“The weird thing is that we DO want athletes to have mental health issues – very much so in fact – but we only want them to reveal them at a time and a place that suits us. Namely, after they’ve retired, and in a book. Then we can profess ourselves fascinated to have learned that an athlete walked out for this or that fixture absolutely broken inside. The key thing is that you couldn’t tell from the outside – that’s the bit we love. The hidden pain, the belated literary reveal. If they won the fixture, we like to learn from the book that they didn’t mean whatever elated thing they said to the journalists at the press conference afterwards – they were just going through the motions because they were broken inside.”
– The Guardian’s Marina Hyde addresses Naomi Osaka’s withdrawal from the French Open.
* * *
“Fanhood, at its fundament, is controlled enmity. Jubilation pays its price in senseless antagonism. Even those of us who abhor friend-enemy distinctions in politics become little Schmittians when watching sports. This is not necessarily a problem for most of us, but it starts to feel troubling in a society whose pro-social anchors are rapidly crumbling. Even having developed, with unnerving speed, my own healthy dislike for Trae Young, the obsession with him both inside and outside the Garden began to seem disconcerting. I found myself hoping that he’d somehow already left Midtown surreptitiously—one of those getaway scenes where the hunted individual lies flat on the back seat, under a blanket or a tarp.”
* * *
“I was 11 when I went to my first Shamrock Rovers game during a season in which they won the league. Dad had lured me in under this false sense of guaranteed success. I thought that winning titles was just what Rovers did. It would be another 16 years before they’d win their next.”
* * *
“As much as all this will enrich the Irish international team, it will also challenge us to tone down the rhetoric around what it means to play for Ireland. Many of these young players did not grow up listening to drunken uncles wrapping the green flag around them at family gatherings. They will have complex, shifting feelings about their identities, drawn from their own experiences, positive and negative.”
* * *
“Slovakia’s contest against Sweden might not be pretty, but both those sides might prove tricky for Spain to break down, considering their problems against deep blocks over the past couple of years. Poland feel like one of the most unpredictable sides at the tournament, with Sousa’s decision-making particularly crucial. This isn’t the most glamorous group, but it could prove the most dramatic.”
– The Athletic’s Michael Cox takes a detailed look at how Group E could play out at Euro 2020.
