Melbourne, Dec. 5: Former International Cricket Council (ICC) CEO Malcolm Speed has played down reports of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) playing a domineering and irresponsible role in the running of world cricket, but acknowledges that if it is doing so, there are processes in place to curtail it.

SEATTLE, Dec. 4  -- The Seattle Times reported Thursday USC offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian would become the next coach of the Washington Huskies.

Sarkisian has never been a head coach at any level of football.

The Huskies have an 0-11 record this season and dismissed Tyrone Willingham as their head coach.

Sarkisian, 34, has been an assistant head coach and quarterbacks coach for USC since 2005. He had served a previous tenure with the Trojans before taking the job as quarterbacks coach for the Oakland Raiders in 2004.

Hobart (Tasmania), Dec. 5 : Young New South Wales opener Phillip Hughes has passed two of Donald Bradman’s records despite his side''s Sheffield Shield loss to Tasmania at Bellerive Oval this week.

Twenty-year-old Hughes set the Shield record for the greatest two-innings contribution to a team''s game total, edging past Bradman. In doing that, he also scored his first
1,000 domestic first-class runs at a younger age than The Don.

The pint-sized left-hander, aged 20 years and four days, has now scored 1,200 runs at an average of 52.17 since his November 2007 debut for the Blues.

Melbourne, Dec. 5 : The Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations’ (FICA), which is headed by former Australian off-spinner Tim May, has proposed a security summit to save cricket in the subcontinent following the Mumbai terror attacks.

The issue will top the agenda at the executive meeting of the Federation of International Cricketers’ Associations’ in Kuala Lumpur next week.

Melbourne, Dec. 5 : Cricket Australia and the players'' union are working towards a revised policy on player workloads to ease fears that stars will decline national contracts to earn big money in flourishing Twenty20 leagues.

Los Angeles  - Rodney Rogers, who starred in college and played in the NBA for 12 seasons, is paralyzed from the shoulders down as a result of an all-terrain vehicle accident, the News & Observer of Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, reported Thursday.

Dave Odom, who coached Rogers for four years at Wake Forest University, told the newspaper that his former All-America forward is paralyzed from the shoulders down.

"Say a prayer for Rodney and his family," Odom told the newspaper.