Category: 6. Sports

As the final Grand Slam of the year is about to unfold at Flushing Meadows, all eyes are on Novak Djokovic and his quest for a record 25th Grand Slam title. At 38, the Serb is on the verge of attaining an unprecedented figure, a milestone that will further cement his legacy as arguably the greatest of all time. Unfortunately, Djokovic has been standing at the number for two years now, making his fans anxious and leaving many knowers of the game curious about whether he will ever be able to get there.

The long wait can finally be over at the US Open 2025, but the big question is: is he ready to do that? Let’s examine the key factors that will determine his chances.

He has the aura and the numbers

Being one of the most dominant figures in the history of the game, Novak Djokovic always enters a competition as a favourite. Whether ranked 1 or 50, the Serbian legend can secure the title, and no fan in the world will be surprised. Thus, considering the aura he holds and his sheer will, he can win the US Open 2025.

Moreover, the numbers also back him. Djokovic holds an impressive 90-14 record at the US Open, and has won the tournament in 2011, 2015, 2018, and 2023. This was the last Grand Slam tournament he won before the waiting phase began. Also, his Grand Slam record in 2025 isn’t something to worry about. Djokovic reached the semi-final stage of all three Grand Slam tournaments till now; hence, he is almost there and just needs some luck with fitness and opponent.

Favourite on hard court

Novak Djokovic is arguably the greatest hard-court player of all time. It is evident from the fact that 14 of his 24 majors have come on the hard court. Needless to state, he has the experience and tactical knowledge required to extract the win from any situation.

Alcaraz-Sinner factor

After Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal faded away, there was no one challenging the throne of Novak Djokovic. However, the next generation of stars finally emerged, and in a matter of a couple of years, Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner have become two of the prominent contenders for every Grand Slam title.

The No.7 seed, Djokovic, will likely encounter one of them at the US Open 2025, and given the fitness both these players have displayed in the last few months, it will be a daunting task for Djokovic to get the better of them, especially if the meeting takes place in the latter stages.

Will come back stronger after the break

Djokovic hasn’t featured in any competitive play since Wimbledon 2025. He will be mentally and physically fresh for the US Open. This could be a key strategy he has taken to compete with much younger challengers. However, this inactivity can backfire as well.

Can Novak Djokovic win the US Open?

While the odds may favour younger contenders, dismissing Djokovic would be foolish. His never say die attitude, legendary fitness, and ability to raise his game at crucial junctures remain formidable weapons in his arsenal.

So, he will enter as a contender? Yes! But will he be able to secure the title and end the wait for the 25th Grand Slam? That remains a captivating question, making this tournament unmissable to tennis fans worldwide.

When will Novak Djokovic play his first-round match at the US Open 2025?

Novak Djokovic will begin his US Open 2025 campaign today, as per local time. He will take on the local lad, Learner Tien, at the Arthur Ashe Stadium.

At what time Novak Djokovic vs Learner Tien US Open round 1 match take place?

The round 1 match between Novak Djokovic and Learner Tien is scheduled to begin at 4:30 AM IST.

How to watch the live streaming of the US Open 2025?

Fans can watch the live streaming of the US Open 2025 on JioHotstar.

Singles schedule at the US Open 2025

The following is the Singles schedule at the US Open 2025, according to Tucson.com.

• Aug. 24-25-26: First Round (Women and Men)

• Aug. 27-28: Second Round (Women and Men)

• Aug. 29-30: Third Round (Women and Men)

• Aug. 31-Sept. 1: Fourth Round (Women and Men)

• Sept. 2-3: Quarterfinals (Women and Men)

• Sept. 4: Women’s Semifinals

• Sept. 5: Men’s Semifinals

• Sept. 6: Women’s Final

• Sept. 7: Men’s Final

Chelsea have given permission to Borussia Dortmund to fly Carney Chukwuemeka and Aaron Anselmino to Germany to complete moves that will take player sales at Stamford Bridge this summer to beyond £270m.

Chukwuemeka, 21, spent the second half of last season on loan at Dortmund and is set to sign on a permanent basis for a fee rising to about £24m, with a significant sell-on clause included.

The England Under-20 international was keen to move back to the Westfalenstadion despite interest from RB Leizpig and is in the process of finalising his return.

That deal would take Chelsea’s income from player sales this summer to a league-high £273.4m, which almost balances out the £277m spent on incoming transfers.

Uefa have told Chelsea they must record a positive transfer balance this window in order to be allowed to register their new signings for this season’s Champions League.

It follows them having been fined £26.7m for a breach of Uefa’s football earning rules and having had a squad cost ratio – the proportion of their income paid out in wages – above 80%.

Meanwhile, Anselmino has agreed to join Dortmund on a season-long loan deal without any option to buy clauses included.

The Argentine defender was told by manager Enzo Maresca that he needed a loan move to play the minutes he needs to develop amid competition for places in the Chelsea first-team squad.

But he remains an important part of future planning at Stamford Bridge, and moves to Dortmund to cover the recent injuries of defenders Niklas Sule, Emre Can and Nico Schlotterbeck.

Chukwuemeka has played 32 matches for Chelsea since joining in a £20m move from Aston Villa in 2022, while Anselmino made a single substitute appearance at the Club World Cup having joined the west Londoners from Boca Juniors in January for £15.6m.

Chelsea hope to sign to more players in the nine days remaining in the window, with Manchester United winger Alejandro Garnacho and RB Leipzig midfielder Xavi Simons targeted.

Forwards Nicolas Jackson, Christopher Nkunku and Tyrique George are expected to leave, while Chelsea could sell as many as nine players, including in the so-called ‘bomb squad’, with the Blues looking at options for Raheem Sterling, Ben Chilwell, Axel Disasi amongst others.

The 2025 World TrailO Championships begin with two PreO days in Hungary – and then Slovakia takes over, organizing the Relay and TempO competitions. 170 competitors from 24 nations will be taking part in the championships, which run from Tuesday until Sunday.

This year’s top TrailO event has attracted 41 physically challenged competitors (P class) from all over the world together with 129 competitors in the Open (O class). There is an increase in the number of juniors entered, the outcome of a campaign to attract even more young people in a discipline of orienteering with a very big age range. Many of these, such as the Czech star Ondřej Macek who will be defending the TempO crown at these championships, are proving to be very talented.

Sümeg, a town north of Lake Balaton in Hungary, is the venue for the first stage. For the PreO competition, where only two control tasks each day have timed answers, some spectacular terrain has been chosen. The first day will be held at an abandoned basalt mine with its many rocks, ledges and ridges, whilst the second day is in an area with traces of former mining activity in mixed-visibility forest terrain. Specially enlarged maps (1:2000) are being provided for parts of this competition, to help participants cope with the complexity of the rock detail. The standard map scale is 1:3000 with 2 m contour interval.

The PreO medals are decided on the sum of the two days. Defending champions from 2023 Michael Johansson, Sweden (P class) and Arno Grønhovd, Norway (O) will be striving hard to retain their titles.

Terrain with complex rock and contour detail can be expected   Photo: ETOC 2024

The Championships then move to Slovakia, with the Event Centre in the capital Bratislava and the competitions sited in a hilly area north-east of the city. There are two days of competition also in Slovakia: first the Relay for teams of 3, which has both PreO and TempO components, and then the day after, the TempO Qualification and Final. In TempO all tasks are timed, and the first 18 from each of two qualification heats progress to the final.

The relay area is a semi-open area with an old quarry and a steep-sided valley, whilst the TempO competitions will be held in deciduous forest with areas of small stones, linked with a castle park. Finland and Germany will be defending their P and O class titles respectively from 2023, along with the TempO winner from two years ago, Ondřej Macek; in TempO, P and O classes compete together on equal terms.

Reports and leading results will appear here on each competition day. Full information on every aspect of the event can be found in Bulletin 4, which can be accessed on the event website www.wtoc2025.org.

Competition Programme

Wednesday 27 August   PreO 1

Thursday 28 August   PreO 2

Saturday 29 August   Relay

Sunday 31 August   TempO Qualification (a.m.), Final (p.m.)

Most fans will have at least one moment during the tennis season when they need to figure out how the tennis rankings actually work. Last year’s came Oct. 21, when Aryna Sabalenka overtook Iga Świątek as the women’s world No. 1 because of an unheralded WTA Tour rule that the organization did not explain or forecast before making the change.

This year’s arrives with the U.S. Open, with the world No. 1 ranking on the line in both the men’s and women’s draws. Carlos Alcaraz and Jannik Sinner are fighting for the top ranking on the ATP Tour, while Świątek, Sabalenka and — maybe — Coco Gauff are in play on the WTA Tour.

“I’m kind of interested in how the rankings and the awarding of these points actually work. I’m going to try to figure it out,” any given tennis fan might say, before navigating to either the men’s or women’s lists, being greeted with a long line of opaque numbers, and deciding that if they’ve survived for this long without understanding the system, another year is just fine.

Dearest tennis fan, we feel you. So much so that we’ve endeavored to explain the rhyme and reason of tennis rankings, even if this should not be perceived as an endorsement of the existing system, which is fraught, to say the least.

Here is how tennis rankings work, how tennis players are ranked, and why it sometimes gets complicated.

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When were tennis rankings invented and why do they exist? 

The official tour rankings date to the 1970s, the first years of the so-called ‘Open Era’ of tennis. That was when the people who ran tennis started to permit professionals and amateurs to compete in the same tournaments, most importantly the Grand Slams. The ATP rankings were introduced in the summer of 1973, but their current iteration dates from 1990.

The WTA rankings were introduced in 1975. Both rankings systems are computerized — ‘Blinky’ calculates the men’s and ‘Medusa’ the women’s — which is why some tennis records are dated since the “introduction of computerized rankings.” Players are awarded points for their results and their points determine their ranking.

Ultimately, tennis needed a fair way to decide who qualifies for each tournament and how they should be seeded in those tournaments. If you think the current rankings system is a mess, it is a model of precision and justice compared with the old system of tournament directors doling out invitations and seedings as they pleased. Things got so bad that the ATP was created as a union for players in 1972, before organizing a large-scale boycott of the 1973 Wimbledon Championships.

How do tennis players earn ranking points?

Players earn points on both tours by winning matches and, they hope, tournaments. A sliding scale assigns each tournament a number of points to be awarded to the winner, beaten finalist, semifinalists, and so on. Tournaments are also categorized according to importance, which is embodied by the prize money players can win as well as the ranking points they can earn.

The four Grand Slams, which are the most important tournaments, deliver the most points, awarding 2000 to the winner and 1300 to the finalist, down to 10 points for players who lose in the first round.

All the other tournaments are categorized by how many points the winner collects. Starred figures in the ATP table indicate rounds that can be included or excluded according to the size of the draw at the tournament:

The next most important tournament is the Tour Finals, which on both tours awards a maximum of 1500 points to an undefeated champion, but only eight singles players can qualify for those, so the next truly significant category is the 1000-level tournaments. The ATP Tour refers to these as Masters 1000s, while the WTA Tour labels them as WTA 1000s. They include six combined events: Indian Wells in California; the Miami Open; the Madrid Open; the Italian Open in Rome; the Canadian Open, which alternates between Toronto and Montreal, and the Cincinnati Open.

Just to add a wrinkle of confusion, the WTA also has a series of 125-level tournaments. These are listed alongside its main events on the calendar but are considered a secondary event circuit despite not being formally designated as such.

The ATP Tour cuts off at 250-level events. Its 125-level events are part of the ATP Challenger Tour, but those events and WTA 125s can still constitute part of a player’s full ATP or WTA ranking if, for example, they win a few Challengers or 125s and so qualify for higher-level events.

And how is their ATP or WTA ranking calculated?

On both tours, the rankings look backwards 52 weeks, so you always have the number of points you have earned during the most recent year. Points then “drop off” a player’s total 52 weeks after they were awarded. Tournaments don’t always line up exactly in the calendar, so on occasion points will drop off before the following edition of a tournament, rather than after it.

The tours are divided, however, on which events constitute a player’s ranking and on which events in the tennis calendar players must play. To begin, each has a number of mandatory events, with some stipulations around qualification and ranking:

Both tours then set a limit on the number of events that can be included in the calculation of ranking points totals to prevent the volume of tournaments played from unfairly outweighing performance in those tournaments. On the WTA Tour, the best 18 results count — 19 if a player qualifies for the Tour Finals. On the ATP Tour, it’s the best 19 — 20 if a player qualifies for the Tour Finals.

The tours also divide their events differently. Both the ATP and the WTA include the four Grand Slams and six 1000-level combined events in their rankings calculations. That makes 10 events, plus their respective Tour Finals if the player in question makes it there. That’s 11 events.

This is where things get slightly complicated because the China Open is a combined event, but is only a 1000-level tournament on the WTA Tour; it is a 500-level event on the ATP Tour. Where the ATP just uses the six combined events which are 1000-level across both tours, the WTA takes the best six results from any combined event that includes a WTA 1000 — the six shared 1000s, and the China Open.

Then they diverge further. The ATP Tour uses its two further mandatory Masters 1000s — the Shanghai Masters and the Paris Masters — to make 13 events, but a player can replace up to three of their Masters 1000 results with higher points totals from ATP 500 or ATP 250 tournaments.

Those results are followed by the next seven best results in any class of tournament to make 20 for a player who qualifies for the Tour Finals, and 19 for a player who does not.

The WTA instead uses the best result at one of the three mandatory, WTA-only 1000 tournaments — the Qatar Open, the Dubai Tennis Championships, and the Wuhan Open. This makes 12 events, followed by the seven best results in any class of tournament to make 19 for a player who qualifies for the Tour Finals, and 18 for a player who does not.

What does ‘defending’ ranking points mean?

To recap: players earn points at a tournament. The points stick around for 52 weeks and then they drop off. That means that when a player enters a tournament, they still have the points they earned at the previous edition. This is known as ‘defending’ and it means the best players of the previous year are most at risk in the following. Win a Grand Slam title for 2000 points and then lose in the first round? Expect a precipitous drop in ranking.

What’s the difference between the tennis world rankings and the ATP and WTA ‘Races’?

Both tours keep a separate scoreboard that tracks the race to qualify for the season-ending Tour Finals. That scoreboard, known as ‘The Race’, begins at the start of the season, since by the end of it all the points from the previous season will have been dropped. The top eight players in each race qualify for the season-ending Tour Finals, except when they don’t.

Last year, Barbora Krejčíková took the eighth spot at the WTA Tour Finals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, despite finishing outside the top eight in the rankings. This is a special provision for Grand Slam champions who finish outside the top eight in the year that they win a Grand Slam title — provided that they do not finish outside the top 20 in the race.

How do the tennis rankings affect tournaments?

Rankings are used to seed players — the top 32 at a Grand Slam tournament and most 1000-level tournaments, then the top 16 or top eight at smaller tournaments. Seedings are calculated from the ATP or WTA rankings around a week before a given tournament starts. Then there are those races for the top eight, to qualify for the Tour Finals, and smaller races further down the rankings that can make the difference between direct acceptance into a main draw or having to go through a qualifying tournament.

While there are 104 main draw places at each Grand Slam, it is extremely rare that all the players in the top 104 end up with them. This is because of ‘protected’ (ATP) and ‘special’ (WTA) rankings for injured players — more on those later.

The 24 further places are given to players who come through qualifying or who receive wildcards, usually in a 16-8 split. For tournaments outside Grand Slams, 96-player draws normally have 78 direct acceptances; 56-player draws have 44 or 45.

In tennis, high-ranked players don’t have to play anyone in their ranking neighborhood until the later rounds of a big tournament. They get byes, which means automatic money and rankings points. Success generates opportunities for more success.

What about rankings for injured players?

The ATP and WTA both have mechanisms for players returning from injury or other circumstances, like pregnancy.

On both tours, players can petition for an injury ranking once they have been absent for six months. On the ATP Tour, the ‘protected’ ranking is an average of the player’s ranking for the first three months following their injury. They can use it for the first nine events they play after returning or through the first nine months, whichever comes first; for an injury lay-off longer than a year that extends to 12 tournaments and months.

On the WTA Tour, players can use their ‘special ranking’ for eight tournaments in a season or 12 if they are out for over a year. Their ranking stays as it was when they first got injured.

Players using these rankings to enter tournaments can not obtain the seeding slot associated with their ranking, so can still face current top 32 players as early as the first round of a Grand Slam tournament.

(Top photo: Aryna Sabalenka with the WTA world No. 1 trophy; by Robert Prange / Getty Images)

Cheteshwar Pujara, who announced his retirement from all forms of cricket on Sunday, leaves behind a career celebrated for its patience, courage and resilience. Among the many innings that defined him, his 56 off 211 balls during India’s historic win at the Gabba in 2021 stands out,but not just for the runs, but for the sheer physical punishment he withstood. On the final day in Brisbane, as Australia’s fast bowlers launched a relentless barrage, Pujara was struck 11 times on his body. Pat Cummins hit him on the back of the helmet, below the neck, chest, thigh, bicep and once on the gloves.Mitchell Starc rapped him twice on the bottom glove, while Josh Hazlewood delivered three painful blows. One was on the arm above the elbow, the other on the gloves that even made him drop his bat, and finally on the helmet which saw his neck guard fall off.

Each strike was a painful blow, but Pujara refused to flinch. His 211-ball vigil blunted Australia’s pace attack and set the stage for Rishabh Pant to script one of India’s most famous Test victories. Explaining his mindset later, Pujara revealed why he chose to take the blows rather than fend them with the bat. “Getting hit on the head wasn’t very painful because you have the protection of a helmet. Yes, it looks very scary when you’re watching on TV and even as a batter you don’t want to get hit on the helmet … forget about the pain and the bruises … but talking about that pitch, I feel it had variable bounce. Especially from one end, the ball wasn’t rising much and then at times it was rising more than what I was expecting,” Pujara said back in 2021.

“There was the option of defending with the bat, but it wasn’t the safe option because the ball could hit your glove and go to short leg, leg slip or gully or you can be out caught-behind. So I wanted to rule that option out. That is why I was taking blows on my body,” he added.

Pujara’s endurance earned praise from across the cricketing world. Sunil Gavaskar, paying tribute after his retirement, told TOI, “One of the old-school cricketers who put India above everything else. Took endless blows for Indian cricket but never took a backward step. Hopefully, Indian cricket will use his experience and expertise to teach young budding cricketers that whatever they become in life is because of Indian cricket and it should come above anything and everything. Take a bow, Cheteshwar. You have made India proud.”

In many ways, those 11 blows at the Gabba captured the essence of Cheteshwar Pujara — a batter who wore pain as armour, and stood tall when India needed him most.

Where all was Pujara hit and by whom?

Body parts struck