1. It is some story, though, and it certainly isn’t easy for Craig, all these years on, to explain how he could go from asking for spare pennies on a street corner, living in an area where the poverty could make you weep, to moving in with the most famous manager in football.
Though maybe it helped, going back to their first encounter outside the Seaburn, that he made sure to refer to “Mr Clough” when he inquired whether Swain was awake, too. Craig was a year out of primary school, small for his age, with buck teeth, fluffy hair and failing eyesight. Aaron had big, brown eyes and a sunrise of a smile. And if there was one thing Clough always appreciated it was good manners.
“Have you two rag-tags had any breakfast yet? And where’s your coats? You’ll catch your bloody death. What’s your mam doing sending you out like that? Now come inside. Hurry up, before I change my mind.”
Daniel Taylor writes for The Athletic (subscription) on the remarkable tale of two Sunderland boys who went begging for pennies and ended up living with Brian Clough.
2. It has been a few years since O’Connell, whose own club would have been Na Piarsaigh, had played a game, and his role looking after the medical needs of the players doesn’t generally require boots or shorts.
So it was onto the pitch in his tracksuit bottoms, and the shoes he had on him.
“The fella I was replacing is a size 12, but I’m only an eight,” he tells RTÉ Sport.
“We actually won by a point, and I got the second last point. We got a free on the 21, and I said the last time I scored was 30 years ago, I’m not going to give up a chance like this!”
Billy O’Connell talks to RTÉ Sport about his Junior B football comeback at the age of 51 last weekend for St Finbarr’s where he ended up marking his daughter’s boyfriend.
3. Eight years ago a series of events began that indicated the mood in Britain was turning ugly. They foreshadowed Brexit and the divisive, Trumpesque politics of Boris Johnson and his ilk.
On 15 October 2011, Manchester United went to Anfield for a Premier League match against Liverpool. The relationship between the clubs was typically frosty. The two sets of fans despise each other. Luis Suarez, the Liverpool striker, became embroiled in a running battle with Patrice Evra. During and after the match the United defender claimed the Uruguayan had hurled racial abuse in his direction. There was uproar.
Just eight days later there was another high-profile incident in the Premier League.
John Terry was seen mouthing “f****** black c***” at Anton Ferdinand during Chelsea’s match against Queens Park Rangers at Loftus Road.
Tony Evans for The Independent looks back at two of English football’s most infamous incidents eight years ago and how their influence can still be felt today.
4. There has scarcely been a more breakneck reverse ferret than the support now shown by some sections of Her Majesty’s press for Raheem Sterling. You love to see it. Certain papers who cheerily trashed Sterling for so long, for reasons they could never quite put their finger on – but he could – recently seem to have become dimly sentient about the existence of racism.
The truly hideous scenes during England’s twice‑halted 6-0 win over Bulgaria on Monday apparently marked a coming of age, with various outlets and pundits now turning on Uefa for the sort of inactivity of which they were guilty or supportive of about 10 minutes ago.
I am sure Sterling and others will raise a wry eyebrow at the spectacle of some of the same hacks who lacerated him for buying a house or something now pontificating that the England side should actually have walked off in Sofia. They can never get it QUITE right, can they, these players?
Marina Hyde for the Guardian on how hypocrisy has been rife since last Monday’s debacle in Sofia.
5. In 2013, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist H. G. (Buzz) Bissinger, fifty-eight years old and until then known primarily for his wildly best-selling account of high-school football in small-town Texas, “Friday Night Lights,” from 1990, experienced a new flush of notoriety.
That March, he published a long-form piece in GQ that detailed a clothes-shopping addiction he had been grappling with. Framed by the occasion of a V.I.P.-client trip he had taken that January, to the Gucci show in Milan, Bissinger revealed the extent of his thrall to rock-and-roll-style, ambiguously gendered outfits, which gave him, once they were his own, the sense of being “liberated and alive.”
Naomi Fry writes for The New Yorker on the documentary ‘Buzz’.
6. When it’s time for the home team to run through the gate, a massive flamethrower erupts nearby. Greenlee recoils, and her eyes, which are the same cloudy shade of white as an overcast sky, glisten from the heat. A few minutes later, Hopkins emerges from the tunnel — he’s always the last player on offense to come out, Greenlee explains — and she smiles.
She can’t see her son, but she knows he’s there.
Seventeen years. That’s how long it has been since she lost her vision when a woman she didn’t know threw acid at her face, blinding and disfiguring her in a bout of jealous rage.
Texan receiver DeAndre Hopkins says he owes his career to his mother. Mina Kimes for ESPN on her remarkable story of survival.
7. So to pick up his spirits, his brother-in-law Buzz O’Connell decided to organise a bash in his adopted home of Cork, on Ireland’s south coast, to celebrate the award he could not accept in person. They hired a venue near his house in the harbour village of Crosshaven and invited some of his former team-mates plus Chelsea’s long-time matchday MC Neil Barnett.
There was a problem, though. How would they pay for it? Barnett had an idea: he would ask Lampard.
Two days later the message was passed back across the Irish Sea. Don’t worry about the costs, Frank is looking after it.
Alan Smith for football.london catches up in Cork with Bobby Tambling, Chelsea’s record goalscorer for 43 years, and his friendship with current manager Frank Lampard.
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