1. “Some will argue that a team with a player as gifted as Lionel Messi almost has no need for tactics: Build a solid platform, let him play and you will win a lot more games than you lose.”
Writing for Bleacher Report, Jonathan Wilson and Graham Hunter take a closer look at the evolution of Lionel Messi into one of the game’s greats.
2. “You hear him coming down the hall before you see him, and by the time he breezes into the room and slowly slides himself into a chair, you’re already starting to get why everybody here in Raiders country seems to adore Sebastian Janikowski.”
Don Banks profiles the greatest kicker in the NFL, and Sebastian Janikowski’s unlikely path to Raiders royalty.
3. “Paddy and Margaret Dunphy had two kids, Eamon and his brother Kevin, and they lived together in a one bedroom flat in a tenement in Drumcondra until Eamon was 15. Eamon and Kevin slept on the floor.”
Ahead of his 71st birthday, Kieran Cunningham tells the Eamon Dunphy story.
4. “With 20 minutes of the 2002 FA Cup final remaining, Arsenal’s Sylvain Wiltord played a smart pass behind the Chelsea midfield. “Oh, it’s all right,” said the television presenter Tim Lovejoy, a Chelsea supporter, commentating on Sky’s FanZone. “It’s only Ray Parlour.” But Marcel Desailly backed off and Parlour kept advancing, then he whipped in a shot from 25 yards to give Arsenal a lead that Fredrik Ljungberg doubled ten minutes later. It was a fine and important goal but the moment also summed up Parlour: underestimated, underappreciated and never taken entirely seriously.”
Jonathan Wilson explores the career of Ray Parlour and how the former Arsenal midfielder straddled a culture clash in English football.
5. “I was born in the shadow of the 21st century, so I never knew O. J. Simpson as an athlete or as an actor. I wasn’t quite a year old on Jan. 1, 1989, the day Simpson beat his wife, Nicole Brown-Simpson, so badly that she fled their house screaming, “He’s going to kill me!” I was only 6 on June 17, 1994, when the N.B.A. finals broadcast cut away to a shot of Simpson’s white Ford Bronco creeping down a California highway, escorted by a line of black-and-whites, as if in a funeral procession. That was four days after Brown-Simpson, 35, and her friend Ronald Goldman, 25, were found dead in pools of blood, nearly decapitated. Some of my earliest memories are of that white Bronco, and of the “Trial of the Century” that followed, and of my parents’ happiness when Simpson was acquitted.”
In the New York Times Magazine, Greg Howard on why ‘transcending race’ is a lie.
The 12-year cycle omen, Frexit and all your Comments of the Week
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