1. “Moyes is increasingly wearing the haunted look of a man who was promised Mila Kunis’s hand in marriage only to lift the veil and find Tom Cleverley staring back at him.
“No amount of earnest shuffling, sideways passing and expert brand marketing can make up for the disappointment.”
The Guardian’s Jacob Steinberg gives us an image of Alex Ferguson watching David Moyes sleep that we may never recover from.
2. “I picked up my laundry, and I had a good training session, and I just thought to myself, Jeez, this is my dream,” he said. “This is everything that I absolutely want, you know? There’s no other place in the world that I want to be right now.”
James McGee runs into Ben Rothenberg and the New York Times after his Australian Open adventure.
3. “It was a moment he always knew would come, and one he dreaded. The decision to address this issue publicly was a “hard, difficult one” that took a number of years to gestate, he tells me. The 31-year-old, who retired from the game last year because of injuries, first told his friends and family.
“I was surprised and happy that they were all totally OK with it. Where I come from, in rural Bavaria, homosexuality is considered ‘un-normal’. I knew that there would be negative reactions from those who will never understand it.”
Thomas Hitzlsperger came out this week, and he spoke with Raphael Honigstein about his decision, for the Guardian.
4. “Something that became very evident from looking at these matches in detail over the last month is that Sean O’Brien is pretty much Ireland’s best player in every game….”
This pain-staking exercise by Demented Mole may have given an answer we suspected, but it’s much more intriguing than that.
5. “Take the clutch argument all the way. Imagine a sequence in the human genome coded for, say, performance under pressure. If the gene was turned on, you have the clutch gene and make every clutch shot you take. If the gene is turned off, you don’t have the clutch gene and you miss every clutch shot you take. We’d find out quickly who has the clutch gene and who does not, and man, the ends of games would be boring as hell to watch.”
SB Nation’s Tom Ziller loves the random nature of sport.
6. “I have been to dozens of Redskins game and have never seen anything close to this kind of mass interactive minstrelsy. Yet there are no protests against this spectacle, no angry editorials and no politicians jumping on the issue. Why is that? Because as any Florida State fanatic will shout at you, the university has “a formal agreement with Seminole Nation” and that makes everything all right.”
The Washington’s football team under so much scrutiny, Dave Zirin looks at another native american styled side, for The Nation.
