Crazy Eddie,
It's a journalistic convention in the UK that sports teams are regarded as plural. Where I worked it used to cause all sorts of harrumphing and sighing from the linguistic purists in general news, but we excused the sweaties on the grounds that they were half-literate eejits writing for the illiterate, so it didn't matter!
(Tolerant places, newspapers. Our nickname for the sports dept was 'toys and games', the features section was usually 'the shallow end' and the sub-editors who laid out the pages and corrected our howlers were dismissed as the 'hod carriers')