Lincoln City moved to the verge of the Championship, Roy Hodgson made a winning return to the dugout, and Rino Gattuso’s time with Italy came to an end

Japan won last month’s Women’s Asian Cup in emphatic style: six wins out of six, 29 goals scored, one conceded. But yesterday they effectively sacked Nils Nielsen, the Greenlander who coached them to glory. Vanilla Ice was wrong: in football, it seems, sometimes even the best is a felony.

Nielsen’s contract expired at the end of the tournament and the Japan Football Assocation decided not to offer him a new one. Norio Sasaki, the women’s national team director, said Japan could not win next year’s World Cup if Nielsen remained in charge, describing his coaching as “a little too lax, a little too soft”.