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Emma Raducanu takes another wildcard in Dubai in bid to stop losing run

  • Former US Open champion has lost four matches in a row
  • 22-year-old opts to bypass qualifying for tournament

Emma Raducanu will continue to try to arrest her losing run against the best players in the world after taking another wildcard into the Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships.

The former US Open champion is enduring the worst sequence of her career having lost four successive matches. Raducanu failed to capitalise on wildcard entries into tournaments in Abu Dhabi and Doha over the last two weeks, losing in the first round both times, to Marketa Vondrousova and Ekaterina Alexandrova.

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Calum Nicholas: ‘I’m trying to inspire people from all backgrounds to look at F1’

‘It can be quite intimidating being the only black guy,’ says the Red Bull mechanic helping open up an overwhelmingly white business

“Asking for forgiveness rather than permission has been my philosophy for a while now,” Calum Nicholas says as he shows the conviction and daring which has made him one of the most recognisable faces in Formula One. Nicholas, who still describes himself as a mechanic, is the senior power unit assembly technician at Red Bull Racing where he has helped Max Verstappen win the last four drivers’ championships in a row, as well as being a key member of a team that clinched the constructors’ titles in 2022 and 2023.

Nicholas has also become famous as one of the very few black faces in the F1 pit lane and a minor star of Drive to Survive on Netflix. He is now an author, having written his first book without the help of a ghostwriter, and he smiles when I ask if he had to clear this new literary venture with Red Bull.

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Could a new rule finally give MLS much-needed transfer gossip?

Complex rules have stopped splashy moves between the league’s clubs. But the ‘cash-for-player’ mechanism could change all that

In any other Major League Soccer offseason, Jack McGlynn probably would have gone to Europe. Ready to take the next step in his career as one of the best young American midfielders in the league, he wouldn’t have had any other realistic option. This offseason, though, the landscape shifted; McGlynn ended up in Houston instead.

The Dynamo utilised a new mechanism introduced by the league last month to sign McGlynn for an initial $2.1m in what is now called a ‘cash-for-player’ trade. This same mechanism was used for FC Cincinnati’s $5m deal sending former MVP Luciano Acosta to FC Dallas, and also Sporting KC’s capture of striker Dejan Joveljić from the LA Galaxy for $4m. “Without the new mechanism it’s very, very, very unlikely that Dejan would have been with us,” said SKC sporting director Mike Burns.

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