Fleetwood shares lead with Scheffler and Thomas

Travelers Championship second round-9 S Scheffler (US), J Thomas (US), T Fleetwood (Eng); -8 J Day (Aus); -7 D McCarthy (US), A Eckroat (US); -6 N Taylor (Can), K Bradley (US)Selected others: -5 R McIlroy (NI); -3 H Hall (Eng); -2 R MacIntyre (Sco); +1 A Rai (Eng); +3 M Fitzpatrick (Eng); +5 S Lowry (Ire); Full leaderboard
Tommy Fleetwood made two eagles in a second-round 65 to take a share of the lead in the Travelers Championship in Connecticut.The 34-year-old Englishman was one stroke better than his opening round and sits on nine-under par alongside world number one Scottie Scheffler and his fellow American Justin Thomas.Fleetwood, who is searching for his first PGA Tour title, shot a modest level-par opening half but then surged up the field in the last six holes at TPC River Highlands.He eagled the par-five 13th by finding the green in two shots then sinking a 10-foot putt then holed out from the fairway with a 30-yard shot on the par-four 14th to pick up two more strokes.A 12-foot birdie putt at the par-three 16th gave him a share of the lead."I've been having a good season and I felt like my game was in a really good place going into the US Open last week," Fleetwood told Sky Sports."For whatever reason - I'll never understand the game - I played really poorly but in golf there is always another week and this week is a big week."I came out motivated to take whatever there is to learn to make you better for the coming weeks and so far this week I'm happy with how I bounced back."Thomas reeled off five consecutive birdies in his six-under 64 while Scheffler carded a 69 to sit atop the leaderboard.World number two Rory McIlroy, who was two off the first-round lead, had a frustrating day with a one-over 71 that dropped him to four behind.McIlroy made three bogeys in his opening four holes and turned in three-over 38, but three birdies in his next six holes recovered the damage.

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34 minutes ago

• Daily Mail​

United States temperatures will serve England players well ahead of World Cup, Harry Kane insists prior to weather that could cause extreme heat risks

Harry Kane insists that he isn't concerned by the extreme hot weather in America and that the England players at the Club World Cup can only benefit from the experience, ahead of the World Cup next summer which will be co-hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico. 'I'm not concerned. It's part and parcel of football. You have to be able to adapt. It's a great experience for me and some of the other England guys who are playing this year and who will be playing next summer,' Kane told Mail Sport. 'There's always something special about these World Cup games and next year will be the same. 'When you come off that pitch and you're sweating and you're dripping and you're cramping and you've given everything out there, there's a special feeling inside, especially when you win,' he added. Kane scored as Bayern Munich beat Boca Juniors in Miami to confirm qualification for the knockouts, with Michael Olise getting a late winner for Vincent Kompany 's side after Miguel Merentiel had equalised for Boca. Temperatures were around 30 degrees in Miami on Friday and a heatwave is expected next week, with Campaign group Fossil Free Football saying that 10 Club World Cup matches are due to be played in the next week with either a major or extreme heat risk, as temperatures could reach 41C. But the England captain stressed that he and his team-mates will use this tournament as a learning curve, as they look to succeed next year under Thomas Tuchel. 'We (the players) are not in touch with each other right now but it's something we'll talk about at upcoming camps - how we all adapted to it and what training methods we used,' said Kane. 'All of this is good experience because it's going to be tough next summer without a doubt. And we have to use our experiences as an advantage,' the Bayern Munich striker added. Tuchel was watching on in Miami and said last month that he expects his players to 'suffer' next summer. There have been warnings that temperatures at 14 of the 16 stadiums being used for the 2026 World Cup could exceed 'potentially dangerous levels' during the tournament. 'It is important to see matches now in America, and in Miami at three in the afternoon,' said Tuchel. 'I will see that. And how it looks and we need to understand how to cool the players down, to drink and what our options are. I have done pre-season there in Orlando and I will be very surprised if we do not suffer. Suffering is one of the headlines for this World Cup,' the England boss added.

The Guardian

an hour ago

• The Guardian

America is showing us football in its final dictator form – we can't afford to look away

Should we give it a miss? Is it best to stay away from next summer's Trump-Infantino US World Cup? Depending on your politics the answer may be a resounding no or a bemused shrug. Some will see pure drive-by entertainment. Why would anyone want to boycott a month-long end-of-days Grand Soccer Parade staged by two of the world's most cinematic egomaniacs? But it is a question that has been asked, and will be asked a lot more in the next year. Those who intend to travel will need to answer it by action or omission. Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? The picture is at least clearer now. After a week of the new steroid-fed Club World Cup we know what this thing will feel like and who it will benefit. There is no mystery with these events now, no sense of politics lurking coyly out of sight. Under Gianni Infantino Fifa has become a kind of mobile propaganda agency for indulgent regimes, right out in front twirling its pompoms, hitching its leotard, twerking along at the front of the parade like an unholy Uncle Sam. So we had the grisly sight this week of Donald Trump not just borrowing football's light, but wrestling it on to his lap and ruffling its hair, burbling like a random hot-button word generator about women and trans people, while Juventus players gawped in the background. We have the spectacle of both club and international football hijacked as a personal vanity platform for Infantino, the dictator's fluffer, the man who sold the world not once but twice. Infantino's status as a wildly over-promoted administrator has always had an operatic quality. But there is something far more sinister in his political over-reach, out there nodding along at the latest Oval Office freak-off, helping to legitimise each divisive statement, each casual erasure of process. Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here is it acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good.

BBC News

an hour ago

• BBC News

Hull cards lowest second round at PGA Championship

Women's PGA Championship first-round leaderboard:-6 J Thitikul (Tha); -3 M Lee (Aus), R Takeda (Jpn); -2 L Thompson (US); -1 C Iwai (Jpn), A Kim (US), S Lee (Kor)Selected others: +2 N Korda (US), L Maguire (Ire); +3 C Hull (Eng); +4 L Ko (NZ)Leaderboard England's Charley Hull carded the lowest second-round score at the Women's PGA Championship as Thailand's Jeeno Thitikul extended her lead at the top of the carded a three-under-par 69, which included four birdies and a bogey, in the only round under 70 on a day when only 14 players broke par in hot and windy conditions at the Fields Ranch East course in 29-year-old shot 78 in her opening round and is on three over for the tournament, with leader Thitikul on six number two Thitikul has yet to win a major but put herself in a promising position after a two-under par round of 70, which included four birdies and two said the "wind and the rough" provided the toughest challenges during the second round. She added: "I had better tee shots than yesterday and put myself in the positions that I have a chance."If not, I just tried to make par. I think par, it's a really big key here - no birdies but 18 pars, you take it."Thitikul's nearest challengers are Japan's Rio Takeda, who shot a 71, and Australian Minjee Lee, who went round in 72, with both players on three under par. American Lexi Thompson is on two under following a 70."[It] got pretty windy even for the morning," said Thompson. "It was blowing more than it did yesterday, so I knew I just had to commit to my lines out there."It's a tough golf course, especially when the wind blows. If you miss the fairways you just have to take your medicine, pitch out, and try to save par any way you can, make the worst score a bogey."World number one Nelly Korda could only manage a 74, which included two birdies and four bogeys, and the American is on two over par, while Ireland's Leona Maguire is on the same score after also carding a Korea's Amy Yang won the tournament last year but, after rounds of 76 and 77, missed the cut on nine over par.