Taipei - Two NBA teams will visit Taiwan and China in October to play warm-up games before the start of the NBA season, a newspaper said Thursday.

The Denver Nuggets and Indiana Pacers will play a preseason game on October 8 at the Taipei Arena. Taiwan's basketball association next month will announce details of the game, the Apple Daily quoted an unnamed sports official as saying.

The two teams will send a total of 30 players, including Denver forward Carmelo Anthony, Indiana forward Danny Granger and NBA legend Larry Bird, now the Pacers' president of basketball operations.

Berlin - IAAF president Lamine Diack says he is against the idea of reducing the length of the athletics world championships from nine to six days as demanded by media broadcasters.

"I am against it. We have the world championships for the

athletes, not for television," Diack told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa in Berlin, where this year's championships take place August 15-23.

Hamburg - Ukraine heavyweight Wladimir Klitschko is looking for a new opponent after doubts have emerged over a planned fight in June with Britain's David Haye, Germany's Bild newspaper reported Wednesday.

Bild quoted Klitschko's manager Bernd Boente as saying the two sides had been close to a fight deal "but then there were increasingly more demands" from Haye's management.

Karachi, Mar. 18 : The Pakistan Hockey Federation (PHF) Wednesday announced its squad for the 26th Sultan Azlan Shah Hockey Cup Tournament to be played in Malaysia.

Zeeshan Ashraf will captain the side and Mohammad Imran will be his deputy. The other players in the squad are Nasir Ahmed, Rana Asif, Shakeel Abbasi, Waqas Sharif, Akhtar Ali, Shabbir Khan, Asim Khan, Tariq Aziz, Shafqat Rasool and Fareed Ahmed, a PHF release said.

The Sultan Azlan Shah Cup is an annual field hockey tournament held in Malaysia. It began in 1983 as a biennial contest.

London, Mar. 18 : Keen to resurrect his sagging tennis career, former world number eight Mark Philippoussis has decided to move back to Australia, his motherland.

Philippoussis has confirmed reports about a shift to Melbourne, where he is now living with his divorced mum in suburban Williamstown.

He also has plans of establishing an all-age tennis coaching clinic and launch a natty new range of orthopaedic sandals in Australia.

Cape Town (South Africa), Mar. 18 : Australian batsman Mike Hussey believes that the internal conflicts within the South African team could help unite the side against Australia in tomorrow''s third Test.

The South Africans have been in crisis in the past week with skipper Graeme Smith to miss the Cape Town Test through injury, meaning Ashwell Prince was recalled as skipper but a day later he was stripped of the captaincy and told to focus on his new role as opener.