1. This madness is only exacerbated by the maniacal parents on the touchline spouting nonsense at their children. The competitive nature of most mums and dads is astounding. The fear they instil in our promising but sensitive Johnny is utterly depressing. We need a parental cultural revolution. If we could just get them to shut the fuck up and let their children enjoy themselves, you would be staggered at the difference it would make.
Gary Lineker gets space in the New Statesmen to vent about the pushy parenting that is killing children’s love of football. Just as applicable in Ireland, sadly.
2. My wife Sarah asked me, “would you be happy to stay and go through all of this again?” I was looking at a two-year contract from Munster, a piece of paper thousands of guys would sign in a heartbeat, but I was mentally broken. I had to get out of there; I didn’t want to put myself through the torment again. I had to accept it was over.
In 2012 Denis Fogarty left Munster and moved to France’s ProD2. In the first of a new series for TapAndGoRugby, he looks back at the moment he walked away from his rugby family.
3. “There is a cloud over Kilbeacanty, the sun came up but it did not take away the darkness. You can feel the sorrow, nearly see it. It’s totally calm even the dogs aren’t barking. It’s as if they know. It’s like Kilbeacanty, Galway, the whole of Ireland, Australia and beyond is covered in a blanked of sorrowful, painful, raw emotion. It’s so hard to believe our star, our hero, our idol has been taken from us in his prime.”
The GAA community was left in shock on Wednesday evening by the sudden and tragic passing of Galway inter-county hurler Niall Donoghue, aged 22. The Kilbeacanty community penned this moving tribute to their star.
4. “Ajax’s youth academy has not slowed down since, with Wesley Sneijder and Christian Eriksen being two examples of players who we may never have had at the level they’re playing at if it wasn’t for their early introduction to ‘The Ajax Way’. In many ways, Ajax’s youth academy is Ajax and is the perfect image of Dutch football, and unfortunately for England, it’s a mind-set on how the game should be run that just may not be achievable in the visible future.”
Writing on his website The Zagueiro, Stefan Kelly explores the links between a nation’s language and its footballing development.
5. “We were beefing with these guys called the Puma Boys. It was 1976, and I lived in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and these guys were from my neighborhood. At that time I was running with a Rutland Road crew called the Cats, a bunch of Caribbean guys from nearby Crown Heights. We were a burglary team, and some of our gangster friends had an altercation with the Puma Boys, so we were going to the park to back them up.”
Once dubbed “the baddest man on the planet,” Mike Tyson writes about his life as a young thug for NY Mag.
6. “I wanted to follow an athlete along the path of a sport, rather than digging into corruption. I wanted to follow a sport and see where it led. I was going in as a naïf – well, not a naïf, but not knowing that much – but it occurred to me that this might be Lance Armstrong’s redemption story, that is to say, he’s been dogged by accusations of doping over his career, so he’s going to come back at the age of 38 and race clean. And he’s going to prove to everybody that it didn’t matter, in some odd way, if he had doped or not in the past, because he’s still an awesome cyclist and is going to beat everybody no matter what. And that was interesting to me.”
Paul Kimmage meets Oscar-nominated filmmaker Alex Gibney to talk about his new documentary on cycling’s biggest scandal, The Armstong Lie. [The Observer]
