Saturday<\/p>\n
Football<\/p>\n
8am (all times BST)Matchday live<\/p>\n
Our essential Saturday morning gateway to the weekend\u2019s football returns and Yara El-Shaboury is your host as the Championship launches with a flurry of matches. Readers are invited to get in touch with their plans for the day; we spin through the headlines from overnight, including Friday night\u2019s Birmingham v Ipswich curtain-raiser; and we flag the day\u2019s big Championship, Football League and Scottish Premiership matches, with team news and all the latest breaking transfer stories. Post your thoughts and questions to Ben Fisher for our Football League Q&A at 11am. Send your queries to matchday.live@theguardian.com<\/a> from 9.30am. Ben sets the scene on the new Championship season \u2013 the contenders, hopefuls and youngsters to watch \u2013 here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Championship<\/p>\n 12.30pmSouthampton v Wrexham<\/p>\n Wrexham return to the second tier for the first time in 43 years. Three consecutive promotions have taken the Red Dragons \u2013 the Welsh club with Hollywood backing and an unlikely global following \u2013 from the National League to an opening-day fixture at Southampton, freshly relegated from the Premier League. While some fans have been dreaming that Wrexham can make it four promotions in succession there is the danger that, after such a rapid rise, they find their ceiling \u2013 the jump from League One to the Championship is bigger than those they have bridged in the past couple of years. Ben Fisher reports from St Mary\u2019s.<\/p>\n Football<\/p>\n 12.45pmManchester United v Fiorentina <\/p>\n The noise around United never ceases and Ruben Amorin\u2019s outlay on players to refresh a team that struggled so glaringly in the Premier League last season has kept them at the forefront of the transfer agenda over the summer. So for United\u2019s final warm-up match, plenty of attention will be on his new signings, the boyhood supporter Bryan Mbeumo among them. Mbeumo was handed the chance to fulfil a dream with a \u00a370m switch from Brentford. Amorim will hope the 25-year-old Cameroon forward adds pace, creativity and goals \u2013 he scored 20 in the league last season \u2013 as he attempts to improve upon last campaign\u2019s desperately disappointing 15th-place finish. Will Unwin reports.\u00a0<\/p>\n Championship<\/p>\n 3pmMiddlesbrough v Swansea<\/p>\n Next up in our coverage of the opening Championship weekend are another Welsh club with North American connections. Comparisons with Wrexham, who are owned by the Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, have been unavoidable since the 53-year-old American rapper Snoop Dogg joined a growing list of celebrity investors in British football last month by becoming part of a Swansea ownership group that already included the Croatia midfield great Luka Modric. Snoop said Swansea\u2019s \u201cunderdog\u201d story \u201creally struck a chord with me\u201d and his vast following on social media \u2013 89 million on Instagram and 20.5 million on X \u2013 quickly learned about the Welsh club and his love for Joe\u2019s ice-cream in the city. A docu-series tracking life at Swansea, on similar lines to the Welcome to Wrexham, is understood to be already in the pipeline. Louise Taylor reports.<\/p>\n Women\u2019s rugby union<\/p>\n 8.10pmFrance v England<\/p>\n England\u2019s final warm-up match before the Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup takes John Mitchell\u2019s side to the Stade Guy Boniface to take on old foes France, but again without the experienced Emily Scarratt, Claudia Moloney-MacDonald and Holly Aitchison. Also absent will be Marlie Packer following last weekend\u2019s red card against Spain. Packer sparked fears about her availability for the first fixture of England\u2019s home World Cup against the USA on 22 August after she was sent off in a 97-7 win for a clumsy clearout. A two-week suspension would have ruled the former Red Roses captain out of the opener at Sunderland\u2019s Stadium of Light, but she will miss only this fixture after World Rugby handed out a one-match ban. Rapha\u00ebl Jucobin reports from Mont-de-Marsan.<\/p>\n Tennis<\/p>\n tbcCincinnati Open<\/p>\n Tumaini Carayol reports on Emma Raducanu\u2019s preparations for the US Open, the tournament she won in 2021, at the Cincinnati Open, where she received a bye in the first round and will face Olga Danilovic. The Briton\u2019s form of late has been encouraging. She followed a round-three exit to Aryna Sabalenka at Wimbledon with a semi-final showing at the Citi Open in Washington, where she was eventually beaten by Anna Kalinskaya. The US Open begins later in August and Raducanu is improving under the guidance of Rafael Nadal\u2019s former coach Francis Roig. \u201cI\u2019m working on the quality of my shots to be better,\u201d she says. \u201cI think against the very top that\u2019s what it needs, it needs to improve.\u201d<\/p>\n Sunday<\/p>\n Football<\/p>\n 8amMatchday live<\/p>\n Dominic Booth and Daniel Harris pick up the baton on our compelling, one-stop guide to the day\u2019s unfurling football action. They\u2019ll be spinning through the overnight headlines and keeping track of all the breaking news, as well as flagging up the Community Shield at Wembley. John Brewin posts updates as he arrives at Wembley for Crystal Palace v Liverpool. Expect a rundown of the latest transfer window stories and some discussion on fans\u2019 transfer hopes. Team news too for the big game in Scotland, Aberdeen v Celtic.\u00a0<\/p>\n Community Shield<\/p>\n 3pmCrystal Palace v Liverpool live<\/p>\n Arne Slot is relishing the challenge of facing Crystal Palace, the FA Cup winners, at Wembley, as the Premier League champions aim to begin the new season with silverware and prepare for their title defence. Liverpool are chasing a 17th Community Shield title, with their latest coming in 2022, but their last trip to Wembley ended in a surprise 2-1 League Cup final defeat by Newcastle in March. \u201cIt\u2019s nice if you can start the season by winning something. We have a chance at the beginning of the season. We face a difficult Crystal Palace side. They have shown how hard it is to win a one-off game with them,\u201d Slot says. \u201cPalace hit the ground running again, it is still the same team. A good challenge for us to start the season.\u201d Rob Smyth is your minute-by-minute host, while Ed Aarons and John Brewin report from Wembley.<\/p>\n Championship<\/p>\n 4.30pmLeicester v Sheffield Wednesday live<\/p>\n In a turbulent past few months Sheffield Wednesday have been hit with several EFL-imposed embargoes for financial breaches, including failing to pay players and staff on time in May, June and July. That led to the 15 first-team players still on the books at the club to boycott a behind-closed-doors friendly against Burnley, which came to light on the same day Henrik Pedersen was announced as manager. The Dane is certain there will be no repeat in their Championship opener at Leicester. \u201cI think I have a really good relationship with the players. I\u2019m convinced we have a group who are really looking forward to Sunday\u2019s game and will do everything they can for our club,\u201d he says. Daniel Harris helms our live blog, with Billy Munday reporting from the King Power Stadium.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saturday Football 8am (all times BST)Matchday live Our essential Saturday morning gateway to the weekend\u2019s football returns and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":55824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[442],"tags":[49,48,82,593],"class_list":{"0":"post-55823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/55824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}