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Watford sack head coach Cleverley
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Watford have sacked head coach Tom Cleverley after the team failed to reach the Championship play-offs.
The Hornets finished 14th in the table after taking only one point from their last five games – a 1-1 season-ending draw with Sheffield Wednesday.
Former Manchester United, Everton and Watford midfielder Cleverley, capped 13 times by England, was appointed as interim boss in March 2024 following Valerien Ismael’s departure.
He was then confirmed in the post on a permanent basis the following month.
The 35-year-old was in charge for 60 games in total, winning 20 and losing 26.
Sporting director Gian Luca Nani said: “The time has come for a change and to build on what we believe is a young and talented squad that will have benefited from the experience of the Championship this season.
“It has been a privilege to work closely with Tom; to understand how he sees the game and his enthusiasm for everything here. He deserves to be recognised for this and I’m sure he will have a bright future in the game.”
Cleverley was the first head coach to remain in charge for an entire season since Javi Gracia in 2018-19.
He was unbeaten at home in his first 15 league games as boss, but results took a downturn following a 2-1 defeat by Cardiff on 29 December and they only took five points from the next nine matches.
Reports in Spain earlier this season claimed former Villarreal head coach Jose Rojo Martin, known as Pacheta, had been in talks with Watford to replace him.
In January, the club dismissed that as “pure speculation” and owner Gino Pozzo later said of Cleverley: “We are committed to support him and look forward to the challenges ahead together.”
Speaking last week, Cleverley said that hopes of achieving a play-off place had been undermined by injuries, particularly among his forwards.
“There’s no difference in the number of goals we’ve conceded from pre-January to post-January, but the amount of goals we’ve scored has dropped significantly,” he said.
He promised to learn the lessons of the campaign and added: “We spent 10 weeks in the play-offs [places], we showed real positive signs before the turn of the year and I think we can clearly identify where and why we’ve run out of a bit of steam.
“We’ve got an incredibly young squad, the average age is boosted up by one or two individuals, but apart from that it’s largely under 25 and the majority under 21 at the minute.
“The experiences they will have had this year – some bad ones – to really develop and ultimately improve from is one of the really exciting positives from this season.”
No Watford manager or head coach has lasted an entire calendar year in the job since Malky Mackay in 2010.
Since being relegated from the Premier League in 2022, they have finished 11th, 15th and now 14th.
‘Supporters will be upset and angry’ – analysis
By Geoff Doyle, BBC Three Counties Radio sport editor
This is going to go down very badly with Watford fans. Tom Cleverley was a really popular head coach – probably the most popular since Javi Gracia who took the club to a Wembley FA Cup final – and supporters will be upset and angry.
Cleverley was a former player who first joined the club when he was a youngster on loan from Manchester United and then came back towards the end of his career. He then became academy manager at the club before his role as first-team head coach.
Watford were seen as possible relegation candidates this season but Cleverley had them in and around the play-offs all season before they drifted away.
He also had to go through a seriously awkward situation in January where his club had to reassure him he wasn’t being sacked on the day of a game when reports in Spain suggested the club had a new man lined up.
The Watford board feel like it’s the right time for change and can point to a poor run of form in the last four months. But Watford fans’ favourite song this season has been about not caring about owner Gino Pozzo and only caring about Cleverley.
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- Watford
- Championship
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Injured Lions hopeful Hansen out for about five weeks
Due to an ankle injury, Ireland wing Mack Hansen will miss Connacht’s final two games of the United Rugby Championship.
Connacht ruled the 27-year-old, who was born in Australia, out for “approximately five weeks” in a squad update released on Tuesday.
When Andy Farrell unveils his British and Irish Lions squad on Thursday, Hansen hopes to be included in it.
Since Farrell made his debut for Ireland in February 2022, he has made 12 tries out of 28 appearances.
Hansen should have recovered before the Lions’ pre-tour game against Argentina in Dublin on June 20th.
After missing Connacht’s URC games against the Stormers and Lions due to a heel issue, Bundee Aki is back playing for the Lions.
As Leinster announced that Ireland captain Caelan Doris needed a shoulder operation on Monday, his hopes were shattered.
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- Irish Rugby
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Canada’s myth of unity
Canada is a haven for pleasing myths.
One agreeable caricature popular these days is of a land and a people united in happy solidarity to resist an unpopular president clamouring to add Canada as the 51st star on the stars and stripes flag.
Uncomfortable truth be told, more than a few Canadians are not wishing Mark Carney all that well as Canada’s Harvard-trained technocrat-turned-prime minister meets today for the first time the domineering commander-in-chief of the United States, Donald Trump.
A fair share of Canadians – still smarting from the Liberal Party’s remarkable revival on election night last week – will be rooting for the other guy who keeps talking about erasing the “artificial line” that separates the two bordering nations.
While Carney insists that Canada’s sovereignty is non-negotiable, I suspect Trump will continue to bellow privately and publicly that his ungrateful northern neighbour, having mooched off the US for far too long, best join it to form one “beautiful country”.
Despite broad expressions of new-found Canadian nationalism, including the boycott of US-made stuff and travel south of the 49th parallel, Trump has good reason to pursue his fever dream of a swollen empire.
The prickly fact Carney and company are loath to admit is that in parts of Canada, the idea of joining the US is not as radioactive as it ought to be.
The proof is in the polling.
A recent survey revealed that 18 percent of Conservative voters would be eager, apparently, to swap O Canada for a rousing rendition of the Star-Spangled Banner.
Let us pause to consider the jarring significance of this fantastical sentence.
Many modern-day ideological descendants of the party of Sir John A MacDonald – one of Canada’s founding fathers, as well as a drunkard and racist – are content to trade in their Canadian citizenship to declare an oath, hand-on-malleable-heart, to America.
The sobering story gets even more alarming the further West you venture.
According to the same poll, a halting 21 percent of Albertans would say “yes” to being absorbed into Trump’s ugly, disfiguring vision of America, where cruelty and vindictiveness are the defining governing ethos.
This is not the petering, verging on irrelevant sovereignty movement that has, at times, traumatised Canada since the late 1950s. This is not Quebec nationalists shielding and asserting their identity, language, and cultural survival.
No, this is a loud, disconcerting swath of the West – perpetually angry, isolated, and nursing a decades-long grievance – flirting not just with separation, but pining, it seems, for annexation.
For Canada’s cockeyed annexationists, Trump represents salvation from myopic politicians in Ottawa beholden to the stranglehold exercised in election after election by smug voters in Ontario and Quebec.
In this stubborn context, Trump’s crude, imperial designs are being treated as an opportunity, not a threat.
His pugnacious image of America, with its love for deregulation, muscular independence, and rejection of every stifling ounce of progressiveness, resonates with scores of Canadian Conservatives who feel abandoned by politicians more interested in currying favour with urban, “woke” constituencies in Toronto, Montreal, and beyond.
Trump’s combustible rhetoric – couched in the language of “injustice”, exceptionalism, and disdain for “globalist elites” – calls to a brewing sense of disillusionment with the existing state of Confederation among a growing number of Canadians.
The president’s calculated provocations – amplified by social media and sympathetic “alternative” news outlets – have bolstered the perception that Canadian federalism is “broken” and that the powers-that-be are not listening.
In this corrosive climate, defeated Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre must finally reckon with his role in promoting a narrative, grounded in estrangement and dysfunction, that has deepened divisions and eroded trust in public institutions.
In his parochial pursuit of power, Poilievre disparaged the nation he sought to lead, echoing – often almost verbatim – Trump’s seething resentment and polarising bombast.
The US president’s cynical efforts to undermine an erstwhile ally’s independence were abetted by a preening politician anxious to declare, again and again, that Canada is crumbling from within.
The potentially dire, unintended consequences are now becoming apparent.
Like all demagogues, Trump is adept at sniffing out vulnerability and weakness. And while most Canadians remain loyal to the Maple Leaf and are offended to their core by his oafish overtures, fissures are showing.
Trump, predictably, is exploiting them with, alternatively, bouts of performative menace and a grating grin.
Although she will dismiss the appellation, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith is, by word and deed, the patron saint of the province’s emboldened separatists.
Smith’s “Alberta Sovereignty Act” is not the benign assertion of provincial rights her allies inside and outside the legislative assembly claim it to be.
This is, in effect, Alberta declaring, sotto voce: “We’ll pick and choose which laws to follow.”
It is a blatant rebuff of federalism and an affront to the constitution itself.
Smith’s broadsides, denouncing central Canada’s betrayal and control, parallel Trump’s noxious modus operandi.
This is not about building pipelines or slashing taxes any more. It is about fomenting a sense of Alberta-as-victim, grooming a citizenry to view Canada not as home, but as an unyielding straitjacket.
It is Trumpism in oil-stained cowboy boots.
A coalition of national leaders – along what constitutes Canada’s narrow political spectrum – must take seriously the disaffection animating in the West.
That means embracing compromise and a wholesale commitment to the imperative that Canada’s always delicate unity cannot be taken for granted.
If the curse of alienation spreads, if more and more Westerners see themselves as outsiders in their own country, then the absurd will become the imaginable.
Perhaps not annexation, but fragmentation. And with that, the very notion of Canada as a coherent, inclusive nation could soon be at stake.
Trump’s pernicious prescriptions are not only a portal into an uncertain future, they pose an existential danger. Canada is confronting the remote, yet conceivable risk, of breaking not with a bang, but by invitation.
Brighton owner Bloom bids for 29% stake in Hearts
Owner of Hove Albion, Brighton & Tony Bloom has made a formal offer to purchase a 29% stake in Heart of Midlothian for just under £10 million.
The Scottish Premiership club’s major shareholder, the supporters’ group Foundation of Hearts (FoH), will take the proposal into account and need to have more than 50% of its members’ approval before it can be successful.
On May 26, a consultation period will end, with a vote taking place following an extraordinary general meeting.
Bloom would purchase shares with no voting rights, which would not have an impact on FoH’s 75.1% of the vote.
If successful, Bloom would have the option of having a representative rather than himself, and he would also have one seat on the board.
The Scottish FA would then be required to give its consent for the deal to be concluded if the terms are approved by FoH.
The proposed investment is a personal one, according to FoH, and Hearts won’t become a feeder club for Premier League side Brighton or Belgium’s Union Saint-Gilloise, where Bloom is a minority shareholder, or a member of a multi-club system.
Analysis of “Investment coming at the right time”
Since Bloom’s name first became associated with the club last year, the conversation has raged among many Hearts supporters.
The club will receive the money exactly when it needs to be, even if it is approved, and there is no compelling reason for it to be that way.
The 2025/26 campaign’s income will significantly decrease because there won’t be any European football to watch next season.
An additional nearly £10 million will be welcomed within the Hearts board with the desperately needed investment in the squad following a incredibly disappointing term.
However, as we’ve already seen in the past, money ultimately does not equal success. It’s all about how much money is made. Every transaction should have a value-for-money component.
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- Scottish Premiership
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Trump course to host revived Scottish Championship
The Scottish Championship will return to the course from August 7 through August 10th, making it the first time Donald Trump’s Aberdeenshire golf course will host a DP World Tour event.
The event will replace the canceled Czech Masters, which was held once before, in October 2020 at Fairmont St. Andrews.
The Menie neighborhood, 10 miles north of Aberdeen, was home to the president of the United States, and it hosted PGA Seniors tournaments in 2023 and 2024.
The DP World Tour’s CEO, Guy Kinnings, stated that “Trump International Golf Links Scotland has already established itself as one of the best modern links courses in the UK and promises to be a fantastic venue for the return of the Scottish Championship.”
The FedEx St Jude Championship in the PGA Tour’s season-ending play-offs, as well as the Chicago event in LIV Golf, will coincide with the $2.75 million (£2 million) prize fund.
The president, who purchased Turnberry in 2014, has remained financially invested and handed over control of his Scottish golf courses to his sons shortly before taking office for the first time in 2017.
This significant milestone, according to Eric Trump, executive vice president of The Trump Organization and the president’s son, reflects the team’s hard work and is a true testament to the outstanding golf and hospitality we offer in Scotland.
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- Golf