EVERY SUNDAY MORNING we get the kettle on, put our feet up and flick back through some of our favourite pieces from the week’s newspapers, websites, blogs and backs of envelopes.
1. “The taxi driver was called Mohamoud Ahmed Ali. He was wearing a heavy coat and bifocal glasses. Ali left east Africa in 1993 and settled in Newham not long after. We talked about the coming of the Olympics, and after the usual chuntering about congestion (almost all conversations with locals about the Games involve several minutes on traffic and the lack of tickets—they received no allocation, or priority booking), Ali pointed to his house. It was the last on Wise Road, hard up against ‘Aurora,’ an unfinished £50m development of 180 apartments, which towered over it.
‘Before the sun we see,’ said Ali. ‘Now they covered it.’ Because his wife, especially, doesn’t like the idea of being looked down on by their new neighbours, his family no longer uses their garden. ‘It is difficult for us,’ said Ali. But he was no longer angry. The Olympics, the envisaged decades of transformation facing this corner of London, are old news in places like Wise Road. ‘Everyone benefits,’ said Ali, using a phrase that stayed with me, ‘because some people benefit in bad ways.’”
Prospect Magazine’s Sam Knight explores the effect the arrival of the Olympics is having on East Londoners.
2. “I first met Paolo Di Canio five years ago at Cisco Roma (now Atletico Roma), a tiny lower league club where he was embarking on what promises to be a distinguished managerial career. ‘When we first met,’ I remind him, ‘you were speaking about your dad in Italian; explaining how everything you ever learned, you owed to him. Then, suddenly, you said four words in English: ‘He was a brickie.’”
Robert Chalmers catches up with Swindon manager Paulo di Canio to talk football, fascism and life in England for the Daily Mail.
3. “The result of her labours: three grand slam titles, 24 titles overall and the world No.1 ranking, which she could soon regain. At her teenage best, Sharapova was one of the few legitimate challengers to the Williams’s hegemony. So why, from a distance, is it easier to warm to certain species of marine crustaceans than this statuesque, tennis tsarina? Sharapova drew criticism for her grunting during Monday night’s match against Sabine Lisicki. But if you develop a disdain for every woman tennis player who cracks champagne glasses in a neighbouring suburbs while hitting a forehand, you won’t be left with much change out of the top 50.”
Richard Hines at Stuff.co.nz explains why it’s difficult to love Maria Sharapova.
4. “On a mild winter night in Majorca, in a grand but empty hotel on the edge of the sea, Bradley Wiggins is at his concentrated best. It hardly matters that the hotel would be shut entirely for three months were it not for an elite group of road and track cyclists who have turned it into a training base as they enter the most momentous year of their careers. And it does not even register with a maverick like Wiggins that Friday 27 January means it is exactly six months to the start of the Olympic Games.”
Another week, another Donald McRae interview in the Guardian- this time with cyclist Bradley Wiggins.
5. “Clive Tyldesley made a wise observation about modern football this week. And it was nothing to do with that night in Istanbul. Chairing a debate on 20 years of the Premier League organised by the universities of Brighton and Coventry, the ITV commentator summed things up by asking his audience of students and academics whether anyone actually enjoyed the game anymore.”
The Telegraph’s Jim White says Premier League’s footballers are losing touch with supporters. Horse. Stable Door. Bolted.
6. “For nearly half a century Paterno projected a safe harbor in the turbulent waters of big-time college sports. If a bag of money was found on a recruit’s doorstep in Texas, well at least we’ve got JoePa up at Penn State doing it the right way. If a bunch of players went on a crime spree in Ohio, thank goodness for JoePa because he keeps his boys in line. If nobody was going to class in Florida and still dressing out on Saturday, all the more reason to appreciate the way JoePa sends most of his ex-players out into the world with diplomas. No matter how much was hypocritical, discomforting or just plain wrong with Division I athletics, JoePa was in State College, keeping the world safe for idealists and dreamers.”
God knows there’s been a lot written about J0e Paterno, his departure from Penn State and his death this week. But Tim Layden‘s obituary on Sports Illustrated is worth a read.
