Tennis great Borg bows out, Man United’s Giggs tears Arsenal apart
April 14 1992: A fan puts a crown on the head of Swedish tennis great Bjorn Borg after his loss to France’s Olivier Delaitre in Nice.
Borg, who won six French Open titles and Wimbledon five times from 1974-1981, retired in 1983 before attempting to make comebacks in the early 1990s. Though he was not successful, his legacy remained intact and he was a hit with the fans who turned up to watch him play. April 14 1999: Manchester United’s Ryan Giggs scores the winning goal in a famous 2-1 victory FA Cup semifinal victory.
Pouncing on a loose Arsenal pass in his own half, Giggs embarked on a solo run on which he beat four defenders before firing the ball past the goalkeeper to win the game for 10-man United.
United won the famous treble that year and Giggs’s run was immortalised by the famous chant “Giggs will tear you apart again” by the United faithful. April 14 2000: Nick Martin, Sydney’s World Cup Triathlon dive leader, swims near the triathlon course while wearing a shark protective ocean device on his back in Sydney Harbour.
Overseas Olympics competitors were worried about shark attacks during the swim leg of the triathlon after a spate of sightings in the harbour and organisers decided to deploy dive teams to ease their fears. April 14 2001: West Ham United midfielder Frank Lampard celebrates with his teammates after scoring the second goal in a 3-1 Premier League victory over Derby County at Upton Park.
Lampard spent his youth career and early years at West
Ham before earning a £11m move to Chelsea later that year — where he won three league titles, four FA Cups and a Champions League trophy.
Lampard, who is Chelsea’s top goal scorer with 211 goals, retired in 2016 after a 21-year career. He got his feet wet in management with Derby County in the second tier before taking up the role at Chelsea in 2019.
April 14 2001: Scottish footballer Jim Baxter died of cancer at the age of 61 and is remembered as one of the greatest talents never to have featured in a World Cup.
His light touch, technique, glorious passing and supreme confidence on the ball led former Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson to describe him as arguably the best player to play in Scottish football.
Yet like Northern Ireland’s George Best, another great talent who missed out on the World Cup, Baxter is also recalled as a player whose hard-drinking lifestyle shortened his career.
Two liver transplants followed his ill-advised decision to become a pub landlord, but like Best, he did not publicly show much regret at his approach to life. “Perhaps I did enjoy myself too much, but what’s too much?,” he said. “Moderation, as far as I’m concerned, is for moderate people.”
April 14 2001: Leicester Tigers celebrate winning the English Premiership title for the third year in a row.
The 2000/2001 season was the first campaign that had the new bonus points scoring system introduced to encourage more attacking play and Tigers won the title by eight points. April 14 2005: US President George Bush throws out the first pitch for the home opener for the
Washington Nationals at their temporary home in RFK Stadium in Washington.
The Nationals, originally the Montreal Expos who moved to Washington, were the first major league franchise to be based in the capital city since 1971. However, there was resistance from civic leaders who were worried the city could not afford its pledge to help build a new stadium — Nationals Park — which opened in 2008 at a cost of more than $700m.
April 14 2007: Uzbek challenger Ruslan Chagaev and Nikolai Valuev clash in their World Boxing Association (WBA) heavyweight title bout in Stuttgart.
Chagaev upset the odds to beat the taller and heavier defending champion Valuev by a majority decision. “Before the fight everybody said that Nikolai is too tall for me to have a chance. Well, I’m smaller but I have the sting,” Chagaev said. April 14 2016: Andy Murray of Britain reacts after missing a point against France’s Benoit Paire at the Monte Carlo Masters in Monaco. Second seed Murray dropped the opening set in the third-round encounter but came back to win 2-6 7-5 7-5 to advance.
Murray fell in the semifinals, losing to Rafa Nadal in three sets. However, Murray would go on to win Wimbledon as well as the Olympic gold in Rio that year to surge ahead in the rankings, eventually becoming the first British man to become world No 1.