1. On a Monday night in Greenville, North Carolina, the fever of high school football archrivalry sweeps over a field in the country. Almost everyone will lose their minds at some point over the next few hours, all except one man. J.H. Rose High School’s football team, after a 30-minute trip from Marvin Jarman Drive in central Greenville here to D.H. Conley High School, steps out of their buses wearing emerald-green pants with bright blue piping and carrying their white jerseys, Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” playing over the loudspeakers, the grass turning muddy under the rain. “This place smells,” one Rose player says.
SB Nation’s Brandon Sneed on ‘the legend of coach Mavin Jarman.
2. “‘Dressing rooms are good places. There’s a difference between cliques and fellas who sit down in certain places. Myself, Murph (Diarmuid Murphy) and Darragh were down in one corner, more often than not, and Darragh had an unbelievable habit of virtually blowing a hole in the wall with farts, like.
“Terrible stuff. I used to ask him how would you have that much wind? I’d go to the toilet maybe four times that morning, so every bit of food I’d have is gone out of my system. And then myself, himself and Murph would be in the corner, and a serious chat going on. The first year Darragh did it, I remember Ger O’Keeffe came over and said (imitates Ger’s brogue) ‘Jesus Christ, Darragh, are you alright, will I call a doctor?’”
Tony Leen sat down with Tomás Ó Sé a year ago, letting us in on the chat as the Ventry man prepares to release his autobiography. Click though below:
3. “Opportunity again might dictate whether Bradley makes another leap up the ladder. Regardless, the narrative of his career seems to add up to a robust pitch for a bigger job. Yet the chatter has been limited. Molde, reigning Norwegian champions, were reportedly interested. Though a bigger job, they would surely amount to a sideways movement, the ostensible American flag carrier still lurking in the European shadows. David Wagner, the German-American head coach of Borussia Dortmund II, the Bundesliga giants’ second string, cautions patience. Wagner has a foot in both camps. Somewhat. He represented the United States at international level but spent his playing career in Germany, where he was born. His coaching pedigree, too, is German-rooted. He served as a Jurgen Klopp lieutenant until the now Liverpool manager left Dortmund last summer. There are many factors to snagging a European remit, Wagner notes, some more obvious than others. Language. The interpretation of success at MLS level. Is your national team in vogue, like world champions Germany or Spain before them?”
Will an American ever coach in one of Europe’s top leagues, asks Bryan Kay in the Guardian.
4. ”Our notions of what constitute a historical site can be limited, and limiting. As Shane Faherty has previously shown here on The Dustbin, landscape and memory intersect in remarkable fashions. Following on from this, I am going to consider the interaction of landscape and memory of a football ground in the heart of Cork. Since I moved to my current residence in Cork, I have been closer than ever to two of the city’s most active sports grounds – Musgrave Park, Munster’s second home and Turner’s Cross, home ground of League of Ireland football club, Cork City. Being so close to both, I take advantage regularly and watch games at both grounds. Turner’s Cross is a particularly interesting football ground so here’s a look at how the ground has changed, both physically and in usage, over the years.”
This is a real treat for stadium nerds. David Toms brings us a journey through the history of Turner’s Cross.
5. “The last foreigner to manage Holland was Austrian Ernst Happel. Once a teenage solder in Hitler’s army on the Russian front, Happel landed in the Dutch league in the 1960s. He never learned much Dutch, which didn’t matter as he rarely spoke, preferring to smoke instead. Famously, he would win his players’ respect by placing a bottle on the crossbar during a training session, then knocking it off with one shot of the ball. Mostly, he just drank cognac and played cards.”
The always interesting Simon Kuper on why the Dutch seem to have forgotten how to play football.
6. ”Warm, loving, elegant, but strong – with a propensity to gather to her table, as her guests, all Donza’s birds with broken-wings, all those who didn’t quite fit – there was yet, a quiet sadness to her, a shadow of tragedy. Back in the day, during the Second World War, she had been the renowned beauty of the nearby village of Varetz and had fallen in love with Jean Salesse, the best athlete of the whole region with a particular talent for the villagers’ beloved game of rugby. Extroverted, good looking, and a member of one of Donzenac’s oldest and most illustrious families, he was the village beau. But when it was announced that they were to be married there was uproar in both villages. The couple were first cousins, and for the tribes of both Donzenac and Varetz such a marriage was an absolute taboo. For weeks the villagers talked of the match, predicting all sorts of dire consequences if the young couple went ahead.”
The Sydney Morning-Herald’s Peter Fitzsimons pulls out the column of the tournament and it’s set a long way from Cardiff or Twickenham.
