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Liverpool's American owners have made contact with Andre Villas-Boas in the past two weeks, in an attempt to establish his interest in taking over at Anfield, where Kenny Dalglish was yesterday dismissed.
It is strange to think that in 12 days' time we will have completed a third of our Test matches for the summer. We've got three Tests against West Indies, the first of which was due to begin at Lord's today, and then three against South Africa later in the summer.
Sidelined for four weeks with a hamstring problem, David Luiz finally returned to full training yesterday as Chelsea's build-up to Saturday's Champions League final reached a critical stage. Hardly the ideal preparation for a central defender who will shoulder responsibility for blunting a Bayern Munich attack led by Mario Gomez, a striker Luiz admits he has faced "just in PlayStation".
By one of those supreme football symmetries, Roy Hodgson was sitting in the national-team manager's chair, explaining all the advice Kenny Dalglish had provided about the Liverpool players in his new England squad, at the moment Dalglish returned to the foreign holiday mode he abandoned when Anfield interrupted his Gulf cruise with an SOS call 18 months ago. Hodgson was leaving through the back door, cut to the raw by his experience, as Dalglish walked through the front. Which only goes to show that a year and a half is a very long time in football.
To Darren Sammy has been entrusted the small matter of leading West Indies from the wilderness. He has been their captain for two years, leading them in 16 Tests of which they have won two, and today at Lord's he faces the sternest challenge of all.
For a man who must have felt these last few days like someone turning out his pockets in the hope of finding a little loose change, England manager Roy Hodgson put on a brave face yesterday. Better still, he gave the distinct impression that he was in charge of both himself and a European Championship squad which, frankly, looks barely competitive.
Manchester City's Carlos Tevez has risked further infuriating his own club over the "Fergie RIP" poster which has earned him public censure from them, by ridiculing the Manchester United manager and refusing to apologise.
Roy Hodgson responded to one question yesterday about his decision to select John Terry for his Euro 2012 squad and leave out Rio Ferdinand with mild exasperation that the subject was attracting such a lot of attention. "There are 23 men in the squad, we're preparing for the future, and yet we're discussing one man until the cows come home."
Roberto Ferrari yesterday won the longest stage of this year's Giro d'Italia, from Assisi to Montecatini, as Great Britain's Mark Cavendish finished fourth.