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NFL

Saints release Bushrod as roster shuffle continues

METAIRIE, La. — The New Orleans Saints promoted running back Jonathan Williams to their active roster and released veteran offensive lineman Jermon Bushrod on Saturday as they continued a weeklong roster shuffle at both positions.

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It’s unclear if there is any chance that Bushrod could come back at some point. He was jockeying for a roster position in an offensive line group that became even more crowded earlier this week, when the Saints re-signed veterans Josh LeRibeus and Michael Ola.

Bushrod then missed practice on Thursday and Friday for an unspecified non-injury reason.

Bushrod, 34, was the starting left tackle on the Saints’ 2009 Super Bowl-winning team after they drafted him in the fourth round out of Towson in 2007. He then went on to play for the Chicago Bears and Miami Dolphins. He has started a total of 122 regular-season games and seven playoff games at both tackle and guard during his 11-year career.

The Saints brought Bushrod back in March to compete for a role as a “swing” backup at both positions.

Williams, meanwhile, is now back on the Saints’ roster after he was one of their most surprising cuts last Saturday. The third-year pro, who spent the week practicing with the team as a member of the practice squad, could still wind up playing a role in Sunday’s season opener at home against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

Williams likely will split time with newly signed veteran Mike Gillislee as the backup tailbacks behind starter Alvin Kamara.

The Saints need running back depth while Pro Bowler Mark Ingram is serving a four-game suspension for violating the NFL’s policy on performance-enhancing substances. But their pecking order at the position has been impossible to decipher this week.

For most of the preseason, it looked as if Williams and rookie Boston Scott would be the Saints’ top two backups behind Kamara. But then they cut Williams on Saturday, signed Gillislee on Sunday after he was released by the New England Patriots and cut Scott on Wednesday.

Scott also was re-signed to New Orleans’ practice squad on Thursday, but he won’t be active for Sunday’s game.

Soccer

UEFA planning to use VAR in Champions League next season

Monaco – UEFA are set to wait until next season before introducing Video Assistant Referees (VAR) in the Champions League, although they are still not ruling out having it in this season’s final, president Aleksander Ceferin said on Friday.

Ceferin has so far resisted calls to bring VAR into Europe’s elite club competition, despite the system largely proving successful at the World Cup in Russia.

It has also been introduced in Spain’s La Liga and Ligue 1 in France this season, with those leagues following on from the German Bundesliga and Serie A in Italy, although the English Premier League has also been more cautious.

“For me, VAR is not completely clear for now, but we also know that there is no way back anymore, technology will come sooner or later,” Ceferin told journalists in Monaco, where the Champions League group-stage draw was held on Thursday.

“The plan for now is to use it from the next season, with the first match which is the Super Cup,” he added.

Logistical challenge

That match is due to be played in Istanbul on Aug. 14, 2019, and the Champions League will then bring in VAR from the playoff round later the same month.

“When we are ready we will use it, but it is not so easy because we have to choose the provider, it is not easy to organise a competition across the continent with all the referees, so we have some issues,” said Ceferin.

There had been reports that VAR could come in from the latter stages of this season’s competition, but UEFA’s Slovenian president now says that it is unlikely to be seen even in the final in Madrid next June.

“I’m not ruling it out but for now it doesn’t look like it will happen.”

UEFA’s biggest concern is how they can effectively run the system in a competition that spans an entire continent – at the World Cup, FIFA used a centralised system based in Moscow, but doing the same thing with matches being played in different countries is far more complex.

“It’s really much more problematic than it looks. We really have a huge territory, we have different countries. We don’t know yet how to do it,” added Ceferin.

“The plan is to do it next season, but let’s see what happens, I don’t want to predict anything 100 percent.”

Nevertheless, it seems certain that UEFA will wait a further year before the Europa League follows suit, just as the continent’s secondary club competition waited before introducing goal-line technology (GLT).

Giorgio Marchetti, the organisation’s deputy general secretary, admitted that VAR was “obviously not impossible but very complex, and requires a lot of planning.”

“The Europa League would follow exactly like GLT, because of this complexity of the operations,” he said, confirming that the idea would be to wait another season.