MS Dhoni, Ashok Dinda, Rahul Dravid, Gautam Gambhir, Harbhajan Singh, Ravindra Jadeja, Dinesh Karthik, Zaheer Khan, Virat Kohli, Praveen Kumar, Ashish Nehra, Pragyan Ojha, Yusuf Pathan, Suresh Raina, Virender Sehwag, Ishant Sharma, Rohit Sharma, Sachin Tendulkar, Sudeep Tyagi, Yuvraj Singh

Former tennis bad boy Boris Becker expressed his amazement Monday at how Tiger Woods managed to hide his numerous affairs for so long from his wife and other insiders.
Three-time Wimbledon champion Becker, 42, experienced a marriage-breaking moment of his own a decade ago when he fathered a baby girl in a fit of passion with a Russian model in an upstairs corner of a London restaurant in 1999.

“That happened to me a decade ago, I have the same experience,” the German told a television interviewer. “But I was surprised by the dimension, the frequency.”

“Given that he had to cover it all up – purely logistically – how did he organize it all?” Becker wondered.

“He must have constantly been changing phone numbers and trying to cover his tracks.”

But Becker said that no one but Woods himself knows the true story of the pattern of behavior which threatens to derail the world’s most prolific golfing career.

“Of course, from the outside, you don’t know if all of the stories are true,” said Becker. “Or whether they matter any more.”

Tennis legend Boris Becker is now sympathizing with the golf legend Tiger Woods over extra-martial affairs which would have done and subsequently faced a media storm over it too. Boris Becker says that he can understand what Tiger Woods must be going through now, because he himself had been in that situation once-upon-time, when he had fathered a love child, after a brief tryst.

“I experienced basically the same thing and can sympathize with him,” he told ARD television in an interview to be broadcast later Monday. “There are all these stories that keep emerging. Whether they are true or not doesn’t matter anymore. Every week there is a new woman,” Becker said, in excerpts from the interview published by the Bild newspaper.

The 42-year-old legend said that he hoped Tiger Woods could reconcile with his wife Elin Woods, who has reportedly hired a Hollywood divorce lawyer, but acknowledged that it would be “damn hard” because of the humongous number of his mistresses.

Becker said that he had met the 33-year-old Woods on a number of times, expressed surprise about the number of women with whom the golfer reportedly had extramarital affairs. He was amazed at the logistical angle of the affairs, that how in the world Woods managed to keep so many mistresses under wraps for so long.

By Larry Fine

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) – The Philadelphia Phillies kept their championship hopes alive by beating the New York Yankees 8-6 Monday to force a sixth game in the best-of-seven World Series.

Chase Utley belted two home runs to support the pitching of Cliff Lee, the same combination that produced victory in last week’s Fall Classic opener.

“It’s the World Series, it’s a do-or-die game,” Utley told reporters after last year’s World Series winners cut the Yankees’ lead to 3-2 ahead of Wednesday’s Game Six.

Phillies manager Charlie Manuel, whose team needs to sweep two games in New York to retain the MLB trophy, hoped Utley could stay in his groove.

“Chase, when he gets hot, definitely he can get hot and stay hot for a month or two,” said Manuel. “Knock on wood.”

A New York fightback that produced four runs in the last two innings fell short as Phillies reliever Ryan Madson struck out Mark Teixeira, representing the tying run, to end it.

Utley blasted a three-run homer in the first inning and a solo shot in the seventh, giving him a total of five round-trippers in the championship showdown to tie the Series record set by Reggie Jackson for the Yankees in 1977.

The Phillies charged to an early 6-1 lead after Utley’s first-inning contribution, followed by another three-run burst in the third against New York starter and loser A.J. Burnett.

Burnett, pitching on three days’ rest for the first time this season, went two innings plus four batters, giving up six runs on four hits, four walks and one hit batsman.

The Yankees, who scored one run in the first, added another in the fifth but looked beaten after Utley and Raul Ibanez connected for solo homers in the seventh off reliever Phil Coke to push Philadelphia’s lead to 8-2.

‘DANGEROUS HITTER’

Yankees manager Joe Girardi said he was not surprised by Utley’s heroics. “He’s a very dangerous hitter, and he puts up great numbers every year.”

Girardi said the seventh-inning runs were a back breaker.

“Those were tack-on runs that hurt us, obviously,” he said. “We ended up with six runs tonight. We still had a chance in the ninth inning to possibly come back and tie it up or take the lead, but when you look back at it, those runs hurt us.”

New York finally knocked Lee out of the game in the eighth with a three-run rally keyed by a two-run double from Alex Rodriguez.

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MELBOURNE – Australia’s 15-man World Cup squad, due to be named on Tuesday, will include the names of most of the players who participated in the one-day series against Pakistan in the UAE, said stand-in captain Michael Clarke.
Clarke is confident that the Australians have gained from being together as a unit.

“I think we’ll have the advantage because we’re playing as a squad, as a team. A lot of these guys are going to be involved in the Twenty20 World Cup and there’s nothing better than playing with your mates for your country. To me, that’s the opportunity that’s presented to us at the moment. We’re doing very well, we get a couple of weeks off back at home then we go as a squad,” Fox Sports quoted Clarke, as saying.

Clarke, however, said that the selectors could bring in some different players in the World Twenty20 squad, as the tournament would be played in vastly different conditions, but added it was always valuable to enter a tournament in winning form.

“England will be a completely different format, but any time you’re winning you certainly take positives out of that,” he said.

Australian captain Ricky Ponting on Wednesday said the India-Australia One-day series should ideally be best of five and not seven.

Ponting said that a five-match ODI series would have kept the players motivated.

“It’s probably too many, five matches are enough in any series. We know the reasons why seven matches are being played,” said Ponting, making it obvious that the commercial considerations force teams to play more ODIs.

“If you play seven matches against any side in a couple of weeks, it is difficult to focus, specially when the series is decided. In this case it is almost back-to-back seven-match series with Champions Trophy in between,” Ponting said on Wednesday.

The Australian team beat England 6-1 and then played the Champions Trophy, which they won, before coming in Mumbai.

Ponting, before leaving Sydney Tuesday, said that there should be some kind of point system to inject some interest in a dead ODI series. He was talking about the series in England where Australia had taken an unassailable 4-0 lead, making the remaining matches a drag and forcing them to rotate the players.