Major League Baseball will announce next week that the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox will play two games at the London Stadium on 29 and 30 June next year, a source has told the Associated Press. The London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has scheduled a press conference for Tuesday with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred but has not announced the subject matter.
“I’ve never been to London, so I’m looking forward to that,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said before Thursday’s game at Houston. “[The trip] can grow our game, obviously, in Europe and hopefully getting two big teams out there will be a great thing for the sport.”
Baseball officials have long hoped to host games in the British capital and settled last year on the London Stadium, which hosted the 2012 Olympics and is in its second season as the home of West Ham United. Because it was originally built to house a 400m track, the stadium is wider than other major sports venues in London and can best accommodate the dimensions of a baseball field. Each player on the trip will get an extra $60,000 for participating in the games, according to baseball’s collective bargaining agreement.
The NFL has played regular-season games annually in London since 2007, holding 18 games at Wembley and three at Twickenham. Three more NFL games are scheduled for this year, including one at Tottenham’s new stadium. The NBA has played eight regular-season games at London’s O2 Arena since 2011. The NHL opened its 2007-08 season at the O2 Arena with two games between the Los Angeles Kings and the Anaheim Ducks.
MLB has put renewed emphasis on international games since Manfred became commissioner in 2015. Cleveland and Minnesota played a two-game series last month in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Diego play a three-game series in Monterrey, Mexico, that starts Friday. MLB announced on Tuesday that Oakland and Seattle will open next season at the Tokyo Dome in March 2019.
The sprinters’ teams never quite got their collective act together, and the quintet retained a slender lead for what was less a final dash than a matter of summoning up any remaining reserves after a long day out front; Tanfield drove hard through the centre as they fanned across the road to win by over a length from JLT-Condor’s Alistair Slater.
“I went from the back and built and built. Everyone was gassed. It wasn’t really what you would call a sprint, more a time trial to the line.” And as he showed in April on the Gold Coast, time trialling is what he is good at.That Premier League intensity had revealed something to Real, offered a route to further riches. The hope now is that Klopp’s example may do something similar for English football. Like it or not Liverpool are deeply Premier League, oddly indigenous in their style.
This is a distinction, not a judgment. For all the brilliance of Manchester City, it is a fact that the Pep Guardiola system is entirely its own entity – no less or no more valid, but with its own distinct fascinations and contrasts. Whereas Liverpool’s hard-pressing, chancy physicality just feels like an unusually good fit with the strangely persistent texture and tone of the game in this country, the way qualities such as pace and power and the eagerness to play at speed still emerge even through the prism of Premier League cosmopolitanism.