Pills protecting nine playing sport (5,6)
I believe the answer is:
table tennis
'sport' is the definition.
(thesaurus)
'pills protecting nine playing' is the wordplay.
'pills' becomes 'tablets' ('tablet' can be a synonym of 'pill').
'protecting' means one lot of letters goes inside another.
'playing' indicates anagramming the letters.
'nine' is an anagram of 'enni'.
'tablets' going around 'enni' is 'TABLE-TENNIS'.
(Other definitions for table tennis that I've seen before include "Ping pong" , "Indoor game" , "sport" , "Ping-pong" .)