England suffered the first injury scare of their tour to the Caribbean yesterday when a freak accident forced Mark Butcher to be carried off Sabina Park with sprained ankle ligaments. Yorick Williams added 13 for Bears, who have two home games to come against Sharks.With Bears and Sharks outclassing all others in the BBL – Towers are in third place – the title seems certain to be settled by those two clashes, with Sheffield needing to win both as they have already lost twice at home to Bears this season.The bottom club Birmingham Bullets’ season took another twist yesterday when the coach, Steve Tucker, returned to America on “indefinite leave of absence” due to a family crisis The assistant coach, Darran Ling, will take over.. “But the most important thing for me is keeping dead still on those blocks, and then when the gun goes, that’s when I go.”If he can do that, the rest should take care of itself.. Brighton Bears cruised past London Towers by 89-69 at the Brighton Centre last night to pull two points clear of the defending champions, Sheffield Sharks, at the top of the British Basketball League. Both Shawn Crawford, a former World Indoor 200m champion who won the US title in 6.47sec, and the runner-up John Capel, an Olympic 200m finalist, are capable of pushing Gardener to his limits.”I will have to equal my personal best or better it to win the title,” Gardener said. “I thought the gun was going to go to call us back, but it didn’t,” he said at the time “I came to Birmingham so geared up…

Jason Gardener, who will seek his first global title in the short sprint two days from now at the World Indoor Championships in Budapest, knows that as well as anyone.
Last Friday week, at the Norwich Union Grand Prix in Birmingham, the 28-year-old was expected to maintain the pre-eminence he has established this season, but was distracted by a sequence of false starts that saw the American runner Coby Miller dispute his disqualification with the trackside referee.When the field finally got underway, Gardener, as in a bad dream, failed to go with it, beginning his running from a standing start after recovering from what appeared to be a daze. Neither is he convinced that illegal substances are never used in equestrian sport. “There’s always a section of the human race that tries to keep a step ahead of the testers, but people do get caught out,” he said.. More than any other sporting event, the 60 metres requires competitors to start well in order to be successful. So far increased testing after the dressage in international contests has failed to uncover a single known sedative.The few who are caught at national level tend to be inexperienced riders competing in intro classes, with positive dope tests usually occurring because the horse had previously been treated with a banned substance that is still in its system.Durrant would like the International Equestrian Federation to eliminate the “grey areas” whereby some herbal remedies are still permitted – although Valerian, which was sometimes administered as a feed additive, is now on the banned list. “We’ve almost got to have a blanket ban and a Draconian approach to get rid of the grey areas,” he said.Yogi Breisner, the Great Britain team manager, would also like the problem of herbal remedies to be tackled, even though he is not convinced that they are effective.

I don’t believe this is a particular problem, but we need to be streetwise and we must be prepared to be proactive. It’s all part of the process of keeping the sport clean.”The dressage phase, which has become increasingly influential, is now seen as the most likely area in which an undetectable wonder drug, claiming to promote well-being and calmness in the horse, might lead the unwary astray. “It’s up to us to eliminate the risk of temptation that comes from advances in science. It will depend on how we react mentally,” he said.
In a game in which Great Britain had the edge in possession and scoring opportunities, a nervous display ended with the game slipping away in the final moments as memories of Poland’s 5-2 victory in Osaka in the last Olympic qualifier came back to haunt them.It might have been different if Tom Bertram had not shot wide with a sixth-minute penalty corner.

Great Britain’s coach, Jason Lee, was understandably disappointed with his team’s 2-1 defeat by Poland in their first game of the Olympic qualifying tournament here, but he was not deflated “Not an ideal start but our aim is still within our reach. Bullets have won just a single BBL game in 27 starts and unless they win six of the last nine the former play-off champions will have compiled the worst record in the club’s history.Avoiding that ignominy falls on Tucker’s young English assistant, Darran Ling, and his first assignment is Sunday’s trip to Leicester Riders, one place above Bullets in the table and their only victims in 31 games in all competitions.. The protesters unfurled giant black banners near the entrance of the Athens University. One read “The Olympics are about bribes, doping and concrete. Most Birmingham Bullets fans had their wish yesterday when the coach, Steve Tucker, left the British Basketball League’s bottom club, though not under the circumstances even his severest critics would have wished. Central Athens was besieged by around 150 anarchists yesterday protesting against the massive police measures planned to keep the Olympic Games safe, as well as the fact that the Games are taking place at all.