Watch Great Britain’s Francesca Jones make a brilliant recovery after dropping her racquet during a rally to win the point against Ukraine’s Yuliia Starodubtseva in the first round at Wimbledon.
Watch live coverage from every court on BBC iPlayer.
Sunderland have completed the signing of Senegal midfielder Habib Diarra in a reported club record £30m deal from Strasbourg.
The 21-year-old, who scored against England in a friendly at the City Ground in June, has penned a five-year contract at the Stadium of Light.
Diarra made 31 appearances for Strasbourg in all competitions last term, helping the club to a seventh-placed finish in Ligue 1 as they secured European football for only the second time in 20 years.
“Everyone saw last season’s success and I guarantee that I’ll give everything for this team and fight for these colours in the Premier League. I’m ready for this challenge and I can’t wait to get started. “
Diarra becomes Sunderland’s second arrival this summer as they prepare for their first season back in the Premier League since 2016-17 and is seen as a direct replacement for Jobe Bellingham who joined Borussia Dortmund in June for a fee worth up to £30m.
Petra Kvitova’s goodbye to her “special place” Wimbledon was always going to be emotional.
Not everyone has celebrated their biggest professional and personal milestones here.
It was here that she won her two Grand Slam titles and on Centre Court that she got engaged, and it was during the Championships fortnight last year that she gave birth to her son.
So when Court One witnessed her final match at the All England Club before she retires later this year, the tears flowed for her and the tissues came out in the stands.
A 6-3 6-1 defeat by 10th seed Emma Navarro was met with a standing ovation for a player who has long held a reputation of being one of the nicest players on the tour.
Given the rare honour of a few minutes on the microphone despite losing the match, Kvitova said she wished they “could have played for a bit longer”.
“I will miss Wimbledon, I will miss tennis, I will miss you fans – but I am ready for the next chapter of life as well,” the 35-year-old said.
“I can’t wait to be back as a member. “
With her family watching from her box, she thanked them all, including the few coaches she has had, adding: “My first was my dad, my last one is my husband. “
Her voice broke when she spoke in Czech when she addressed her family, and she took her time leaving the court and taking in her final moments there.
She had been outplayed by American Navarro in an error-strewn performance, the final curtain coming when she double-faulted on match point.
But there were occasional glimpses of the blistering forehand that drove her success on grass, as well as the thumping serves which were part of a game that propelled her to world number two.
“It was surreal looking across the court to see her serving bombs at me,” Navarro said. “It was intimidating at times.
“Petra’s had an amazing career. It was a pleasure to play against her today. “
Brought up in a sleepy Moravian town where she played on the local clay courts, grass was not a natural surface for Kvitova and her first two appearances at the All England Club ended in first-round exits.
However, with a big serve and booming baseline shots, she had the perfect game for grass and from 2010 to 2015 reached at least the quarter-finals, lifting the trophy in 2011 and 2014.
In December 2016 she suffered a career-threatening injury in a knife attack at her home, where the nerves in her racquet-holding hand were severed, but she defied the odds – doctors gave her a 10% chance of competing again – to return five months later.
Since then she has not made it past the fourth round here, though she did make another Grand Slam final at the 2019 Australian Open, but “Wimby”, as she calls it, has always been her favourite tournament.
She missed last year’s Championships while on maternity leave and returned to the tour in February.
She won only one of the nine matches she has played as a mum and announced last month that she would be hanging up her racquet after the US Open in September – but not before accepting a wildcard for one final Wimbledon.
Test cricket is brilliant.
You may have known that long before England’s defeat of India in the first Test, or discovered it through what happened at Headingley.
Last Wednesday morning, the day after England strolled a chase of 371, there was a spike in social media engagement with posts giving love to the five-day game. “Test cricket is the best format”, “the Rolls Royce of our great game”, “there’s nothing else like Test cricket”. Naturally, there was a bit of Hundred bashing in there, too.
These outbursts of support each time there is a half-decent Test are a strange phenomenon, akin to a subculture being vindicated for a passion in something that would otherwise seem a bit weird. Like admitting to a love of Warhammer, pro wrestling or McFly (no, yes, sometimes – in case you’re wondering).
Compared with other sports, there is not the same fervour after a Premier League thriller, tense final round of a golf major or five-set epic at Wimbledon. Not the same need to proclaim “that is why (insert sport here) is the best”.
There are good reasons for Test cricket devotees to feel under attack, and therefore moved to defend their corner.
This is not meant to be a dig at franchise and short-form leagues. They can be excellent in their own right. In a competitive global market, it is remarkable that what is essentially a new sport has become so lucrative in little more than 20 years.
Where all the different elements of cricket should be able to rub along together for the betterment of each other, we have somehow landed in a civil war, almost exclusively fuelled by the game’s administrators.
Take The Hundred as an example. English cricket is right to have a franchise league and the money due to come in should be lauded as a fantastic opportunity for the sport in this country. Instead, The Hundred has never recovered from the awful PR of its launch, a message of ‘cricket for people who do not like cricket’. It alienated those already enthralled by the game, who are now stirred to protect their bit of it.
The fabric of Test cricket has been chipped away by poor scheduling and the pursuit of dollars, pounds and rupees. If it is eradicated to nothing, leaving a revolving roadshow of leagues, cricket will be infinitely poorer for it.
An obvious solution is to separate the calendar into dedicated windows for the different formats, just like football and rugby ringfence various times for international and domestic competitions. Now it is down to cricket’s governors to show the required guts and gumption.
The irony of Test cricket being under attack is the on-field product has never been so good.
Since the beginning of 2024, West Indies have won in Brisbane, England in Hyderabad and Sri Lanka at The Oval.
Even in the past week, away from Leeds, West Indies flirted with pulling off something special against the Aussies in Barbados, and in Zimbabwe 19-year-old Lhuan-dre Pretorius became the youngest man to make a hundred for South Africa. Keep an eye on him, a megastar of the future.
More broadly, runs are being scored faster, wickets taken more regularly, there are more close matches and fewer draws than ever before.
The run-rate across all Test cricket in the past three years has been 3. 60, the highest of any three-year period. Over the same time, less than 10% of Tests were drawn, down from more than 20% across the previous 20 years and more than 40% historically.
It is a disregard for draws that marks England’s Bazballers out as innovators.
It would be hyperbole to say they have saved Test cricket, still not unreasonable to say they have altered the perspective on the way it could be played – 37 Tests and counting since Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum united, only one soggy draw among them.
Draws can be thrilling – some wonderful Tests have been drawn – but by being so bullish about not considering a stalemate as a possibility, this England team have added a thrilling aspect to the five-day narrative.
For those watching, it leaves the wonder of how England will attempt to force a result, regardless of the situation. For opponents, it leaves the fear of always being in danger, the confusion of what it will take to beat Stokes’ team. For England, it gives the clarity of thought to attempt and comfortably complete a run chase like the one in Leeds, removing the seed of doubt sewn by the safety net of a draw.
As an opening chapter of a 10-part story, comprising this India series and the Ashes against Australia this winter, Headingley was perfect, more than living up to the pre-match billing. There will have been plenty of other series with as much expectation as the two England are undertaking, though it is hard to remember a time when Test cricket has been in such sharp focus for a period of time as prolonged as the next seven months.
England were favourites at Headingley and could, probably should, have lost. India paid the price for dropped catches, a crucial Harry Brook wicket off a no-ball and a tail that refused to wag.
As a result, the tourists are in a muddle at Edgbaston. Do they play another one of their Jasprit Bumrah chips, leaving only one for the rest of the series? Will they find a place for magician wrist-spinner Kuldeep Yadav and simultaneously boost their lower-order batting?
England are settled, with the prospect of Jofra Archer returning for the third Test next week at Lord’s, the ground where he made his electrifying debut six years ago. Steve Smith and all that.
It would be good for the series if India won this week. Level at 1-1 is all to play for, 2-0 down is as good as over. The visitors will have to battle history – they have never won in eight visits to Edgbaston spanning 58 years.
From Paris to Lisbon, locals and tourists are struggling as a powerful heatwave grips European countries. Temperatures are soaring past 40°C, prompting school closures, tourist attraction restrictions, and warnings about wildfires and climate change.
Israeli forces have killed at least 102 Palestinians in attacks across the Gaza Strip, medical sources told Al Jazeera, even as United States President Donald Trump claimed that he would be “very firm” with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on ending Israel’s war on the Palestinian enclave.
Israeli attacks on Tuesday destroyed clusters of homes in the north and south of Gaza, amid fears of yet another looming ground invasion.
The attacks come ahead of a planned visit next week by Netanyahu to Washington, DC. Trump said on Tuesday that the Israeli prime minister wanted to end the war on Gaza, even as his forces ramp up attacks in Gaza.
Among the Palestinians killed were 16 hungry aid seekers who died when Israeli soldiers attacked crowds at aid distribution hubs run by the controversial US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), according to medical sources.
They are the latest victims in a wave of daily killings at these sites, which have killed nearly 600 Palestinians since GHF took over limited aid deliveries in Gaza in late May amid a crippling Israeli blockade.
More than 170 major international charities and nongovernmental organisations have called for an immediate end to GHF, which rights groups say is operating in violation of international principles.
“Palestinians in Gaza face an impossible choice: starve or risk being shot while trying desperately to reach food to feed their families,” a joint statement read.
GHF brings “nothing but starvation and gunfire to the people of Gaza,” it added.
Israeli forces also attacked Gaza City in the north, where it recently issued forced evacuation orders for residents of the area, which has already been bombarded into rubble. At least five people were killed when an Israeli quadcopter struck a gathering of people, local news agency Wafa reported.
At least 82 percent of Gaza is now an Israeli-militarised zone or under forced displacement threats, according to the United Nations, warning people have nowhere to go.
Ismail, a resident of the Sheikh Radwan suburb of Gaza City, said that newly displaced families were setting up tents in the road, after fleeing from areas north and east of the city and finding no other ground available.
“We don’t sleep because of the sounds of explosions from tanks and planes. The occupation is destroying homes east of Gaza, in Jabalia and other places around us,” he said.
In Khan Younis and its al-Mawasi area in the south, at least 12 Palestinians were killed when a home belonging to the al-Zanati family was targeted. Separately, a child was killed and several others wounded when an Israeli air strike struck a displacement camp.
Several more were killed in an Israeli attack west of the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, according to sources at al-Awda Hospital, while two others were killed and several wounded in a separate attack on a UN-run school sheltering displaced families in the al-Maghazi refugee camp.
In a statement, the Israeli army said it attacked Gaza more than 140 times in the past 24 hours, claiming all those hit were “terror targets” and “militants”.
The attacks come as hospitals in the devastated enclave struggle to cope with the influx of people amid a severe shortage of medical supplies and much-needed fuel.
Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud, reporting from Gaza City, said critical services at the al-Shifa Hospital – which has come under attack and besieged several times throughout Israel’s assault on Gaza – will soon come to a halt.
“Critical services at al-Shifa Hospital have either stopped or will stop in the coming hours as backup generators are running out of fuel,” Mahmoud said.
“This hospital was once the largest healthcare facility in Gaza, but has slowly turned into a waiting room for death, not just because of the war wounds, but because of a lack of fuel that keeps everything running,” he said.
The desperate situation in Gaza is increasing the pressure on world leaders to secure a deal that would end the war.
Trump continues to maintain that a ceasefire deal is close, and that he hopes one will be secured “sometime next week”, during Netanyahu’s White House visit.
Israeli Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, a close Netanyahu ally, is in Washington this week for talks with senior officials on a Gaza ceasefire, Iran and other matters.
Senior Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said pressure by Trump on Israel would be key to any breakthrough in stalled ceasefire efforts.
“We call upon the US administration to atone for its sin towards Gaza by declaring an end to the war,” he said.
Al Jazeera’s Hamdah Salhut, reporting from Amman, said there is “cautious optimism” in Israel regarding a ceasefire.
“But there are still a lot of concerns, especially among family members of Israeli captives who have been calling for a deal,” Salhut said, adding that Netanyahu “has never signalled he wants to end the war”.