1. “‘My career as a player was a rollercoaster, if I’m honest,’ O’Neill said. ‘I was kind of a child prodigy at Newcastle, in the team with Gazza at 18, finished top goalscorer, played internationals; to then having bad years, moving on to Scotland. I’ve seen both sides of it.’”
Shamrock Rovers’ manager Michael O’Neill has experienced his fair share of highs and lows since serving an apprenticeship at Newcastle in the late 1980s. Speaking as he preapres to lead Rovers’ Europa League charge, he talks to the Daily Mail’s Michael Walker about his experiences.
2. “Bolt reveals he rarely runs farther than one lap of the track. ‘I don’t really do any cardio in training,’ he says, preferring to focus on quality over quantity. ‘It’s hot anyway in Jamaica, so we burn a lot of calories when training. Even just warming up I would be sweating hard.’ Even so, his longest run is surprisingly short.
‘This season, probably 350 metres. A couple of times I have run 600 metres in the past, but that’s as far as I’ve ever been.’”
Want to run like Usain Bolt? GQ’s Jason Henderson sat down with the Jamaican track dynamo to collect his top ten sprinting tips.
3. “The scars of their relationship run deep – and can be traced back to the moment when Floyd Sr, then a professional boxer, held up baby Floyd as his shield when he was shot in the late 1970s. Years later Big Floyd ended up in jail, after being busted for cocaine-dealing, and he had to allow his brother, Roger, to become Pretty Boy’s trainer. The wounds have never healed.”
Donald McRae, writing in the Guardian, spends some time with the world’s most successful boxer, and gets to grips with a narrative that’s as much a family drama as it is a sporting success story.
4. “Novak Djokovic’s four-set win over Rafael Nadal in Monday’s U.S. Open final was brutal, lengthy, and loud. As Nadal strained to match Djokovic’s power and precision, the long rallies became metronomic: forehand, groan, backhand, groan, forehand, groan. Sometimes Djokovic would join in, too, creating a grunt-to-grunt rally to parallel the one with the ball and rackets.”
Slate’s Josh Levin traces the history of tennis’s least endearing characteristic, drawing an evolutionary line between Maria Sharapova’s Hitchcockian shriek and the first tentative groans of a young American by the name of Victoria Palmer in the 1960s.
5. “‘You don’t realise how strong the situation was here. The country was completely devastated. Today is a paradise compared. You can see the miserable people, but if you compare with last year … you could be walking the street and find the [amputated] legs of people, the arms of people.’”
Haiti’s 6-0 victory over the Virgin Islands in the first round of World Cup qualification was hardly the stuff of headline writers’ dreams, but as The National’s James Montague found out, the team have been carrying the goodwill and expectation of nation on their shoulders.
6. “Closers need these songs more than anyone. Pitching just one inning to end the game, they rely on elements of intimidation that workhorse starters can’t sustain over six or seven innings. Closers are performers in the full sense of the word, and their entrance music is nearly as much a part of their personas as a filthy slider or 97-mph fastball. Yet few understand what makes a good entrance song. They have much to learn. Most of which, incidentally, can be found in the following guide.”
Being an MLB closer is about more than having a cannon for an arm and nerves of steel. Eric Freeman, writing for The Onion AV Club, analyses just what it is that sets the likes of Brian Wilson and John Axford apart from the crowd.
7. “Gasperini’s Genoa played a vibrant, exciting style of football in a 3-4-3. He is wedded to that. That’s what he’s good at; it’s what he does. To appoint him and expect him to play something different is akin to signing Niall Quinn and expecting him not to play as a target man. Inter’s squad, though, doesn’t look suited to the system.”
Inspired by the early failure of Gian Piero Gasperini at Inter, the Guardian’s resident footballing brainbox, Jonathan Wilson, tackles a doozy of a query in this week’s The Question: Should a manager use tactics unsuitable for his players?
