1. So, for Delaney, the question is whether O’Neill is still the man to get Ireland to what seems the pretty reasonable target of a 24-team European Championships, the importance of which has been heightened by the fact that some of Ireland’s games would be in Dublin. It is hard to tell for sure but, having effectively doubled the management team’s salaries to keep them around just a few months ago, changing horses right now would be both costly and embarrassing for the chief executive.
If O’Neill is the right man, however, then the quality of the players comes into sharper focus – and that is on Delaney himself. In 2015 he said the association had the “fundamentals in place to produce better footballers”, but, despite the structural changes that have occurred in recent seasons around the underage leagues here, there are no obvious signs of any impending new dawn.
After a tough week for Irish soccer, Emmet Malone looks in the Irish Times at the dilemma facing John Delaney.
2. Last week, Yahoo reporter Chris Haynes walked into the Lakers locker room and spotted LeBron James sitting alone. “LeBron is a different cat …” Haynes said later. “He’s got his headphones on. He’s playing music. He comes off like he doesn’t want to be bothered.”
“Man, I don’t care about that shit,” Haynes continued. “I walk over there. He takes his headphones off. We start chopping it up, talking in front of everybody.”
Any reporter who has been in an NBA locker room has seen this kind of flex. A writer snags a private interview with a superstar while envious reporters look on. Until now, the move didn’t have a widely agreed-upon name.
It has been called the “side interview” and the “sidebar” and, when employed as the player leaves the court, the “tunnel walk.” But I prefer the term ESPN’s Brian Windhorst uses: sidling. As in, you sidle up to the players.
Bryan Curtis in The Ringer on how sidling has become the great skill of the NBA beat.
3. Monday night was the best performance by an England football team for a generation, a display of unprecedented intelligence, bravery, ruthlessness and teamwork to dismantle one of the best teams in the world. And yet to spend time with some of the fans following England was to have any sense of pride coloured by shame.
What leaves the deepest mark is not the low-level bad behaviour, the littering, the vandalism or the noise. It is the tragic attempts of a new cohort of fans to redraw the English football nation on narrow religious and racial grounds.
The Independent’s Jack Pitt-Brooke believes the behaviour of so many English soccer fans abroad is not at odds with the national character.
4. In his new book, which provides graphic insight into this implosion, Hendry accepts that people compare his condition to a golfer’s ‘yips’. He scrunches up his face. “That trivialises it. I hate the word because it’s much more than that.”
It resulted in humiliation for Hendry. He had to qualify for his final world championship by playing at the Institute of Sport in Sheffield instead of his beloved Crucible. “It felt degrading. That’s no disrespect to other players but I had owned the Crucible for a decade with seven wins and two finals.”
The Guardian’s Donald McRae sat down and listened to seven-times world champion Stephen Hendry discuss his snooker struggles.
5. For him, a glaring one is that 131 years on from that first All-Ireland hurling championship, hurling is still pretty much confined to the same handful of counties.
“That is the great question for the Gaelic Athletic Association and for people who love hurling — if we consider hurling to be such a great game, the greatest game in the world, why is it played by so few people? Why is it, at best, second-rate and ultimately, third- or fourth-rate in large swathes of the country? It’s a question that hasn’t been properly answered.”
Irish Examiner columnist Paul Rouse talks with Kieran Shannon about history, academia and the sport of hurling.
6. I bought the share — just one — in 2004. It was not easy to understand exactly how to do it: I had to go through a specific stockbroker to make the purchase. It was not an easy decision, because of the cost, but I wanted that extra layer of connection with the club. I believe in custodianship.
Owning a share made me feel as though Arsenal was actually my club: It was a closer, more emotional bond. The best parallel is that it is the same as owning a house, rather than renting one. You are emotionally invested in it in a completely different way. It is yours.
For hundreds of Arsenal fans, Stan Kroenke’s move to take full control in August changed their relationship with the club. Rory Smith shared some of stories in the New York Times.
7. Mourinho served a privileged apprenticeship at Barcelona. Sarri grafted part-time in amateur football. Mourinho is obsessed with presentation and show. Sarri wanders around the Stamford Bridge touchline wearing dad-glasses and an ill-fitting nylon smock-shirt that makes him look like an overworked military field surgeon on a fag break between yanking out shrapnel and swapping wisecracks.
Tactically Mourinho’s first instinct is to constrict, to disrupt his opponents’ strengths before asserting his own whereas Sarri still comes across like a fan with a tactics board, a man drawn to the flame, bent above all on enacting his own vision of high-energy attacking football.
The Guardian’s Barney Ronay on the clash of styles between the men in the dugout as Manchester United faced Chelsea.
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