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CTV News
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
Messi scores twice, assists in Miami's 4-2 win over Montreal
Inter Miami forward Lionel Messi (10) reacts after scoring a goal during the first half of an MLS soccer match against CF Montreal, Wednesday, May 28, 2025, in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky) FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) — Lionel Messi scored twice and had an assist, and Inter Miami broke out of its slump with a 4-2 rout of Montreal on Wednesday night. Messi scored in the 27th and 87th minutes and set up Luis Suárez's goal with some nice dribbling in the 68th. Suárez added another in the 71st. The win gave Messi's slumping Inter Miami team just its second victory in its past eight matches. Miami last won on May 3, going 0-2-2 since then and dropping to sixth in the Eastern Conference. It has been a surprising plunge for a team that went 22-4-8 during the regular season in 2024 to set MLS records for points (74) and winning percentage (.765) and captured the Supporters Shield. In its last match, Miami rallied from a two-goal deficit to tie Philadelphia, and that momentum carried over against Montreal, which is last in the Eastern Conference with just one win this season. Messi's first goal on Wednesday was set up by Sergio Busquets, who delivered a pass to his former Barcelona teammate and set the screen that freed up Messi for his seventh goal of the MLS season. Messi then linked up with Suárez to give Miami a two-goal cushion midway through the second half, and iced the win on a pass from Suárez just before the end of regulation. It was a much needed goal for Suárez, who finished last season tied for the second-most goals in MLS (20) but had just two goals entering Wednesday's match. Dante Sealy and Victor Loturi scored for Montreal. It was also the offensive performance Miami needed before it begins Club World Cup play. The Herons have another MLS match at home on Saturday against Columbus before their first contest of the tournament against Al Ahly of Egypt on June 14. This report by The Associated Press was first published on May 28, 2025. Alanis Thames, The Associated Press
Time of India
23-05-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
Inter Miami predicted lineup vs. Philadelphia Union – Lionel Messi, Busquets, and more
Image Source: Getty This weekend, Inter Miami will be looking to turn things around after a recent downturn, and the Union is just trying to keep space in the playoff picture. Inter Miami hopes to turn its season around with the return of star forward Lionel Messi, while Philadelphia aims to build on its unbeaten home streak. Both teams are going to go with robust lineups in what shapes up as a high-stakes and intense encounter with playoff implications on the line. Inter Miami's projected lineup and key players Expect coach Javier Mascherano to set up a 4-4-2. Oscar Ustari, the veteran goalkeeper, is the natural choice to start between the sticks. Potentially also in the backline: Ian Fray at right-back, Tomas Avilés and Noah Allen as center-backs, and Jordi Alba on the left. Sergio Busquets is expected to anchor the midfield along with Yannick Bright in the center, with Benjamin Cremaschi and Telasco Segovia outside him. Luis Suárez will spearhead the attack, with Lionel Messi coming back from a slight adductor strain to perhaps partner him up front. Here's the projected Inter Miami CF lineup: Formation: 4-4-2 Goalkeeper: Oscar Ustari Defenders: Right-back: Ian Fray Center-back: Tomas Avilés Center-back: Noah Allen Left-back: Jordi Alba Midfielders: Central Midfield: Sergio Busquets Central Midfield: Yannick Bright Right Midfield: Benjamin Cremaschi Left Midfield: Telasco Segovia Forwards: Luis Suárez Lionel Messi (returning from minor adductor injury) Luis Suárez has been the most consistent offensive performer for FC Cincinnati despite those recent challenges. Messi can add a layer of creativity to bring Inter Miami back to form. Philadelphia Union's form and potential threats Philadelphia Union comes into the match having not lost in six matches and will likely be organized and difficult to break down. Striker Tai Baribo has been in incredible form, with seven goals in league play and 12 in his last 11 competitive games. A good sign for Union attackers is that after sitting out a week and a half ago with a minor hamstring issue, he fully recovered in time for this match. A big boost for the Union defensively comes from the return of Olwethu Makhanya, who is back from suspension. He being there should strengthen the defense against the Inter Miami offense. Also Read: Lionel Messi finally reveals one goal that means the most in his iconic career Experienced players like Lionel Messi and Luis Suárez's presense will be key for Inter Miami to find their way back on track, while Philadelphia Union will set sights on making the most out of their current form to grab a crucial win. This match will be one of the most exciting clashes of the MLS weekend. Get IPL 2025 match schedules , squads , points table , and live scores for CSK , MI , RCB , KKR , SRH , LSG , DC , GT , PBKS , and RR . Check the latest IPL Orange Cap and Purple Cap standings.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
‘Impressive' – Luis Suárez sends personal message to Barcelona star Lamine Yamal
Barcelona legend Luis Suárez has this week moved to make clear his appreciation for the talents of current Blaugrana talent Lamine Yamal. Wide-man Lamine, of course, is fresh off playing a starring role in Barca's latest title triumph in midweek. Afforded a starting berth in a derby meeting with Espanyol at RCDE Stadium, the 17-year-old opened the scoring in spectacular fashion, en route to a 2-0 victory for the visitors. Barcelona, in turn, wrapped up the La Liga title, making it a domestic treble in their first season under the watch of new boss Hansi Flick. And as alluded to above, evidently left impressed by Lamine's contributions along the way was one of the Catalan giants' most famous attackers, in Luis Suárez. Taking to the comments section of the youngster's latest post on Instagram, Inter Miami frontman Suárez wrote: 'Congratulations, champion. You are impressive. Keep it up… so you can WIN, WIN and WIN!' 👏 La felicitación de Luis Suárez a Lamine Yamal💬 "Impresionante lo tuyo" — Mundo Deportivo (@mundodeportivo) May 17, 2025 Conor Laird – GSFN
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
🎥 OTD: Liverpool hit Barcelona for four in incredible UCL comeback
🎥 OTD: Liverpool hit Barcelona for four in incredible UCL comeback There have been many great Champions League nights on the hallowed Anfield turf, but few can rival Liverpool's remarkable semi-final comeback against Barcelona in 2019. Jürgen Klopp's side suffered a 3-0 first leg defeat at Camp Nou, as former Red Luis Suárez struck early and Lionel Messi netted a late brace. Advertisement Anfield needed a rousing moment in the second leg to spark a potential recovery and Divock Origi delivered the first with a simple tap-in after just seven minutes. Liverpool went into half time 1-0 up on the night before Georginio Wijnaldum's double and quick thinking from Trent Alexander-Arnold and Origi led to one of Anfield's most memorable European moments. The Reds carried winning momentum into the 2018/19 Champions League final and comfortably beat Tottenham 2-0. 📸 Clive Brunskill - 2019 Getty Images
The Guardian
24-04-2025
- Sport
- The Guardian
‘One father threatened to stab the referee': why does kids' football bring out the worst in parents?
A chilly Saturday morning on the Astroturf pitches at Coram's Fields in central London and several youth football matches are under way. I'm watching an under-11s game. The sound is the thud of boot on ball, the shrill interruption of the referee's whistle, and a whole lot of shouting. From the players ('Mine!', 'Here!', 'Pass!', 'Ref!', etc). From the two coaches ('Press!', 'Stay wide!', 'Push up!', 'Ref!', etc). And from the touchline dads. There is one mum here today, but she's less vocal. To varying degrees, the dads are part fan, part coach, part personal trainer to their progeny. There is one dad (there's always one) who's taking it a bit further, who's a bit shoutier than the others. 'Get rid of it!' he screams at the defence, meaning hoof it upfield, which is the opposite of the coach's instructions to play it out from the back. 'Ref! Seriously?' he shouts at the referee (who's only about 17 himself). Most of Shouty Dad's shouting is aimed at his own son, who, because of his position on the wing, has his father's wisdom bellowed in his lughole throughout. 'Stay wide!'; 'Go on, son, skin him!'; and, intriguingly, 'You've got a mouth – use it!' (I think he means call for the ball, rather than do a Luis Suárez and sink his teeth into an opponent.) The poor boy looks utterly miserable, as if he wants the ground to open up and swallow him. Or – better – swallow his dad. At half-time, when the coach gathers the players around for a chat, Shouty Dad joins them, to offer his own thoughts on the first half and what they could do better in the second. To be honest, it's not the worst parental behaviour you'll see at a youth football match. It can get a lot more serious than this. For example, it was reported that at a recent under-10s game in Kent an altercation between a couple of players led to a parental pitch invasion, punches being thrown, and one kid getting steamrolled by an out-of-control dad (presumably not his own). This is not a new issue. Over a decade ago, Gary Lineker wrote about parents screaming abuse from the sidelines, and how it is killing their kids' love of the beautiful game. Speaking to me from 300 or so miles north of Coram's Fields, Ian Coates, general manager of the Northumberland Football League, agrees that it's problem: 'A kid will make a pass and then look at the parents for approval or disapproval. When I'm coaching, I say to the kids: 'The only person you take notice of when you're on the pitch is me. If your mum or dad shouts anything to you, you've got my permission to turn round and tell them to shut up. And if they give you a bollocking, tell me and I'll give them a bollocking.'' That's easier said than done, perhaps. 'Some parents give their kids the lickings of a dog,' he says. 'When you approach them and say, 'Fella, just calm down a little bit, man', they say, 'That's my son – I can say what I want.' 'Actually, you can't, because what you're doing is child abuse and you could be reported for it.' That's when you get – excuse my French – 'Don't be fucking ridiculous! Who the fuck are you to talk to me?' And I'm quite an imposing figure, 6ft 4in and built like a brick shithouse.' Figures published by the Football Association (FA), the governing body for football in England, show there were 2,561 charges issued for allegations of serious misconduct in grassroots football in 2023/24, up 13% on the previous season. But this refers to behaviour on the pitch, rather than parents' conduct. A spokesperson for the FA told me that it can take action against clubs for the behaviour of their spectators, including parents, under FA Rule E21. The FA said that, in the 2023-24 season, 349 E21 charges were issued against clubs for the behaviour of their spectators, 60% of which related to the youth game. County football associations break down disciplinary issues further. I spoke to Jon Pike, CEO of Somerset FA, about how his association records the number of reported misconduct offences – which include parents and coaches shouting and screaming from the touchlines. The rate of misconduct incidents at Somerset FA has been rising steadily since about 2018, when the number recorded each season was in the low 200s. In 2023/2024, according to its 2024 annual report, 273 cases of misconduct were recorded. The association also noticed a spike in incidents when football restarted after the pandemic. Pike says: 'No one had played for six months – it was like someone had shaken up a bottle of Coke and taken the lid off and everything just spurted out. We put it down to the fact that people had been repressed in lockdown.' But things haven't improved since the end of the pandemic. After the opening of last season, the worst for discipline in Somerset FA's history, Pike posted a 'CEO discipline statement' on the association's website. It said the following about youth football: 'The main offenders in youth football are adults, be they coaches, managers, club assistant referees, spectators or parents. This may not come as a surprise to some of you who regularly watch youth football, but now is the time for everyone to take responsibility and protect the game that we all love. Young people in football, regardless of their role, deserve to enjoy the game free from abuse and negativity, and should expect adults to behave in a manner that sets a positive example.' Pike tells me about an exercise carried out at a young leaders' day, where members of Somerset's youth council (aged 16 to 24) had to write down, anonymously, on Post-it notes, what they liked and didn't like about football. 'We had this collage, all these Post-its, and the number who said that being shouted at from the side, 'my parents going off on one', that kind of thing, to me that's one of the most powerful things I've seen. This was young people saying that what they didn't like about the game was mouthy adults on the touchline.' Pike thinks touchline behaviour has deteriorated since the pandemic because so many other areas of life have, too. Coates agrees: 'It's got worse because society's got worse. It's the whole breakdown in discipline.' But he also thinks it trickles down from the higher echelons of the game. He cites the example of a match at St James' Park in Newcastle, where the referee gave a free kick against a player, who responded with: 'You're having a fucking laugh.' The Gallowgate End immediately and inevitably broke into a tuneful rendition of: 'The referee's a wanker.' Well, that's just part and parcel of the game, isn't it (as inevitable as using cliches such as part and parcel)? It's just a bit of fun, a display of passion? 'OK, but there's a 13-year-old boy in the stand with his dad,' Coates says. 'They see that nothing happens to anybody. The player gets away with it, isn't carded. And in the stands the stewards and police officers stand by letting everybody do these abusive chants without challenging them.' The trouble is, Coates says, what happens the next time the boy is playing football himself. 'He goes in for a tackle, the ref gives a free kick, he shouts: 'Ref, you're having a fucking laugh', and he gets sent off, as he should be under the laws of the game.' And suddenly the referee is getting it from the sidelines, mainly from the child's dad. 'You get dads who go and watch football on a Saturday and can virtually say and do what they want, then on a Sunday morning they go and watch their sons and daughters play, and they think they're in the same environment and say and do what they like.' Ant Canavan is a steward at Anfield and a referee in the lower leagues; he also runs the Referee Forum Group on Facebook. 'Parental behaviour has been an issue the whole 20 years I've been refereeing, but it's certainly got worse since Covid,' he tells me. 'A lot of people you talk to say people's behaviour in the public domain has got worse, but it's particularly noticeable in youth football.' Canavan says dads are the main culprits, but you do get the odd mum misbehaving. 'You expect that kind of emotional outburst from a man – that's what they do at football games, the man's arena. When you get it from a woman, it's not as expected.' Where does it come from? 'There's the old trope we go to: it's the dad who had trials at Arsenal or whatever but never made it as a footballer, so they're doing everything they can to make their kid stand out, be better, so they can have that professional career. They're kind of vicariously living their failed and broken dreams through their children. But a lot of the time they just don't know how to conduct themselves … No, they do know; they're not bothered. You'll see them in the terraces in the same afternoon as they've watched their kids in the morning and they're doing the same thing, shouting at these millionaires and professional referees.' You don't get this kind of behaviour at cricket, rugby or, say, volleyball matches, Canavan says. 'You wouldn't have parents coming on to fight each other. It's only football. And I think it's because of this hooliganism culture that may stem from the 80s that got suppressed. It's still knocking about, still there. I think football has this culture of toxic abuse, like it's all part of the game.' Canavan has had to abandon matches due to bad behaviour. 'I've had parents interrupt games because they weren't happy with my decisions, and they've felt entitled to shout abuse from the sidelines or walk on the pitch and have a go at me. And I'm 6ft 4in, broad as you like, not easily intimidated.' Canavan continues to referee in the lower leagues, but he has stopped doing youth football and walked away from the angry dads. 'Other referees will still go out for their 30, 40, 50 quid, take the abuse and at the end of it say: 'Well, I'm getting paid for it. I'll take it; the money is more important than my dignity or my pride.'' Not every referee is 6ft 4in and broad as you like. Back in Northumberland, Coates tells me about a 16-year-old referee who was chased out of the ground by parents and players. 'He had to lock himself in the changing room, fearing for his life. We've had a referee threatened to be stabbed by a parent; he said if he gave another foul against his son he would stab him in the car park.' Those incidents were reported to the police. But, usually, parents don't get punished for their bad behaviour on the sidelines. Coates tells me about a recent under-16s game where, like the Kent match, 'the parents all decided to start kicking the shit out of each other. The referee abandons the game, reports it to the county; the club gets charged with an [FA Rule] E3, which means failure to control players, managers or spectators. The club says yeah, we're guilty, but how can we control the parents when they're 70 yards away on the other side of the pitch? So the county FA or the FA fine them £150 and warn them about their behaviour – because the FA can't take action against an individual parent.' And that's the problem: while the kids who are playing can get lengthy bans for misdemeanors, their parents aren't classed as participants by the FA, so they're not covered by its rules and regulations. So whose responsibility is it to intervene? 'The police could, but if you've stood at the side of the pitch, which I have, waiting for the police to come, you'll be there till next Tuesday,' Coates says. To remove problematic parents from matches, a banning order would have to be issued. Coates says Northumberland has successfully managed to do this for pitches on private land, but it's difficult to when the match is played on public land. A couple of leagues have been trialling body cams, similar to the ones worn by police, for referees. The Northumberland Football League doesn't have permission from the FA for its referees to wear them, but for the last couple of years it has been issuing them to stewards and volunteers at matches. Coates has used them and finds them very effective. 'When I go to the side of the pitch and speak to a parent about their behaviour, I switch my body camera on with the remote control in my pocket. And when the parents can see that red light on, suddenly their tone is totally different.' Sometimes, if a young referee is getting abuse from a parent on the sidelines, he'll go in undercover. 'I'll take my league coat off, and go and mingle with the crowd, stand with him. It's easy to find out which is his son and I'll say: 'See that number seven there? He's shit, isn't he? He's never trapped the ball, he cannot pass the ball, he needs to get his head up …' And he'll turn round and say: 'Oi, man, that's my son!' And I say: 'It's not nice, is it? That's what you've been doing to my referee for the past 10 minutes.' That makes the penny drop.' Ah, the beautiful game, eh? Where children are screamed at by adults and officials are abused and scared. 'You look at it,' says Canavan, 'and you think: at what point did football become this?' Back to the second half at Coram's Fields, and it hasn't quite descended into call-the-police chaos, but Shouty Dad is still at it. He's having a go at the centre mid now, for being out of position: 'Who's in the middle?' Oi, man, that's my son! So I punch Shouty Dad in the face, and then kick him when he's down … No, of course I don't. Nor could I. But I do tell him that it's my son, and he says sorry and tones it down. To be fair, he was right about him being out of position – I might have shouted something myself, but I am only allowed on the touchline on the condition that I keep my mouth shut. It's a lifetime condition, issued not by the league, or the FA, or the coach … but by my son, of course.
