Egypt Upsets Italy at Confederations Cup

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Egypt stunned Italy, 1-0, on a 40th-minute goal by Mohamed Homos on Thursday, putting Egypt in a position to possibly advance to the semifinals of the Confederations Cup with another victory.

Homos out jumped Daniele De Rossi for a cross from Mohamed Abo Terika and headed the ball off the inside post and past goalkeeper Gianluigi Buffon.

Essam El Hadary made several tough saves for Egypt, the African champion, which lost, 4-3, to the five-time World Cup winner Brazil in its opening game.

Brazil leads Group B with 6 points after a 3-0 win over the United States; Italy is second, ahead of Egypt on goal differential. Egypt closes the first round Sunday against the United States. Also Sunday, Italy, the World Cup champion, plays Brazil in the tournament’s most-anticipated group-phase match. The top two teams from each group advance to the semifinals.

Italy Coach Marcello Lippi changed his front line after an opening 3-1 victory over the United States, starting Giuseppe Rossi at center forward, with Vincenzo Iaquinta on the right and Fabio Quagliarella on the left wing.

“We tried some different things, and it didn’t go very well,” Lippi said. “We wanted to play with two wide attackers and Rossi moving around in the middle, but we didn’t do anything we trained to do.”

After 20 minutes, Iaquinta moved to the center, Rossi went to the right flank and Quagliarella to the left. Both of Lippi’s usual center forwards, Luca Toni and Alberto Gilardino, started the game on the bench. Toni replaced Rossi in the 58th minute, with Iaquinta moving to the left and Quagliarella to the right.

“When Egypt started to play better and work harder they scored a goal from a corner, which is permissible,” Lippi said. “But then we stopped playing. It was a very ugly end to the first half. We tried to turn things around in the second half, but their goalkeeper was very good — he stopped four or five great chances. In the second half, we played fairly well.”

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Egypt Grabs Soccer World’s Attention

JOHANNESBURG — The goalkeeper went to his knees in prayer. His teammates rolled on the field, shirtless and ecstatic. The coach hugged his assistants and began to cry.

Egypt had just scored its greatest soccer victory, defeating Italy, the defending world champion, by 1-0 on Thursday night in the Confederations Cup. As players poured onto the field here, thousands poured into the streets of Cairo, waving flags and honking horns in startled delirium.

No one had expected anything from Egypt at this dress rehearsal for next year’s World Cup. It had won the African soccer championship six times, and was strong on the counterattack, but Egypt was considered a bit player on the world stage. Surely, it would be exposed against Brazil and Italy, which own nine World Cup titles between them.

“No Hope for Pharaohs,” blared a headline a week ago in a Confederations Cup preview in The Star newspaper here.

But no one counted on Egypt’s being such a brilliant soccer chameleon, adapting the style of its worldly opponents, playing samba offense in a narrow 4-3 loss to Brazil and door-bolt defense to become the first African team to defeat Italy.

And now Egypt is the talk of the Confederations Cup. It can advance to the semifinals of this eight-team tournament with a win Sunday against the United States and a draw or a loss by Italy against Brazil.

Coach Hassan Shehata remains beleaguered. His team arrived here having lost to Algeria and tied Zambia in the final round of World Cup qualifying. There is no guarantee that Egypt will even be here next year for what is widely considered the world’s most important sporting event.

But all of that was forgotten Thursday night. The scoreboard said, Egypt 1, Italy 0, and players rolled on the grass and Shehata hugged his assistant coaches and tears ran down his cheeks.

“He’s under so much pressure,” said Zak Abdel, an Egyptian who coaches goalkeepers for the United States national team and is a friend of Shehata’s. “The Egyptian media is very difficult. After the Brazil game, they said he was lucky. Whatever. He came back and beat Italy. It wasn’t luck.”

A former player, Shehata, 60, silver-haired and mustachioed, has coached the Egyptian national team since 2004. He is known as fair, honest and a strict disciplinarian. In the 2006 African Nations Cup, he tossed his star striker, Mido, off the team after the forward confronted him on the field after being substituted for during the semifinals.

The player sent on by Shehata then scored the winning goal, vindicating the coach. Shehata kept Mido out of the final, but allowed him to collect his victor’s medal. Tough but fair.

“He’s very organized,” Abdel said of Shehata. “Some players don’t like that. If practice is at 4 o’clock, some players wake up at one. Shehata wants you to be a professional, up at 7 for breakfast. After four or five years, the players realized they come into camp to work. Before it was vacation. You do whatever you want. Now it is work.”

Shehata played another hunch on Thursday, inserting midfielder Mohamed Homos into the lineup. Five minutes before halftime, Homos drove a header into the net for the game’s only score. Then goalkeeper Essam el Hadary, alert and aggressive and inspired, made save after save to thwart Italy, diving, sliding, sitting, anything to keep the ball from crossing his line.

It happens this way all the time, said Bob Bradley, the American coach. This is why soccer is so beautiful and cruel.

Teams come into international tournaments after long club seasons. Some players are enthused, others are tired. Their motivation can be sprightly or fatigued, their concentration frisky or exhausted. A great team can fail and an underdog can succeed.

Bradley pointed to the 2002 World Cup opener, when France, the defending champion, lost to Senegal. In the 1990 World Cup opener, Argentina, also the defending champion, lost to Cameroon. Africa is at it again in the Confederations Cup, with Egypt threatening Brazil and defeating Italy, soccer minnows swimming with whales.

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Losers’ Bracket: Try to Catch It if You Can

Welcome to the losers’ bracket. That’s what the weekend interleague frolics at Yankee Stadium feel like after the Mets and the Yankees were cuffed around by divisional rivals in midweek.

In their annual June appointment, the Mets rallied for a 6-2 victory on a soggy Saturday afternoon, after their vintage collapse Friday night, when Luis Castillo muffed a two-out pop fly that allowed the tying and winning runs to score.

Castillo’s clank off the heel of his glove was worse than anything Marvelous Marv Throneberry ever did at first base, was downright Bucknerian, except that it did not lose the sixth game of a World Series.

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In an admirable display of professionalism, Castillo met reporters before Saturday’s game, telling them he had no option but to move forward. He was saved by the quotidian renewal of baseball that allows somebody to perform a hideous error late one evening and be back leading off the next afternoon.

Castillo was greeted with loud, derisive applause by appreciative Yankee fans, but he might have anticipated that. And wonder of wonders, life did begin again. Castillo stroked a hit in the second inning, handled grounders and a line drive, beat out a roller in the eighth and generally kept chugging along.

The long and loopy Friday game came after the two New York teams had stumbled around against the two division leaders, the Red Sox and the Phillies.

The interleague schedule is something of a burden for teams with intracity opponents, giving the Yankees and the Mets six challenging games every season, just as it does for teams around Los Angeles, the Bay Area and Chicago.

This year’s interleague demands seem downright cruel: the Yankees just got whacked three times in Boston, giving them an 0-8 record against the Red Sox, while the Mets lost two of three to the Phillies. It’s a long season, but both New York teams gave indications of not being as good as their rivals.

“But it’s good for baseball,” the Mets’ manager, Jerry Manuel, said of interleague play. “It outweighs the fact that you are playing a good team.”

Is there anything positive that can come from six games against the Yankees?

“It tells you where you are as a team,” Manuel said. “And you still have 100 games left.”

Manuel has a unique perspective, having managed the White Sox. Cajoled into comparing the rivalries, he said, “I thought the Chicago thing was a little more intense.”

“It was so intense,” he added, “that we had to play all day games at our place, and that hurt us.”

Why did they have to play only day games on the South Side, which has played a vast majority of its games at night for half a century?

“Fights,” Manuel said. “Tyson, Ali, stuff like that.” There were no fights Friday. Folks who can afford the outrageous prices in this Yankee Stadium palace are probably not brawlers, at least in the physical sense.

The crowd in the stadium was decidedly mixed, supporting a current survey by The New York Times, with Cornell University and NY1 News, that indicated 34 percent of New Yorkers favored the Yankees, while 25 percent favored the Mets. Thirty-four percent said they had no allegiance to either team, and 6 percent said they liked both teams, if that is humanly possible.

Yankee fans might even have gotten their money’s worth Friday from a play they will remember a long time — a seasoned major league second baseman performing the modern one-handed stab at a ball in the throes of gravity. Apparently, it is absolutely against the contemporary code of honor to raise the other hand alongside the glove to capture the ball — or swipe at a fumble, in an emergency. Style counts, after all.

To be fair, Mark Teixeira, the solid Yankee who legged his way from first to home on the play, did allude to a slight wind that carried the high, drifting pop-up by Alex Rodriguez. There is a draft in the Yankees’ new launching pad, and this was Castillo’s first game there, but it was one epic blunder.

Castillo compounded his error by hitting the deck to retrieve the ball, thereby depriving himself of being in position to make a strong throw as Teixeira steamed home. Look at it this way: Whose knees would not buckle after making an atrocious error like that?

“I need to catch the ball,” Castillo said later, standing up and speaking like an adult. “I feel bad. I feel bad. I need to catch the ball.” He dropped his voice, and all that could be heard was the word “tomorrow,” which came up soon enough.

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The inadequacies of the Yankees were apparent Friday, when Joba Chamberlain reminded everybody that he was still essentially a novelty act — flameball youth trying to learn the starter’s craft, in public. Very public.

Chamberlain had one of those 100-pitch, two-hit, four-inning performances that situate him exactly halfway between Nolan Ryan and Steve Dalkowski. Then Andy Pettitte was extremely mediocre on Saturday.

Manuel and his Yankee counterpart, Joe Girardi, have been reminding their players that there are 100 or so games left. After watching both New York teams struggle against the big dogs during the week and now displaying pitching woes and mistakes on the weekend, they may adopt the same mantra: Thank goodness for the wild card.

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A Hall of Fame Find by a Sports Reporter

So here, potentially, is the ultimate — and fitting — commentary on the 1998 home run extravaganza that supposedly saved Major League Baseball from its self-inflicted collective bargaining wounds of four years earlier:

The reporter who doused the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa celebration of strength with a long article that raised a short question — is it real? — has a chance to be voted into the Hall of Fame before either of the now-shamed sluggers.

Steve Wilstein, the former Associated Press reporter who spotted a bottle of androstenedione on the shelf of McGwire’s dressing stall and got him to admit to using the then-over-the-counter, testosterone-producing supplement,has been nominated for the J. G. Taylor Spink Award and admission to the baseball writers’ wing in Cooperstown, N.Y.

“I’ve only been nominated by the writers in Seattle,” Wilstein said in a telephone interview. “I’m not one of the finalists yet, and I don’t want to sound as if I’m campaigning. But I’d like to think the decision will be more of a referendum about writers covering the issues than it will be about me.”

McGwire left the sport before it got around to the messy task of testing for performance-enhancers in 2003 but convicted himself in the court of Hall of Fame-voting opinion by refusing to say his little bottled helpers didn’t go beyond androstenedione during Congressional hearings in 2005.

Sosa was a serial denier, including under Congressional oath, but has now been identified by The New York Times as having been among the 104 positives during tests conducted primarily as a survey in 2003.

Eleven years after McGwire obliterated Roger Maris’s record of 61 homers in a season with 70, with Sosa pushing him through the summer with 66, the Sosa revelation brings more symmetry than surprise. The 1998 race that captivated the country is now burnished with a figurative asterisk. Barry Bonds’s subsequent assault on McGwire, 73 homers in 2001, is a tainted legal labyrinth.

Even Alex Rodriguez, prematurely presented as the great, clean home run hope by some who forgot that he, too, was a product of the 1990s, was ensnared before he could even mount a serious run at Bonds’s career mark. With many a superstar already implicated, names will continue to drip from this faucet. The fallout, however, was always more about a negligent and ignorant culture than the occasional plumber who did sloppy work and got caught.

The Sosa news did not make Wilstein — gone three years from the daily sportswriting life and living in Washington State — want to say ‘I told you so.’ He is simply eager to remind people that the next time a reporter treads into sacred territory and discovers something untoward, don’t excoriate that person for doing his or her job.

“I love the game, grew up in Brooklyn a Dodgers fan, with a three-fingered Duke Snider glove,” he said. “My daughter grew up in the Bay Area a Mark McGwire fan. I was never an enemy of baseball, which is how many people in the game and other writers saw me.”

Back then, you expected such defensiveness from the lifers. Tony La Russa, McGwire’s manager at the time, levied the popular snooping charge against Wilstein, even though the bottle was on a shelf and all a reporter had to do was read, if not spell, androstenedione.

Others were flummoxed by the assertion that a magic potion might be of assistance in the hitting of a curveball, a naïveté born of insulation and the belief that baseball, being true Americana, was on a higher moral plane than less refined pastimes.

Maybe a bat was occasionally corked, a pitch doctored, a sign stolen. But steroids were only for Olympic swimmers and sprinters and incredible football hulks.

Wilstein had seen the East German female swimmers up close, and Ben Johnson before he tested positive in Seoul. To him, McGwire and Sosa looked no different. They looked chemically enhanced.

“We hear lots of talk these days about how baseball writers missed the story, and to a large degree some of them did,” Geoff Baker, who covers the Mariners for The Seattle Times, told Bloomberg News while discussing Wilstein’s nomination. “History will show that he did an excellent job at what he was supposed to do.”

I remember being in the Shea Stadium press box on a Friday night in late August 1998 — McGwire and the Cardinals happened to be in town — when an editor sent an e-mail message to me with the thoroughly researched Wilstein article, which included quotations from Sosa of the not-me-man variety.

Later that night, McGwire waved off a question about androstenedione, which has since been banned. He has been ducking the more damning questions since. Considering where combative denials got Bonds and Roger Clemens, it hasn’t been the worst public strategy.

Sosa could yet be held legally accountable for his denials and will certainly move into the purgatory holding pen, alongside McGwire, for baseball’s drug cheats once considered to be Hall of Fame locks.

Put them in, I say, with steroid scars inscribed on their plaques. But put Steve Wilstein in first for hitting the biggest home run in 1998.

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Rodriguez Falters as Mets Fall Again to Orioles

BALTIMORE — The Mets want to win, although it may not always seem that way. Even on nights like Thursday, when their 5-4 loss to the Baltimore Orioles offered evidence to the contrary.



The ingredients to their latest defeat, their sixth in eight games, included a ninth-inning breakdown by their generally indestructible closer, Francisco Rodriguez; a practically unprecedented comeback by the Orioles, who had lost each of their previous 34 games when trailing after eight innings; and the second winning hit in as many nights from their newest nemesis — and perhaps future teammate — Aubrey Huff. All this occurred after the Mets overcame a two-run deficit through five innings to lead, 4-2, after seven.

“You know at some point that he’s not going to be perfect,” Manager Jerry Manuel said of Rodriguez, who blew his first save chance of the season Friday night at Yankee Stadium when Luis Castillo dropped a pop-up that enabled the tying and winning runs to score.

“You hope that when he’s not, we got a little bit more room for him to work with,” Manuel added.

By now, Manuel knows that is too much to ask of a Mets team (33-31) that must play nearly flawlessly to win. As it was, when Daniel Murphy drove in the go-ahead run with a seventh-inning double — his first extra-base hit since May 9 — and when Sean Green guided the Mets through a shaky eighth, they were already pushing their boundaries.

Nothing, though, was flawless about Rodriguez’s ninth inning. Almost immediately, he recognized that he had poor command of his fastball. But what surprised him and catcher Omir Santos was how selective the Orioles had suddenly become. “They swing at almost everything” is how Santos described their approach.

Facing the bottom of the Orioles’ lineup, Rodriguez allowed a leadoff double to Matt Wieters before walking pinch-hitter Nolan Reimold on five pitches. Then came a pivotal play: Santos fielded Brian Roberts’s bunt up the third-base line and, with no other options, fired to third. It was a close play, and the third-base umpire, Tim Timmons, called the pinch runner Felix Pie safe in a ruling that sent the Mets dugout into a fit of rage. David Wright recoiled in shock. Manuel ran out to argue, but Timmons could not be swayed.

With the bases loaded, Rodriguez walked the free-swinging Adam Jones, forcing in Pie with the tying run. He recovered to strike out Nick Markakis looking, but miscalculated when the next hitter, Huff, came to the plate. Expecting him to take the first pitch, Rodriguez tried to get ahead with a curveball. Huff drove it to right field, giving Mets General Manager Omar Minaya one more reason to seriously consider acquiring him and his potent left-handed bat before the July 31 trade deadline.

“It was an awful, awful outing,” Rodriguez said. “I’m a human being. Unfortunately, days like this are going to happen.”

They just seem to happen more often to the Mets, and Manuel, after another trying loss, was asked to rank this one. He said he did not know if he could: every one counts the same.

INSIDE PITCH

John Maine will not come off the disabled list Monday, when he can be activated, and the Mets are uncertain when he will rejoin the rotation. Guy Conti, the organization’s rehabilitation coordinator, told The Associated Press that Maine still felt a “pinch” toward the back of his shoulder while throwing a 60-pitch simulated game Thursday in Port St. Lucie, Fla. But the pitching coach Dan Warthen, who spoke with Conti, said he was not told about any physical setbacks. ... Oliver Perez threw three scoreless innings (48 pitches) in an extended spring training game and is on track to pitch again Tuesday.

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The Unknown Is Troubling Yankee Hitters

Baseball players love familiarity. With the Yankees, that desire for familiarity apparently extends to the opposing starter: they have not liked facing unfamiliar pitchers for years.

It was a problem for the Yankees when Joe Girardi was a catcher for them in the late 1990s, and the problem has persisted now that Girardi is in his second year as the manager.

In their past five games, the Yankees were silenced by four starters they had never faced before: Craig Stammen, John Lannan and Shairon Martis of the Washington Nationalsand Fernando Nieve of the Mets. They combined to hold the Yankees to five earned runs in 27 1/3 innings. The Yankees lost three of the four games.

The only familiar starter in that stretch was Johan Santana, who gave up a career-worst nine runs.

How can the Yankees batter Santana, a two-time Cy Young Award winner, and get baffled by pitchers with lesser pedigrees?

“I don’t really have any concrete theories,” Girardi said. “We talk about it as a staff. I think everyone loves to see something that they’ve seen before because they’re used to it, in a sense, no matter what walk of life you’re in.”

The Yankees are in the middle of a stretch of unfamiliar starters scheduled for six consecutive games. The Yankees will face the Florida Marlins’ Sean West, Josh Johnson and Chris Volstad this weekend.

Girardi said he was concerned that the Yankees have wilted against pitchers who are relatively unknown to them.

“We have to find a way to be better against these clubs,” he said.

The problem is not confined to the Yankees. The St. Louis Cardinals’ Albert Pujols, who is perhaps the best hitter in baseball, said last month that he would rather face elite pitchers like C. C. Sabathia, Jake Peavy, Carlos Zambrano and Roy Oswalt than a pitcher he does not know.

“Sometimes, I have success against these guys because I’m really focused, and I know those guys are going to bring their best game,” he said. “And I need to bring my best game. Sometimes, I get discouraged about facing a rookie or somebody else because you think he’s going to make an automatic mistake. But sometimes that’s not the case. Sometimes, he pitches me tough, too.”

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Nadal Withdraws From Wimbledon

Rafael Nadal announced Friday that he would skip Wimbledon this year, citing tendinitis in his knees.

“I played underneath myself for the last few months,” he said at a news conference at the All England Club, only three days before the 2009 championships begin. Nadal was the top-seeded player.

“I could not play close to my best,” Nadal said, insisting he would work hard to “come back as soon as possible.”

Asked if he had been told by doctors that he was suffering from a long-term or permanent injury, Nadal replied: “I can recover for sure.”

Nadal’s departure commences a symphony of musical chairs within the men’s draw.

But under rules observed at the four major international championships, Juan Martin del Potro of Argentina, seeded fifth, moves into Nadal’s slot at the top of the draw. James Blake of the United States, seeded 17th, moves into Del Potro’s position. Nicolas Kiefer of Germany, seeded 33rd, moves into Blake’s position.

The unseeded Thiago Alves of Brazil, who lost in the final qualifying round, takes Kiefer’s slot, gaining entry into the main draw, making him what is customarily called a Lucky Loser.

Nadal announced his decision after playing an exhibition against Stanislas Wawrinka. Although he won the first set, 6-4, he lost the second, 7-6, and then lost a tie breaker. On Thursday, it was clear that his knees were bothering him. He played Lleyton Hewitt in an exhibition and lost, 6-4, 6-3, at the Hurlingham Club in London.

The Times Online, referring to Toni Nadal, his uncle and coach, reported:

When Toni urged his nephew to “bend down” to the ball during the second set yesterday, the Wimbledon champion appeared to mutter, “I can’t.”


According to records of the All England Club, Nadal is the second player in the past 35 years not to defend his championship. Goran Ivanesevic of Croatia won the title in 2001 and did not compete in 2002.

Some tennis observers have openly questioned the extent of Nadal’s knee injury after his fourth-round loss to Robin Soderling at the French Open, calling it gamesmanship or a public relations smokescreen.

But it is precisely Nadal’s never-say-die playing style, one that involves covering every inch of the court, and often several feet beyond the baseline and doubles alleys, that has both battered opponents into submission in his rise to the top and battered his knees through cumulative wear and tear. The effect of this tenacious physicality is compounded by the number of matches he plays — he enters nearly every tournament, and usually reaches the finals.

As Cynthia Gorney writes in The New York Times Magazine:

Nadal is muscled-up and explosive and relentless, so that his best tennis looks not like a gift from heaven but instead like the product of ferocious will. His victories and his taped-up knees and his years as a very good No. 2 in the world all resonate together, as though the rewards and the wages of individual effort had been animated in a single human being: if you hurl yourself at a particular goal furiously enough and long enough you may tear your body up in the process, but maybe you can get there after all.

While it’s too early to know for sure, if Nadal is out for an extended period, several possibilities emerge:

1) Nadal’s early exit at Roland Garros not only paved the way for Roger Federer to win the French Open and complete a career Slam, but now his absence at Wimbledon also opens the door for the Swiss great to regain the No. 1 ranking he so desperately craves and continue to dominate tennis for years to come.

2) Andy Murray, fresh off his Queen’s Club victory, pulls off an upset of Federer at Wimbledon and at least temporarily takes Nadal’s place in the rivalry that has held a thrilling stranglehold on the sport for over four years.

3) Over the next year or two, the game moves beyond the Federer-Nadal era entirely, leaving Murray and Djokovic to fend off del Potro, Tsonga, Cilic, Monfils and other talented up-and-comers. There could be a different winner at each of the Slams. Imagine that!

4) Nadal takes time to recuperate and comes back at top form. But does he play a different style of tennis? Does he play fewer events?

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