Alberto Contador may regret giving Sheffield blind eye

By Sunday night, Alberto Contador will learn whether his decision to avoid looking over the Tour de France to Sheffield is a smart move or not but, speaking the day before the race began, he said with eight categorized climbs later on it can prove to be very complicated. 

Call it confidence, call it old-school approach road is decided, but Contador did not take advantage of his time in Yorkshire to check Jenkin Street or Oughtibridge. "I have seen the video but not on the ground. One of the big factors that can be a breeze and there are a heck of a lot of climbing to the early stages in the Tour. You will need to pay attention to during the day and I hope my legs up to the task. "

The Spaniard has won more Grands Tours from any other riders in the peloton - including the Tour in 2007 and 2009, coupled with a victory in 2010 that was removed from his record as a positive test for clenbuterol - but he is keen to clog coat to favorites shoulder Chris Froome, the winner in 2013. "rider who has shown he is the best in both years was Froome, he's No1 favorite. For me, I had better last year? Yeah, but I do not know if it will be enough. "

Contador appeared more relaxed than Froome have to face the media on Thursday and said he expected a different race from 2013, when the Kenyan-born British gained considerable amount of time in opponents fairly early in the proceedings. "We've got some major stage early - stage two and stage five more Pave - but the race does not start until we got to the Vosges, and there is no early test of time, so it will not be like last year." 

This season, Contador looked stronger in the first round of Froome but not quite at the same level as the head of the Sky team when they were paired together in the primary stage of the Dauphine Libere race, a warm-up for the Tour. He was not sure what form this season compared to 2009, when he won the Tour despite tense battle with his own teammate, future winner Lance Armstrong's former seven-time. 

In 2010, Contador showed good compared to the other favorites in the third stage, which featured several rocky sections. The consensus is that he's a much better position than Froome to walk this year on the cobbles, level five, but not surprisingly he was keen to play this down. 

"Froome has a highly experienced team to that stage but so Vincenzo Nibali and he is quite useful in that kind of terrain. It will be a battle for survival for us all. It is a point where you could lose the Tour, but it also one where you can get a lot of time on your rivals. "

Team Saxo-Tinkoff Contador has continued with Sky, as it includes two key members who have spent time in Froome Team Sky - road captain, Michael Rogers, and directeur sportif, Steven de Jongh, who has also coached Contador - and general manager of the team , Bjarne Riis, said if he was in the shoes of Sir Dave Brailsford, he might have acted differently vexed question of whether to put in Sir Bradley Wiggins or not. 

"Wiggins is not on my team, so it's not a question I had to worry about. But if he was on my team, I would have included him." 

That was entertaining footnotes but what is certain is that Sky has been involved in the formation of the Tour Contador, he will have a closer look at Sunday....

Electric Zoo

Electric Zoo
It was supposed to be the bigger, better party. Electric Zoo 2013 was the fifth annual Labor Day weekend of electronic dance music on Randalls Island, and its promoter, Made Event, had expanded it by adding another stage with additional headliners. But after two concertgoers died, apparently from using MDMA (known in different formulations as Molly or Ecstasy), Made Event followed the recommendation of the mayor’s office and abruptly canceled Sunday, the third day of the festival. Last week, the House of Blues in Boston closed temporarily after drug overdoses following a show by Zedd, who would have been one of Sunday’s Electric Zoo headliners.

Yasin Bhatkal

Yasin Bhatkal

MUMBAI/NEW DELHI: Yasin Bhatkal must be the only terrorist to have played such a long hide-and-seek game with Indian agencies despite being in the country all along.

Unlike most top terrorists, who invariably melted into Pakistan or West Asia after terror strikes or after their names cropped up on agency radars, Bhatkal chose to stay back and conducted blast after blast for five years despite every agency trailing him.

Satyagraha

Satyagraha

Satyagraha hits the theatres today. The film starring Amitabh Bachchan, Kareena Kapoor, Arjun Rampal, Amrita Rao and Manoj Bajpai is a dialogue with the youth of today, Prakash Jha said at most of his promotional events.

The director picked a rather new (as compared to last

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political thriller Madras Cafe) subject for Satyagraha.

Although the director claimed that his movie is not based on the Anna Hazare movement, most reports suggested otherwise. With a topic like that, Prakash Jha helming the project and actors like Amitabh Bachchan, Ajay Devgn and Manoj Bajpai - the expectations were sky-high. Prakash Jha, however, could not live up to the expectations, at least for most critics.

Saibal Chatterjee writes for NDTV, "Prakash Jha's Satyagraha is a political film that, for all its well-meaning bluster, neither stings nor scalds. It fails to hit the core of the truth that it seeks," and further elaborates, "Unfortunately, Satyagraha barely skims the surface of a complex theme, leaving many a crucial question unanswered. As a result, it can hardly be expected to shake a vast nation and its somnolent rulers out of their torpor."

Ander Herrera

Ander Herrera

Manchester United prepare £40m double swoop for Bilbao's Ander Herrera and Roma's Daniele De Rossi
Manchester United are expected to trigger a €36 million (£30.7 million) release clause in Ander Herrera’s Athletic Bilbao contract after having a €30 million bid rejected for the playmaker identified by David Moyes as an alternative to Cesc Fabregas.
After seeing two bids for Fabregas rejected by Barcelona, following an aborted move for Spain Under-21 captain Thiago Alcantara earlier this summer, Moyes is now attempting to add three midfielders to his squad before Monday’s 11pm transfer deadline.

The United manager, having won his battle to keep Wayne Rooney at the club in the wake of two substantial offers from Chelsea, has stepped up his pursuit of reinforcements by also lodging a €12 million offer for Roma midfielder Daniele De Rossi after testing Everton’s resolve with a £38 million combined bid for Marouane Fellaini and England left back Leighton Baines on Thursday.

Bilbao, Roma and Everton have all rejected United’s advances this week, but there is a confidence within Old Trafford that deals will be done before Monday evening.

However, despite Herrera’s release clause, Bilbao president Josu Urrutia has insisted that the Basque club, one of the few in Spain in strong financial health, are under no pressure to sell, even if United meet the 24-year-old’s valuation.

“Our club is different, in that it is based on feeling,” Urrutia said. “Our objective is not to make money. We received the offer last night, and we communicated [to the club in question] that we do not negotiate for our players. If a player is to leave, first he has to inform us that he wants to go and then his release clause has to be met.”

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney, acclaimed by many as the best Irish poet since WB Yeats, has died aged 74.

Heaney was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995 "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past".

Over his long career he was awarded numerous prizes and received many honours for his work.

He recently suffered from ill health.

His 2010 poetry collection The Human Chain was written after he suffered a stroke and the central poem, Miracle, was directly inspired by his illness.

Heaney in 1970, two years before he gave up full-time academic work to become a freelance writer and poet

Recalling how he had been lifted up and down the stairs to his bedroom, the poet eulogised the biblical characters who carried a paralysed man to Jesus to be healed.

"Their shoulders numb, the ache and stoop deeplocked / In their backs, the stretcher handles / Slippery with sweat. And no let up."
'Profound sorrow'

"The death has taken place of Seamus Heaney," said a short statement issued by his family on Friday.

"The poet and Nobel laureate died in hospital in Dublin this morning after a short illness. The family has requested privacy at this time."

Heaney's publisher, Faber, said: "We cannot adequately express our profound sorrow at the loss of one of the world's greatest writers. His impact on literary culture is immeasurable.

"As his publisher we could not have been prouder to publish his work over nearly 50 years. He was nothing short of an inspiration to the company, and his friendship over many years is a great loss."

Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate and a friend of Heaney, told The Telegraph that Heaney was "a great poet, a wonderful writer about poetry, and a person of truly exceptional grace and intelligence."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Irish poet Paul Muldoon told BBC Radio 3: "One of his great gifts was to allow people in who were not necessarily that interested in poetry... and I think that's one of the reasons why he occupies such an extraordinary place in people's hearts."

Heaney was born in April 1939, the eldest of nine children, on a farm near Toomebridge in County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, but as a child moved to the village of Bellaghy.

He was educated at St Columb's College, Derry, a Catholic boarding school, and later at Queen's University Belfast, before training as a teacher. He settled in Dublin, with periods of teaching in the US.

Heaney was an honorary fellow at Trinity College Dublin and, last year, was bestowed with the Seamus Heaney Professorship in Irish Writing at the university, which he described as a great honour.

Lukaku

אסד

After a titanic mishap like today. Lukaku will stew in those emotions on the bench and won't live it down. He needs to go on loan where he can play, get some game time and totally forget about this blown chance with a really shit