Defense was the difference for the Chicago Sky with their season on the line and facing elimination in Game 3 of its WNBA playoff semifinal Sunday against Los Angeles Sparks.The reward? Chicago earned a 70-66 win and another shot at Los Angeles in Game 4, set for Tuesday night at Allstate Arena in Rosemont, Ill. Los Angeles still holds a 2-1 lead in the best-of-five series, meaning everything the Sky accomplished on Sunday will be for naught if it cant replicate the effort at least one more time.Game 5, if necessary, will be played Thursday in Los Angeles.The Sky held Los Angeles forward Candace Parker, who came into the game averaging 25 points in the first two contests in the series, to just nine points on 3-of-14 shooting from the floor. The Sparks shot just 36.6 percent as a team and just 18.2 percent from three-point range.Los Angeles took a whopping 33 three-point shots in Game 3 after attempting 41 in the first two games of the series combined. Conversely, Chicago was just 1 of 3 from long-range and took 69 two-point shots.Parker did corral 15 rebounds, 11 of them on the defensive end, and league MVP Nneka Ogwumike scored a game-high 22 points for Los Angeles.Chicago got 17 points from Courtney Vandersloot and 13 points and 11 rebounds from rookie center Imani Boyette in Game 3. Vandersloot and Boyette scored Chicagos final 10 points of the game.The Sky is still playing without star forward Elena Delle Donne, who on Sunday missed her ninth straight game after undergoing right thumb surgery on Sept. 13.Los Angeles led by 15 points in the first half and by nine at halftime. Chicago outscored the Sparks 19-8 in the third quarter and clinched the game on a pair of free throws in the final seconds by Vandersloot.The Sparks won Games 1 (95-75) and 2 (99-84) and have captured five of the six meetings between the two teams this season, including twice on Chicagos home floor with Delle Donne in the lineup. Los Angeles has scored at least 93 points in four of those victories.The winner of this series will play defending champ Minnesota, who swept Phoenix in the other semifinal, in the WNBA finals beginning Oct. 9 in Minneapolis. Discount Nike Shoes Canada . Barcelonas entertaining victory ensured the defending Spanish champions retained their share of the league lead with Atletico Madrid two rounds ahead of their meeting in the capital. Real Madrid needed a late goal by substitute Jese Rodriguez to earn a 3-2 victory at Valencia to stay in third place and three points behind its title rivals. Air Max Canada Online .S. Open champion Justin Rose birdied the first hole with a blind shot he hit to a foot of the pin, and he stayed in front Tuesday until he completed a 4-under 67 for a two-shot lead over Jason Dufner in PGA Grand Slam of Golf. http://www.airmaxoutletcanada.com/ . "It was nerve-wracking, but we pulled through," said Collaros, who threw four touchdown passes to lead the Toronto Argonauts (8-4) to a 33-27 win over the Calgary Stampeders (9-3) in front of 28,781 fans at McMahon Stadium. Wholesale Air Max Canada For Sale . Takahashi, who had a 10-point lead after the short program, received 268.31 points after the free skate to finish 15 points ahead of second-place Nobunari Oda. Clearance Air Max Canada Store . Note: The Calgary Flames announced Tuesday that Sean Monahan would not be made available to Canadas World Junior team. The law is an ass. Dont take my word for it, take Bob Woolmers. In an interview with The Guardian on Wednesday, Pakistans coach decided that attack was the best means of defending his team, as he accused Law 42.3 - their alleged breach of which has thrown the game into chaos - of being anachronistic and contrary to crickets best interests.Id scrub out the law completely, said Woolmer, of a ruling that once consisted of a couple of ambiguous paragraphs about the dos and donts of ball maintenance, but has - since the start of the millennium - been rehashed as an eight-clause, 13-subclause magnum opus.It was brought in because of ball-tampering with razor blades and bottle tops and everything else in the past, added Woolmer, but thats been shoved out of the game now. Its like prohibition: the more you ban alcohol, the more it goes underground. They really need to open it up in my opinion.These are brave words from a man who had admitted that, before yesterdays hearing postponement shifted the goalposts, the future of Pakistans tour of England hinged entirely on that very charge of ball-tampering. As one exasperated journalist pointed out at the height of the brouhaha on Monday, cricket is such a hicks game. Only in cricket could a team prepare their defence of a rule-breach by turning round and saying: Well, its a silly rule anyway.Well, it is a silly rule, and thats what makes this whole issue all the sillier. Though the moralists froth with righteous indignation, in the eyes of the ICC law-makers, ball-tampering barely even registers on the Richter Scale. It is deemed a Level 2 offence, which is on a par with sticking too large a logo on the back of your bat, or getting over-excited in the pursuit of an appeal.The Level 3 offence, the disrepute charge that Pakistan are now willing to accept, is actually one notch more serious, though it does not come attached with anything like the same historical, emotional and moral baggage. Pakistan have no truck with being called troublemakers, but quite understandably, they wont stomach being called cheats.Well, most of them wont, at any rate. Shahid Afridi, however, has always done things differently, and back in February, at a time when his teams bowlers were being lacerated by Indias batsmen on the slow, flat featherbeds of Lahore and Faisalabad, he gave an interview to the Indian news channel, Times Now, extolling the virtues of making the ball.You have to make the ball in order to make it swing, said Afridi in the interview that has spread like wildfire since Sundays stand-off. I dont think theres anything wrong because its a torture for the bowlers to bowl on these wickets. With the kind of cricket that is going on, it spells death for the bowlers if you dont.Afridi has a very valid point. In the first two Tests of that turgid series, 2770 runs were scored for the loss of just 36 wickets, 410 of which came in a single opening stand between Virender Sehwag and Rahul Dravid. It is all part of a modern-day trend towards bland, conformist pitches that last a full five days and thus please the TV companies, ground authorities and everyone else whose priority lies with the short-term buck. No wonder any attempts to assist the bowlers are so frowned upon.Pakistans underlying grievances, however, stem from the double standards inherent in ball-tampering. As anyone who has ever played the game knows, a bit of spit and polish is perfectly acceptable, essential even, but a bit of scratch and scour ... well that can only be the devils work. But remember last summer when England reinvented the art of reverse-swing? The claim doing the rounds in the Australian press, in a not-so-distant echo of Englands own gripes in 1992, was that their fielders had been armed with boiled sweets to make their shiny sides all the shinier.ddddddddddddWhether sugar-enhanced spittle constitutes an artificial substance is a brilliantly moot point - its not exactly Justin Gatlin territory is it? You might as well ban high-energy drinks if youre that worried. But when Simon Jones plucked out Michael Clarkes off stump at Old Trafford with perhaps the most orgasmic delivery of the summer, the only thing that mattered was the sheer, unadulterated skill on display.Personally, Id seen nothing like it since Wasim and Waqars own zenith in 1992. Why on earth would we want to drive such an art-form underground? To hear Afridi talk of making the ball as an innings progresses is a wonderfully creative vision, the sort that should appeal to any schoolboy who has ever sat at the back of a history lesson, folding his way to the perfect aerodynamic paper dart. Its time for the dark arts to be brought into the light.But lets go back to Woolmers thoughts, because they are the most intriguing. Id allow bowlers to use anything that naturally appears on the cricket field, he suggested. They could rub the ball on the ground, pick the seam, scratch it with their nails - anything that allows the ball to move off the seam to make it less of a batsmans game.Provocative comments, but personally, I wouldnt go quite that far. I certainly wouldnt permit rubbing on the ground, because that just replaces one grey area with another - remember Steve Kirbys furtive scrape on the carpark concrete at Sophia Gardens? And besides, who wants to see the unedifying spectacle of a bowler sandpapering the match ball on the cut strip for minutes on end?Afridi himself suggested making it all legal from the 30th or 40th over, which is a neat solution, albeit one that is equally open to abuse. But, in an extension of the natural-substances line, how about this as a solution? Why not require all players to have their nails clipped at the start of a match, and then send them clawless out onto the field, in the full gaze of 26 television cameras, to do their damnedest as the match progresses?Its not as ludicrous as it sounds - after all, footballers are required to have their studs checked before they set foot on the pitch. And more importantly, in bringing the practice up to surface level, we would get one step closer to demystifying the whole phenomenon of reverse swing, which everyone talks about but no-one truly understands. Last summer, one national newspaper commissioned a full-page spread on the subject, complete with illustrated diagram. They happened to get their aerodynamics completely wrong, but of course absolutely no-one noticed.Ultimately, what people find most offensive about ball-tampering is not the act itself, but the furtiveness involved. When Mike Atherton was fingered for the dirt-in-the-pocket scandal in 1994, he could have insisted that he was maintaining the condition of the ball, as per the rules. But upon encountering the formidable figure of Peter Burge, the match referee, Atherton panicked and changed his defence.Bad move. It was quite clear from Athertons actions that he was guilty of something - anything! - and in the kangaroo courts of the British media, that was enough for pandemonium to ensue. It sounds familiar, doesnt it? ' ' '