About 100 special anti-riot police, cradling sub-machine guns, outnumbered the fewer than 50 spectators and players Wednesday night as the Israeli team Maccabi met Belshina Bobruism of Belarus in a European Champions League soccer qualifier at Nicosia, Cyprus.
Maccabi’s home city is Haifa in northern Israel but the game was switched to Cyprus at the demand of the Union of European Football Associations because of the security situation in Israel.
Maccabi won the game, the first leg of a home-and-home, total-goals series 4-0.
– The future of the Scottish Premier League was thrown into doubt when 10 of the 12 clubs said they planned to quit the league after two more seasons to protest the power of two teams, Rangers and Celtic, to veto any proposal.
Basketball: Phil Smith, an All-America guard at the University of San Francisco before winning an NBA championship with the Golden State Warriors in 1975, died of bone-marrow cancer in Escondido, Calif. He was 50.
Cycling: Tour de France third-place finisher Raimondas Rumsas, whose wife was jailed after allegedly being caught with a stash of performance-enhancing drugs, decided not to meet Wednesday with French investigators.
Hockey: The estimated cost for a new hockey arena in Pittsburgh is $270 million–$45 million more than previous projections, according a city-county agency studying the plan.
Horse racing: Jockey Carlos Silva won the 3,000th race of his career Wednesday at Arlington Park. The 46-year-old Rolling Meadows resident guided Illinois-bred Buba’s Caper to a neck victory in the third race to became the 101st rider to reach that plateau.
