Sterling Davis led Bears scorers with 22 points, while Rod Brown racked up 16 for the Leopards.Sheffield, though, face “mission impossible” at Ponds Forge tonight in the BBL Trophy, when they need to beat Chester Jets by 24 points to join Newcastle Eagles, Birmingham Bullets and London Towers in the competition’s semi-finals.. A 13-0 run put Bears 21-6 ahead in the first quarter, and subsequent bursts of 9-0 and 7-0 kept the Leopards out of range. He was on court for eight minutes but his frustration at Newcastle’s defeat led to his expulsion for arguing with the officials.Jerry Williams led Sharks scorers with 33 points, while T J Walker scored 23 for the Eagles.The Bears also romped home, beating Essex Leopards 91-60 at the Brighton Centre. Arinze, who dislocated a shoulder when he fell on court last month, was not expected to play again until after Christmas but scored 14 points in 27 minutes on court.The player-coach Flournoy has also been playing sporadically due to a prolonged hamstring injury. Fab Flournoy, the Newcastle Eagles coach, was ejected from the game in the closing seconds at the Telewest Arena last night as his team were overwhelmed by BBL Championship leaders Sheffield Sharks 105-72.
The Sharks stayed four points clear of Brighton Bears and Thames Valley Tigers at the top of the Championship after blitzing the Eagles with a 28-6 run at the start of the third quarter to lead 70-43.The only encouragement for the Eagles was the return from injury of the American Nikki Arinze, the league’s leading rebounder and scorer. Doing away with the take-off board would be akin to widening the goals in football – an act of dilution.Before he left, Johnson affably but firmly ruled out the notion that he had ambitions to become a future president of the International Association of Athletics Federations “Just as well,” someone remarked The American took it in good grace..

It is an integral part of jumping to perform within a framework. Coming from a man whose long-jump technique earned huge quantities of decathlon points over the years, this observation rendered the take-off-where-you-like school of thought facile. Remember that long and triple jump fouls are not measured, which means their possibilities are boundless. A couple of millimetres meant he had to wait another four years to claim what was rightly his.By drawing a line before the sand, as it were, athletics officials offer a minority within their sport an outstanding opportunity for fate-rueing open to no other sector of their community.

One thinks, too, of the tiny fraction of toe which disqualified what would otherwise have been a winning effort for Britain’s Jonathan Edwards in the 1996 Olympic triple jump final. It is certainly true that long jumping, and its sister event triple-jumping, offer unrivalled opportunities for angling-style stories of “the one that got away”.One thinks of Carl Lewis’ huge foul at the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo, where he lost his mighty match against fellow American Mike Powell. “They were always moving too fast to be seen,” he responded.When the topic of long jumping came up, Johnson observed laconically that it always seemed to be the longest jumps which were ruled as fouls. Personally I’m convinced that we will one day witness a thrower who gets their physics all wrong and leaves the ball-and-chain in the circle while they fly out to the 80 metres mark.Race walking was another prime prospect for ejection in the view of some others present, an event regularly punctuated with distressing technical dismissals and which, in one observer’s memorable phrase, resembles shouting in a whisper.It seemed to me that Johnson ought at least to have been grateful that no red-card-waving officials presided over his events, as he would have been routinely disqualified for not lifting – his knees, that is. There is something cartoon-like about hulking men winding themselves up into a frenzy and producing nothing but an embarrassing bulge. One thinks of the Irish thrower who once managed to demolish the cage.