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The Sunday Papers: some of the week's best sportswriting

Gazza, Ray Lewis and match-fixing all feature (although not in the same article). Here’s our round-up of the week’s best scribblings.

1. At the Providence rehab centre, in Dorset, friends and counsellors wait anxiously for news about Paul Gascoigne. They are disappointed to see the former England footballer leave Bournemouth, but say it made sense: he was headed for the Meadows rehabilitation centre, in Phoenix, Arizona, thousands of miles away where, alone and unknown, he can get on with the task in hand – of saving his life. There was a horrible inevitability about his recent lapse. The most talented, and most tainted, England player of his generation was back on the booze. It was as unseemly as it was pitiful, and the redtops devoured it. Last week, he had to be helped on to the stage for an evening of chat in Northampton. He was weepy, abusive, and obviously ill.

As one of the most talented footballers of his generation hit the headlines again this week, The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone wrote on the horrible sense of inevitability about Paul Gascoigne’s relapse.

(And if you have a subscription to get yourself behind the Times’ paywall, this piece by George Caulkin is excellent.)

2. When Jack Dickey, a college senior at Columbia and a writer at the website Deadspin, told editor Tommy Craggs he’d heard a tip that star Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o did not in fact have a girlfriend whose death inspired the Fighting Irish’s undefeated season, Craggs wrote back in an instant message, ‘This would be the most amazing story. This would be fucking amazing.’ ‘Oh man,’ he added in a transcript shared with The Daily Beast. ‘I have such a hard-on. I want this story. I want it I want it I want it.’

Sports site Deadspin spent America’s mainstream media scrambling when they revealed that the story of Manti Te’o's dead girlfriend was a hoax. The Daily Beast’s David Freedlander meets the men behind the scoop.

3. In an unbeaten decade of dominance Brian O’Driscoll’s capacity to crush red-rose ambitions has eclipsed even the haunting figure of All Black Jonah Lomu in English nightmares. But as the Irishman prepares to stare down England for the 12th time in his Test career in Dublin on Sunday, he offered an insight into the strength of mind which has driven him to victory over the old enemy in every game since 2003 – a record that no one can match in the professional era of the Six Nations. During his early days in the green shirt O’Driscoll suffered two fierce beatings at Twickenham, where Ireland shipped 95 points in two games in 2000 and 2002, but it was a rose prick in Dublin 10 years ago that would hurt him most.

As the country looks to BOD for another famous win, Adam Redmond profiles Ireland’s leader and legend for the Independent.

4. I am a midlevel Hungarian gangster. You are a Finnish referee. So here’s how it works. I get a call from a lieutenant in the syndicate — not from Dan Tan himself, the boss has to be protected, but from a middle man somewhere in Asia. Maybe Singapore, where Dan Tan is based; maybe someplace else. The caller says: We need so-and-so to happen in such-and-such soccer game. So I fly to Helsinki from Budapest and take a train north to Tampere, where you’ll be officiating a match in the Ykkönen, the Finnish second division, between FC Ilves and FC Viikingit. We meet. It’s not as if I’m lugging a duffel full of cash. The money will be laundered; we have the systems in place. I want you to be comfortable, after all.

In a week in which Europol revealed allegations of widespread match-fixing across European football, the ever-brilliant Brian Phillips penned this for Grantland.

5. He looks at ease with himself and the world, a far cry from the man who fought his demons for years and whose story was well-documented in his acclaimed autobiography A Weight Off My Mind. Clearly, winning the jockeys’ title is an achievement that has brought satisfaction, but there is more to it. He is happily married to Lizzie, who has been supportive through the tough times when he battled a drink problem. He has a young family and, professionally, there is more to look forward to in 2013 than any previous season he can remember.

Dubliner Richard Hughes is desperate to win one of horse-racing’s classics this season, as he tells J A McGrath in the Telegraph.

6. For a month, Ray Lewis had spoken quite a bit about his so-called last ride, and the first question posed to him here Monday was whether he had found himself thinking about the end: his last game, his last speech, his last pregame prayer, his last question about a double murder and distractions. He said that he hadn’t, that he wouldn’t, that he couldn’t. But only Lewis knows where his mind meandered Sunday night while he spit fury at his teammates; while he sat alone on the edge of the Ravens’ bench with his head bowed; while he chased after San Francisco receivers who ran him ragged across the middle of the field; while the 49ers spun a 22-point deficit into a dazzling comeback that expired at the Baltimore 5-yard line.

It’s a shame about Ray — Ben Shpigel in the New York Times looks at the man who hogged plenty of headlines in the run up to the Super Bowl, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis.