Sports Saturday: Arsenal, Lakers and London Marathon roar

Editorial digest April 25, 2026
Last updated : 08:20

Saturday's sport carries the unmistakable hum of a season tipping over. Arsenal get their talisman back at the precise moment their title hopes have started to wilt. Across the Atlantic, a 41-year-old refuses to let the Rockets breathe. And on Sunday morning, 59,000 Londoners will stand in Greenwich for a race that has quietly become the loudest cultural event of the British calendar.

Can Saka rescue Arsenal's title bid?

Mikel Arteta has spent five matches without Bukayo Saka and won precisely one of them. That is not a slump. That is a structural problem dressed up as bad luck.

The England forward has not played since the Carabao Cup final defeat by Manchester City a month ago, sidelined by an achilles injury, the Guardian reports. Arteta said on Friday that Saka would be in the squad to face Newcastle at the Emirates, alongside the fit-again Riccardo Calafiori. The manager talked about "different energy" — coachspeak that masks a harder truth: Arsenal's attack stops working without the right boot of one player.

The stakes are as plain as the league table. Beat Newcastle and Arsenal go top, with City to chase rather than catch. Drop points, and the title conversation effectively closes. Arteta says he is targeting "two big competitions". For now, only one of them is still in his hands.

Why is the London Marathon suddenly this big?

Sunday's race will send a world-record 59,000 runners through London, raising close to £100m for charity and absorbing 93,024 Lucozade gels along the way, according to the Guardian. More than 1.1 million people entered the ballot — 750,000 more than four years ago. Read that figure twice. It is not growth. It is reinvention.

The numbers tell a story British sport rarely gets to tell. A third of ballot entrants were aged 18 to 29. Women drove the surge. Run clubs, once the preserve of midlife knees and Garmin obsessives, have become a Saturday-morning social scene with the cultural pull that once belonged to nightclubs.

There is a quieter story underneath. £100m for charity, in a year when discretionary giving has been squeezed everywhere else, is a remarkable transfer of resources from individuals to causes. The marathon has become — among other things — one of the country's largest annual fundraising machines. That deserves more attention than the inevitable men's world record talk.

LeBron at 41: the Lakers refuse to leave

In Houston on Friday night, LeBron James did the thing he is supposed to be too old to do. Down six with under thirty seconds to play, James drained a tying three-pointer with 13 seconds left in regulation. Marcus Smart added eight points in overtime. The Lakers won 112-108 and lead the Western Conference first-round series 3-0, the Guardian reports. They can sweep on Sunday.

The asterisk matters. Houston were without Kevin Durant. A series that looked competitive on paper has become a procession because one team's superstar showed up and the other's could not. That said, James putting up 29 points and a clutch dagger at this stage of his career is no longer a curiosity. It is the new normal — and it should be unsettling for every contender that assumed the Lakers were a problem for next April, not this one.

Around the rest of the weekend

Spain produced two stories worth tracking. Héctor Bellerín's stoppage-time leveller for Real Betis at Real Madrid all but extinguished Carlo Ancelotti's side's faint title hopes, the Guardian reports. And in Madrid, Alex de Minaur was crushed 6-3 6-1 by 19-year-old local Rafael Jodar — the world No 8's sixth defeat in ten matches, an alarming dip ahead of Roland-Garros. That tournament will already be missing Carlos Alcaraz, withdrawn with a wrist injury. The men's draw is starting to look unrecognisable.

In the Championship, Millwall salvaged a 1-1 draw at relegated Leicester through Macaulay Langstaff to climb back into the automatic promotion places, a point ahead of Ipswich who have two games in hand. At the Crucible, Shaun Murphy hammered Xiao Guodong 13-3 with a session to spare and went home for the weekend — the kind of casual brutality that 2005 world champions are entitled to.

What to watch

Saka's first touch at the Emirates will tell us whether Arsenal's title race is still alive. James and the Lakers can finish their sweep on Sunday and announce themselves as a genuine threat. And in Greenwich at dawn, 59,000 runners will quietly remind British sport that participation, not spectacle, may be the real growth story of the decade.