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DETROIT -- The Detroit Lions have won this season with clutch kicks, timely takeaways and last-ditch drives.Now, add a couple game-changing penalty flags to the long list of things that have gone Detroits way.Two holding calls in the final minute kept Chicago out of reasonable field goal range, and the Lions beat the Bears 20-17 on Sunday for their eighth victory in nine games. Almost every Detroit game this season has come down to the wire, and this one might very well have gone to overtime if not for the two crucial flags on Chicago.It may not be pretty, but this is the way it is in this game, Lions coach Jim Caldwell said. I just know one thing: You dont do it that many times and consider it luck, so there is some skill in there. I think our guys do a tremendous job of being able to handle tough situations very, very well and they keep doing it week after week.The Lions, who have not won a division title since 1993, lead the NFC North by two games.Down by three, the Bears had the ball at the Detroit 43-yard line with 58 seconds left. Cameron Meredith caught a pass and outran the defense before going out of bounds at the 16, but the play was called back because of a holding penalty on lineman Charles Leno.On the next snap, Matt Barkley completed a pass to Daniel Braverman that would have put the ball at the 30, but there was a flag on that play too -- holding on lineman Ted Larsen.When I was playing it didnt feel like it, a grab, a hold or a restriction, Larsen said. They called it, so theres nothing you can do about that, but you cant really recover from two holding penalties back to back. They called it. I really dont have much to say about that.The Bears finished with 11 penalties for 139 yards, with 74 of those yards coming on three pass interference flags. A pass interference call on Tracy Porter helped the Lions drive for their first touchdown of the day in the second quarter, and Bryce Callahan was flagged for the same infraction shortly before Detroit quarterback Matthew Stafford scored the winning touchdown on a 7-yard run late in the fourth.Detroit (9-4) has had only one game this season decided by more than seven points. The Lions have gotten consistently good kicking from Matt Prater, who made a 54-yarder Sunday, and Stafford has made fourth-quarter comebacks seem almost routine. Chicago took a 17-13 lead with 7:07 remaining when CreVon LeBlanc intercepted a pass and returned it 24 yards for a touchdown. Stafford then led a seven-play, 76-yard drive and scored the winning TD with 3:17 remaining.The Bears (3-10) were driving back the other way before the two holding calls left them facing first-and-30 from their own 37. They made it back across midfield to set up fourth-and-11 from the Detroit 44, but Barkleys pass over the middle was incomplete.When you keep getting pushed back like that, you really want to just get chunks at a time -- youre not going to gain it all back in one play, Barkley said. Gave ourselves a chance on fourth down. Weve just got to make a play.---For more NFL coverage: http://www.pro32.ap.org and http://www.twitter.com/AP-NFL .---Follow Noah Trister at www.Twitter.com/noahtrister Fake Custom Shirts . Barcelonas entertaining victory ensured the defending Spanish champions retained their share of the league lead with Atletico Madrid two rounds ahead of their meeting in the capital. Real Madrid needed a late goal by substitute Jese Rodriguez to earn a 3-2 victory at Valencia to stay in third place and three points behind its title rivals. Custom Shirts Fast . With Parker having a quiet game for once, Nicolas Batum and Boris Diaw provided the scoring as France won its first major basketball title by beating Lithuania 80-66 on Sunday. It was a victory that ended a decade of frustration for Parker and a talented French generation, which lost the final against Spain two years ago and took bronze in 2005. http://www.shirtscustom.us/ . -- New England Revolution goalkeeper Matt Reis is retiring after a 16-year career to become the goalie coach for the Los Angeles Galaxy. Custom Shirts Outlet . The mixed zone is not a place to make friends. Best Custom Shirts . The Montreal Canadiens announced on Friday that the veteran forward will return to the teams line-up on Saturday night when the Habs visit the Nashville Predators. It is said in Pakistan that Pathans are not an ethnicity but a state of mind. To us, growing up in the nineties, watching Pakistan win unwinnable matches against India in Sharjah, the Pakistani cricketer was an enviable state of mind, a state beyond our comprehension. The highest praise we could afford an Indian cricketer for his gumption, his cricketing smarts, and occasionally his flawed character, was to say: he is almost a Pakistani.Manoj Prabhakar A Prabhakar autobiography would start thus: As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a Pakistani cricketer. He didnt have the pace, but he swung the ball big. He reversed it. He leapt away from the stumps in his delivery stride. Like Imran Khan. He had a mullet. Like Imran Khan.Colleagues swore by his courage. If an opener was injured, Prabhakar would face the new ball. If an opener chickened out, Prabhakar would step up.In South Africa in 1991-92, when India were brutalised by Donald, Schultz, McMillan and Matthews, up stepped Prabhakar with 62 in over five hours to facilitate a draw. During it he kept asking McMillan if he was half-blind until the bemused bowler asked what the hell he was talking about. Pitch it in my half too. Cant you see that half of the pitch? As an opener, he averaged 35.48 in Tests and 34.02 in ODIs. Not bad for someone who was primarily a bowler.The flaws of Pakistani cricketers are their charms. In keeping, Prabhakar once gave up an ODI chase of 63 in nine overs with five wickets in hand, instead blocking his way to a hundred. He was banned for one match. Somewhat appealingly, somewhat mysteriously, he crusaded against match-fixing, carrying out a sting against team-mates. Politics and embezzlement followed post-retirement.Ravi Shastri Shastri was drinking one evening in Karachi, in 1983. (A friend of his had come from London with duty-free alcohol.) They were in Shastris hotel room. He heard a knock. It was Sunil Gavaskar, the captain. Will you open with me in this Test? It was the sixth Test of the series. Arun Lal had scored a total of 100 in three Tests, Kris Srikkanth 28 in two. Shastri was 20 years old. He lost the booze immediately, replacing it with the high of an opportunity of a lifetime. Days later he scored a hundred against Imran, Sarfraz Nawaz and Abdul Qadir.A left-arm spinner who began his career at No. 10, Shastri loves to say he scored Test hundreds against two fearsome pace quartets. One is the West Indian, what is the other? Imran, Sarfraz, Javed Akhtar and Khizer Hayat.Shastri was English in his technique, his professionalism and his fierce ambition, but he was Pakistani in his homegrown methods, boastfulness, his way of getting things done, his sledging, his punching above his weight. He was positively dour when he batted, like Mudassar Nazar, but he also hit six sixes in a first-class over. Had Shastri been any more Pakistani, he would have come out of retirement at least once. As it was, his retirement - coming as it did at the age of 30 - surprised everyone.Ajay Jadeja You will be hard-pressed to find an Indian cricketer with a higher smugness-to-skill ratio than Jadeja. You could imagine how annoying playing him would be. A limited batsman, especially against pace and swing, Jadeja plaayed with his collar up, lips parted in an infuriating smirk; and he was a match-winner when he had no business being one.dddddddddddd A bit like Javed Miandad, he might not always have been the man you wanted on your side, but he was the one you didnt want in the opposition.Behind the exterior was a shrewd brain. He loved fielding, even as a substitute. He didnt mind stepping out of his comfort zone. He always wanted to open but made his name hitting in the middle order. After the most Pakistani thing he did in his career - the 1996 World Cup quarter-final carnage against the arch-rivals - he said: Look what they have turned me into. A pinch-hitter. A slogger.When banned for match-fixing, he didnt lose the smugness, appearing in movies, dance shows, providing incisive cricket analysis. Surely a captain India lost.MS Dhoni Burewala. Gujar Khan. Sheikhupura. Many Pakistani small towns are known only for producing world-class cricketers who learnt their early cricket there, through some inexplicable junoon, and then enchanted the world. India was always more sterile, with players coming through coaching academies in big cities, where flair is smothered like the turn on a flighted offbreak. Only a handful beat that system.Ranchi was known in India only for its mental asylum until Dhoni made it famous the world over. He is the biggest Pakistani cricketer India has ever produced. Almost entirely uncoached, flipping the bird to convention at every step, he has become an ODI batsman as accomplished, chillingly calculating and psychologically damaging as Javed Miandad was. He loves taking a match into the last over, then turning it into a one on one. Then he hits a six early, one that rings around the stadium, a huge one. Then the world watches the poor bowler wilt.And Dhoni captains and keeps wicket. As with Pakistani cricketers, you cannot tell what he is thinking, what his next move is. You cant put anything beyond him. There hasnt been a more authentic Made in Pakistan hologram. Vijay Manjrekar Towards the end of his career he had put on weight, but he kept playing at Shivaji Park. Those were the days when crowds turned up for local cricket. A barracker called him Ganpati (for Ganesha, the Hindu elephant god with the generous waistline). He made his way to the boundary, identified the heckler and asked, Do you want to see the trunk now?Once, an established opener went to him for advice. What is wrong with my batting? He said: Nothing. There is something wrong with the selectors who keep picking you.One day, after he had retired from the game, he was watching cricket and saw Nana Patekar, the Bollywood actor, heckling a spectator. He grabbed Patekar by the collar, and the two almost came to blows.Manjrekar was the original badass, a free spirit who couldnt stand fools; never short of a witty retort; giving his son Sanjay tough love.He learnt his cricket the regimental way but felt suffocated and shackled. He and Subhash Gupte were the mawalis - the ruffians and hooligans.Oh, by the way he was one of Indias best batsmen against pace despite not being the fittest. Inzi anyone? ' ' '