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With the stakes so high and the margins so thin at the World Cup, having the best players available and on the field to compete makes a huge difference for teams looking to secure critical results. That means players will look to avoid picking up too many yellow cards (also called cautions or bookings), since absorbing cautions risks not only getting sent off in a match, but also being suspended for yellow card accumulation (picking up multiple cautions)....

Torts was referring to players like Jack Eichel, Auston Matthews and Johnny Gaudreau, plus Brandon Saad and Seth Jones from Tortorella’s Blue Jackets, who took the ice for Team North America in the World Cup. That U.S./Canada, 23-and-under mashup was a crowd favorite in Toronto. Maple Leafs savior Matthews had much to do with that, but it was also a really good club. MORE: World Cup of Hockey rosters...

The Romanian, who cited soreness in her right Achilles, said she still plans to take part in the upcoming US Open. “I need to recover in time for the US Open,” she said. This would have been Halep’s third tournament in as many weeks. She won the WTA Montreal event before being runner-up in Cincinnati, losing in three sets to Dutchwoman Bertens on Sunday. “I really wanted to play it (Connecticut) and I saw that many fans bought tickets to see me here, but I feel very sore with my Achilles, and I need some rest,” she added....

RELATED: World Of Warcraft: 15 Best Transmog Sets For Mages Many of the priest class’s best sets come from the old days, long before 3D assets began appearing. All the way back to the Vestments of Transcendence and its paper-thin design, the priest has always had beautiful armor to wear and choose from. Shadow, however, is the only spec players have yet to see a good design for, and it requires a bit of creativity to transmog it right....

Enchanting has always been defined by the need to destroy uncommon or higher quality items to extract reagents. This continues in Shadowlands with the purple Eternal Crystal only coming from disenchanted epic gear. With Mythic dungeons and Castle Nathria drops being the only reliable source of epics, it was nearly impossible for many new enchanters to get enough Eternal Crystals without spending massive amounts of gold on the Auction House....

A quest in World of Warcraft’s new desert zone, Vol’dun, transforms players into a giant snake and has them investigate a small area. Some players have taken advantage of the snake’s fluid mobility by utilizing the form as a way to grind some stair rails and performs some sick 360s over gaps. The result is just about as ridiculous as you might expect. Check out the video right here:...

These big narrative moments featured in World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth cinematics, quest text, and other in-game moments led many players to speculate that the original faction lines between Horde and Alliance may come crashing down as the two groups come together to face an external threat in the MMO’s next expansion: Shadowlands. Those hopes were dashed away pretty quickly by the man in charge, Ion Hazzikostas during an interview at BlizzCon....

One of the most popular among these has been the “Glory of the Hero” and “Glory of the Raider” meta achievements that traditionally reward World of Warcraft players with a thematic mount. The Red, Black, and Plagued Proto-Drake have been the first of these mounts, and the one awarded for mastering Dragonflight’s dungeons has finally been revealed. RELATED:World of Warcraft: Dragonflight Adds New Transformation Mount Wowhead has datamined that completing all the special achievements in the eight dungeons of Dragonflight will bestow the reins of a volcanic snail mount called Shellack....

While completing World of Warcraft World Quests yesterday and trying to unlock the Tortollan faction reward, I spent some time traveling around the new zones and completing quests for the ancient turtle-themed faction. One of those quests tasked players to take control of a cannon and blast crabs and birds out of the way to clear a path for baby turtles trying to reach the water. The quest felt incredibly familiar and after a little bit of research, the reason became obvious....

In a statement Thursday, the sport’s world governing body said the competition will be a “two-division, merit-based format with promotion and relegation and a potential pathway for all unions.” The statement’s use of the term “merit-based” implies the first league in 2022 will comprise the top dozen teams in the world rankings. But the statement provides no explicit assurances Pacific island teams will be included and there have been reports suggesting it will tap the larger television markets of Japan and the United States....

Turned out he was wrong, and all was right with the Cardinals. The 16-year veteran playing in his first Series singled twice and drove in a run to help St. Louis tie it at one game apiece with a 4-2 win over the Boston Red Sox on Thursday night. "When I left the ballpark yesterday, I had very little hope that I was going to be in the lineup," Beltran said....

Now, as revealed by Blizzard today, players will be able to try out every race available in World of Warcraft, regardless of which expansion they own, without paying any additional fee. That means that those aforementioned vanilla WoW players, who didn’t want to fork over the cash for ‘Lich King’ or ‘Cataclysm,’ can play as a Drenai, a Worgen, or a Blood Elf without paying any extra. Even more exciting than playing as one of the older locked racesis the announcement that, when the ‘Mists of Pandaria’ expansion becomes available on September 25th, those same players will be able to try out the new Pandaren race as well....

Playing in the closed beta, only the standard gameplay features and options were available, such as the graphics (which are automatically set based on computer performance), audio, and controls. World of Warplanes offers quite a lot of control options, ranging from simple mouse gameplay to more intricate commands that players can use on the keyboard. A joystick though, seemed to be the best option for complete control, especially one that has programmable buttons....

As we have witnessed so far in this tournament, no team was going to give away the opportunity to progress further without putting up a fight. This made for some cracking encounters in the World Cup round of 16. Goals in every game mean that the group stage game between France and Denmark continues to be the only goalless tie of the tournament. Only one encounter was decided by more than one goal, Brazil’s 2-0 win against Mexico....

The stakes are sky high for the two sporting behemoths: An audience of over 3 billion and merchandise sale opportunity to the tune of $5 billion. Let’s look at the figures which cement FIFA World Cup’s position as the world’s most watched (sporting or non-sporting) event: The 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil had a global in-home television audience reach of 3.2 billion. That’s about half the human population!...

With the U.S. missing the 2018 World Cup, one might expect there to be almost no MLS presence at all in Russia 2018. And that would be wrong. The obvious improvement of MLS over the past four years is evident in the significant number of its players who’ll be in Russia even with no U.S. contingent included. In 2014, there were 31 MLS players on official rosters, of whom 16 represented the United States....

“This team is more (Lionel) Messi’s than mine,” Sampaoli said in March. He was talking about Messi’s ability to get the best out of his teammates, but now, three games into a chaotic campaign in Russia, we may as well think about Argentina’s No.10 as their player-coach. There is some dispute as to whether Messi made the decision to bring on Sergio Aguero during Tuesday’s match with Nigeria; did he tell Sampaoli it was happening, did Sampaoli ask Messi what to do, or did the coach merely make the decision himself and relay it to the captain, as has since been claimed in the Argentine press?...

Of course, after such a big win, there are several positives that can be taken for the winning team. In this case, Shikhar Dhawan coming back to the kind of form he so regularly shows in the ICC events is great news for India. So is the performance of Kohli, who may not have played a fluent innings, but chipped in with a crucial knock which will do his confidence a world of good going further into the tournament....

Australia thrashed Afghanistan by seven wickets in their opening encounter and grinded out a tense win over the West Indies thanks to some vital contributions from Nathan Coulter-Nile and Mitchell Starc. India, on the other hand, produced a thoroughly professional display to beat South Africa by six wickets at Southampton with Rohit Sharma and Yuzvendra Chahal being the stars of the show. Match Details Date: 9th June 2019 (Sunday)...

After plummeting to a huge defeat against West Indies in their opening game, Pakistan stunned the home side in a high scoring thriller. Unfortunately, their next match against Sri Lanka was washed without a ball bowled. A loss against Australia will mean Pakistan will have 3 points from 4 matches, which certainly make things difficult for them in the later half of the tournament. Australia won their first two games against Afghanistan and West Indies but suffered a defeat against India....