“I was nothing more than a prop. His ‘best team-mate of all time,’ he called me. He couldn’t have been more condescending if he tried. On second thought, I could believe my eyes. I spent a lot of time around the man. I knew what made him tick. How naïve I was to expect anything else. Each episode was the same: Michael on a pedestal, his team-mates secondary, smaller, the message no different from when he referred to us back then as his ‘supporting cast’. From one season to the next, we received little or no credit whenever we won but the bulk of the criticism when we lost. Michael could shoot six for 24 from the field, commit five turnovers, and he was still, in the minds of the adoring press and public, the Errorless Jordan.”
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“The actors had reason to be confident: When they had presented their ideas to the Trust in a video call, the reaction had been positive. Still, as they waited for the call that would inform them of the result of the vote, they did not know if it would be good or bad news, and that put them in something of a bind. McElhenney had concocted the idea of buying a soccer team after inhaling both seasons of Sunderland ‘Til I Die, the successful Netflix series that detailed the fleeting ups and downs of another faded club rooted in postindustrial Britain. ‘He told me: We should do this. We should buy a club and make a documentary,’ said Humphrey Ker, one of McElhenney’s writers and the person who had recommended the Sunderland series to him.”
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“The inter-county game may be the heart of the sport, extracting money from television and ticket sales and pumping it around the various arteries, but club football is its soul. Those present in Breffni Park – for the purposes of this column, we’ll give the old ground its original title – last Saturday evening witnessed a scene, which exhibited better than any I can recall the power of the club game to unite. Denn won the Junior Championship but that wasn’t the important thing – someone wins the Junior Championship every year. What mattered was the context. Denn is a deeply rural area, which has been torn apart by tragedies for years, the last year-and-a-half the worst of all.”
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“Unfortunately, Manchester United are finding sillier, stupider but always slightly different ways to win or lose and start the cycle all over again. Still, this all feels familiar enough by now to build a framework; an outline of Ole-ball and its key dramatic principles, to help ease the writing process a little. It’s a bit like an episode of Scooby Doo. You might not know who the villain is but you know you’ll have already encountered him along the way, just like you know there will be a chase sequence against an infinite loop background and a bit where Scooby and Shaggy eat those really big sandwiches.”
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“When I first started playing pro rugby I remember having a Players’ Association meeting and the conversation was all about having a global window and a shorter season. We’re still having the same conversations about rugby now. There’s a number of changes we can and have to make to help protect the players of the future. I look at the NFL again and they have a 17-game season across four-to-five months with the possibility of a couple of playoff games. You compare that to rugby with a 10-month season. There needs to be a discussion about what constitutes an acceptable volume of rugby.”
