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Tempers flare during Galway vs Armagh. Evan Treacy/INPHO
Well read

Gaelic football's blurred lines, Bazunu's move and the rest of the week's best sportswriting

Stick the kettle on and get stuck into this lot.

1. For some of the GAA’s detractors, complaining about violence in Gaelic football is like a diner suggesting to a waiter that his soup is a bit wet.

Is the whole sport, they reason, not just a turbulent continuum, that starts with off-colour remarks about your opponent’s mother, moves on to pushing and shoving, escalates to sly digs and occasional headlocks and runs all the way to full-scale donnybrooks in full view of a scandalised nation?

Was Gaelic football, these sceptics argue, not originally codified as a way of harnessing the natural pugilistic tendencies of the Irish at play, within the wider Victorian ethos of muscular Christianity? Was it not simply the ancient Irish custom of faction fighting made respectable, dispensing with blackthorn sticks and knuckle dusters and thereby resulting in slightly fewer fractured skulls?

Tommy Martin writes for the Irish Examiner about Gaelic football’s blurred lines between decency and disgrace 

2. Richarlison was living at America Mineiro’s training ground when a shipment of clothing arrived with his name on it.

He was only a teenager, still just a ripple on the surface of the Brazilian game, but he had just agreed his first sponsorship deal with Nike. So they sent him tracksuits, training kit, shoes and boots, all shiny and box-fresh.

It would have been an exciting moment for any young player; for Richarlison, who had been selling ice lollies on dirt roads just a couple of years prior, it must have felt completely surreal. In the circumstances, he would have been forgiven for feeling a swell of pride, or even lording it over his team-mates. But no, that wasn’t Richarlison. Richarlison had other plans.

The Athletic’s Jack Lang on the Richarlison you didn’t know

3. There’s a flag blocking my view of Paul McCartney. It’s advertising a small business-to-business journal servicing the freight industry. Around it are hundreds more: football teams, pride flags, satirical comments about Boris Johnson, the now-familiar Ukrainian blue and yellow, memes, screen grabs, private jokes. I want to burn literally every one of them. I want to focus my will and have the entire lot flash into cinders. I want the big stick with Ed the Duck on the end, bobbing up and down before the stage like McCartney’s thumbs, to be struck by lightning. I want each makeshift flagpole to suddenly glow white-hot and blister the hand of the selfish, insufferably smug bellend who is holding it. And then I want them to bear that scar forever and have to explain that they got it blocking my view of a Beatle. I turn to the screens at the side of the stage, mostly elevated above the hateful, unceasingly wacky pageantry. Somehow there are flags between the camera and Sir Paul. The vision mixer instead focuses on Macca’s muso backing band. It’s like being shown the frame around the Mona Lisa. Someone lights a coloured flare in front of me, causing a bout of explosive coughing and further blocking the view for a few hundred people.

For the Quietus, Marc Burrows on why he’d have had a lovely time at Glastonbury were it not for the tens of thousands of other people and their flags and the reminder that snobbery often comes from self-loathing 

4. On a March evening at New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport, an agent beckoned me over to the check-in counter and asked for my passport. As he thumbed through its pages, he paused on the page with a red visa stamp and an imprint of a baobab tree.

“What’s your reason for traveling to Senegal?” he asked in a tone simultaneously neutral and stern.

“I’m attending a basketball tournament there,” I told him.

“Oh, some people flew from here only a few days ago carrying jerseys,” he said, perking up in his chair. He told me he was from Senegal himself. “Basketball is coming up in Senegal,” he said proudly.

Omar Mohammed takes a look at basketball’s $1bn play for Africa for the Guardian

5. In the era of the controlled message, Gavin Bazunu is one footballer who doesn’t need help to tell his story. Spend time in the company of the Ireland goalkeeper and it becomes apparent why his former employers at Manchester City never felt the need to put him through the media training that tends to go with the territory at a club of that stature.

Truth be told, it was never even mentioned. He’s mildly amused by the whole concept. “They were probably comfortable enough with what I was going to do,” he says, with a knowing grin that reflects a refreshing self-belief that shines through his every sentence.

The Irish Independent’s Dan McDonnell chats to Gavin Bazunu following his move to Southampton

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