says they have a great opportunity to keep themselves in the minds of the Lions coaches when injuries inevitably take a further toll on the squad.

“I think the most pleasing aspect of the players is how well they’ve played and how they’ve responded to the news they weren’t going to be in the Lions tour,” Townsend said.

“Darcy scored a hat-trick the week after he wasn’t selected. Rory was man of the match against Stormers, he’s been playing excellently. Jamie’s carried on his really good form, as has Tom Jordan.

“They’re still playing very good rugby, if not even better rugby than they played in the Six Nations, so that’s going to put them in the best position possible if there were changes to that Lions squad, which, if you go on history, it’s going to happen.

A relaxed-looking Emma Raducanu began her grass-court singles campaign with an impressive straight-sets victory over Spanish qualifier Cristina Bucsa at Queen’s.

The Briton smiled and interacted with the crowd as she secured a 6-1 6-2 victory on the Andy Murray Arena.

Raducanu needed just one hour and five minutes to breeze past world number 112 Bucsa and said it felt “incredibly special” to be playing at the home tournament.

“For us girls to have this tournament here finally, after watching the TV and seeing the men play [here], is really nice,” said Raducanu.

The world number 37 is one of four women remaining in the tournament bidding to become the first Briton to win the women’s title at Queen’s Club since Ann Jones in 1969.

Her progression to the last 16 follows that of Katie Boulter and Heather Watson earlier on Tuesday and Sonay Kartal on day one.

British number one Boulter overcame a stern 7-6 (7-4) 1-6 6-4 test against Australian qualifier Ajla Tomljanovic after Watson beat Kazakhstan’s Yulia Putintseva 6-4 6-3 to set up a last-16 meeting with fourth seed Elena Rybakina.

It has been a difficult 12 months for Raducanu.

Left feeling “wary” after being targeted by a stalker during a match in Dubai, she has also had a period of uncertainty with frequent changes to her coaches and a series of back problems that have at times kept her sidelined.

But the 2021 US Open champion has started this grass-court season with a more familiar and stable set-up, including the return to her team of former coach Nick Cavaday.

She has also been “managing” the back issues and looked physically and mentally at ease in her maiden singles match at Queen’s.

Raducanu has played down her expectations at the tournament but, having got a feel for the grass alongside Boulter in their doubles victory on Monday, quickly made herself at home to the delight of a partisan crowd.

Cries of “Emma, we love you!” could be heard from fans throughout, while Raducanu returned the love by cheering and smiling towards the crowd after winning points and signing the camera lens “home turf” with a smiley face after her victory.

The heavily scrutinised Raducanu would surely benefit from a run at a tournament where she has quickly become comfortable but tougher tasks lie ahead.

Boulter said she had “dreamt” of playing at a Queen’s tournament after she came through a match filled with twists and turns against Tomljanovic.

After years of watching the men’s tournament, the 28-year-old said it was “special” to play in the inaugural women’s WTA 500 event at the iconic venue.

“I came out yesterday to watch Andy get his first court [named after him], which is special in itself,” she said.

“To get the women back here feels very special. It’s actually something I dreamt of, having come here the last couple of years to watch the men play, so I’m just really grateful to be on this court.”

In her first singles match of the season on the surface, Boulter navigated a tricky hold where she saw off break points before impressively breaking to love, but missed the opportunity at 5-4 to serve out the set.

Instead, Boulter relied on her serve to get her out of trouble in the first-set tie-break, smashing a forehand winner to take the set in just over an hour.

But things spiralled rapidly for Boulter in set two as she struggled to find any rhythm, falling down a double break and struggling to find the answers.

And, having relied so heavily on a strong serve in the first set, she double-faulted on the first point of the opening game in the decider, laying the foundations for Tomljanovic to break.

Now on a run of six games without a win for Boulter, the home crowd was flat and struggled to provide the Briton with the boost she needed.

That came soon after, though, as Boulter immediately broke back and rediscovered some momentum to win three games in a row.

More to-ing and fro-ing followed as neither player could hold their serve but Boulter eventually kept her calm at 4-4, holding serve before taking the match when Tomljanovic’s forehand dropped long.

Saul ‘Canelo’ Alvarez’s super-fight against Terence Crawford will take place in Las Vegas on Saturday, 13 September.

Mexican pound-for-pound great Alvarez will meet undefeated American Crawford for the undisputed super-middleweight title.

The blockbuster will be streamed globally on Netflix and has been billed the “fight of the century” by Turki Alalshikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s general entertainment authority.

It will be the first fight to be promoted by Alalshikh in collaboration with UFC president Dana White.

“Turki wants to make the biggest fights that the fans want to see in boxing and this is right up my alley,” said White.

“Are you kidding me that the first boxing fight I’m going to get to promote is Canelo versus Crawford? It’s literally a once-in-a-lifetime fight.”

Alvarez holds all four recognised world titles in the super-middleweight division after the 34-year-old beat William Scull last month.

That resulted in him regaining the IBF belt and the undisputed super-middleweight title, and after the fight Crawford was confirmed as his next opponent, with the pair posing for a face-off in the ring.

Alvarez has 63 wins from 67 professional fights, with two draws and two defeats.

Crawford is a four-division and two-weight undisputed champion, and will be moving up from light-middleweight.

The 37-year-old possesses a flawless record, having won all 41 of his pro fights.

“My perfect record speaks for itself,” said Crawford. “I am the best fighter in the world and no matter the opponent or weight class, I have always come out on top.”

Ivan Romeo rode solo to victory on stage three of the Criterium du Dauphine to claim the yellow leader’s jersey.

The Movistar rider made a couple of attacks before going clear of a group of 10 riders with about 6km left in the 202.8km route from Brioude.

Mathieu van der Poel led the chase group, but they had left it too late and Romeo crossed the line first in Charantonnay, near Lyon, some 14 seconds ahead of Harold Tejada, Louis Barre and Florian Lipowitz.

“I don’t believe it,” said Romeo. “It was one of the toughest days of my life so far.

“The breakaway, it was so hard to get into it, and I wasn’t feeling really good, so I waited to the last moment.

“I know in this kind of flat finish in a small break, I have good instinct, and that if they give me some seconds I can make it.

“I had this stage on my mind for a month. We’ve been doing altitude [training] at Sierra Nevada, working super hard with all the team, and they gave me this chance at the beginning of the week.”

Romeo was the under-23 time trial champion at last year’s World Championships and Tuesday’s success means he has a 17-second lead in the Dauphine’s general classification standings heading into the time trial.

Arsenal’s attendances are the envy of women’s football – not just in England, or Europe, but around the world.

So successful have they been at building their fanbase over the last four years, they have now announced that all their Women’s Super League games will be held at the 60,704-capacity Emirates Stadium from next season.

To put their attendances into context, their average last season of nearly 29,000 is more than three times the team with the second highest average – Chelsea, who are the dominant force in the WSL.

England captain and Arsenal defender Leah Williamson, minutes after leading the Lionesses to Euro 2022 success, made a rallying call live on the BBC: “The legacy of this tournament is a change in society. We have brought people together, brought people to games. We want people at WSL games.”

And Arsenal fans listened.

The club had already planned to trial games at the Emirates Stadium and eight weeks after that final at Wembley they hosted Tottenham, setting a new WSL record with 47,367 fans in attendance.

But it was not just capitalising on momentum from the Euros that helped Arsenal achieve that feat – and then do it again and again. Other WSL clubs have not seen the sustained growth that Arsenal have managed.

In December 2021, Arsenal appointed Julie Slot as their new chief commercial officer to oversee marketing, among other responsibilities.

She highlights three main factors as contributing to the club’s success:

Premier League football clubs are not used to having to work hard to try and market tickets – Arsenal’s men’s team have long been selling out the Emirates Stadium.

Slot brought her experience from working in horse racing and applied it to football.

“We’ve used a lot of test and learn marketing techniques around things I brought from racing,” she says.

“With horse racing you work hard to sell every ticket, and it’s more of an entertainment experience rather than a pure sports experience.”

One of those adopted from horse racing was tiered pricing – early-bird, general sale, and last chance – which rewards loyal supporters.

To encourage fans to come back, rather than just attend a one-off game, they also introduced packages allowing fans to buy tickets for all the games being held at the Emirates at a discounted rate.

“It’s such fun marketing women’s football,” she adds. “I’m a woman and I love sport, but women’s football allows you to be really creative and really ambitious.

“Because we’ve got a stadium to sell, and we’re not ultimately selling out for every game, we’re thinking about who are all the communities we can reach and what are the campaigns that we can do with them, because we’ve got a lot of tickets to sell.

“So that goes back to that real ability to test and learn. As a marketer, there’s nothing better than testing something and seeing what works, and what doesn’t work.”

And key to everything has been the data they have gathered about the different people who come to their women’s games:

Another major aspect of their strategy is around pricing. Traditionally women’s football clubs would sometimes give away tickets to boost attendances – but then some of the recipients wouldn’t bother turning up.

Slot was adamant from the moment she joined that Arsenal would not be giving away tickets.

“It’s a really important positioning for the club because this is a professional football game and they are professional athletes and it’s a product we’re putting on,” she says.

Yet affordability is key to attracting new fans, and can partly explain why such a large proportion of supporters going to WSL games are experiencing the Emirates Stadium for the first time. Next season, early bird tickets will range from £13.50 to £18 for a standard adult ticket – significantly cheaper than to watch their male counterparts.

“Lots of people want an entertainment experience and, in London, finding that for a group of you is quite hard at an affordable price so when we were really pushing the tickets from a price [perspective] people think ‘oh, that’s actually something I can afford to do’,” explains Slot.

Having gone from averaging nearly 3,500 in Women’s Super League the season before England hosted Euro 2022, Arsenal grew that more than eight times to almost 30,000 in the space of two years.

That 2023-24 league season included two complete sell-outs as some 60,000 fans packed out the Emirates, which hosted six WSL matches and saw three league attendance records set in the process.

According to Slot, there are two key factors to getting a sell-out – holding matches at weekends at suitable times for families, and the opposition.

With many people attending a women’s football match for the first time, Slot says their context is the men’s game. So although a team like Tottenham are not one of the WSL’s big names, Arsenal built on their traditional rivalry, specifically targeting communities in north London.

“Their perception is that Arsenal-Spurs is a really big game and we built on that,” she says. The result – a record WSL attendance of 47,367 in 2022-23, a sell-out of 60,050 in 2023-24 and their highest attendance of the season of 56,784 in 2024-25.

Last season they increased the number of matches to nine at the Emirates but saw their average gate fall slightly to some 29,000.

Yet Slot is not perturbed. “I think we did really well last season,” she says. “The thing for me, is to maintain sustainable growth. So I would rather regularly have 29,000 than have one sell-out and then lots of 10,000s.

Success off the pitch has not been dependent on success on it, with Arsenal having gone six years without winning the WSL title, although they did end this campaign in spectacular style by becoming European champions.

The like of WSL giants Chelsea, who have been the dominant force in the WSL for the last six years must cast their eye enviously across London at the Gunners’ off-pitch growth. The Blues held just three of their matches at Stamford Bridge last season compared to four the previous year.

“We haven’t been successful just through luck, I would say this has been a clear, strategic objective by the club,” says Slot.

“We used a moment (Euro 2022), but we’ve also been very agile in our approach.”

However, she is keen to share as much as she can with other WSL clubs, adding “there’s a real openness in the WSL”.

“We all have an ambition to build the women’s game and promote it and to support each other,” she adds.

Chelsea have had an offer worth more than £42m for English winger Jamie Gittens rejected by Borussia Dortmund.

The 20-year-old already has a seven-year contract on the table and is thought to be keen on a move to Stamford Bridge.

But the two clubs are struggling to meet in the middle on their valuation despite the England Under-21s international not fitting into the system of manager Niko Kovac, who joined the German club in February.

The latest rejection casts doubt over whether Gittens will join Chelsea in time to take part in the Club World Cup, with a first transfer deadline for the competition approaching on Tuesday evening.

The Blues were also interested in signing AC Milan goalkeeper Mike Maignan but have opted to walk away over a difference in valuation.

Milan have been asking for £25m for the France international with just one year remaining on his current deal, but Chelsea value Maignan, who turns 30 next month, at about half that.

Gittens came through Manchester City’s academy before joining Dortmund in 2020. He made his Bundesliga debut two years later, and last season scored eight goals in 32 league appearances.