1) How José Mourinho painted me as the panto bad guy
Stephen Hunt, the Republic of Ireland footballer turned Irish Independent columnist, knows how to start an article:
Around the time José Mourinho was depicting me as public enemy No1, I was walking through Harrods when who should I see but José Mourinho. I’m not sure what thoughts went through my head but afterwards I wondered why I hadn’t asked him if he cared about the collateral damage that came from all the things he had been saying about me. The encounter didn’t go as I had anticipated. When he saw me, he came over and shook my hand. We didn’t say much, maybe a “How are you?” and we went on our separate ways but it was significant enough for me to realise something about José Mourinho.
Hunt realised that Mourinho is an actor, a man who will happily castigate an opponent on TV in front of millions of impressionable fans but then bump into that person in an upmarket department store and exchange pleasantries as if nothing has happened. Mourinho’s angry words were delivered for the benefit of his own team and to try to influence referees, but he doesn’t hold on to his convictions beyond the stage of a press conference.
“If he believed the things he said about me,” writes Hunt, “I would have expected him to be angry, to come over in my direction and start jabbing a finger in my chest as you imagine would have happened if it had been, say Alex Ferguson. You can say what you like about Alex Ferguson, but there was an integrity to his rage.” Mourinho doesn’t really do rage. He is much too self-aware to let his true emotions show. It’s all an act and, as Hunt discovered when he injured Petr Cech, took a battering from the Chelsea manager and then suffered abuse from angry fans, it’s not fun to play a supporting role in Mourinho’s melodrama.
2) 100 blogs to follow in 2015
Bookmark this immediately.
3) Why Ireland are realistic Rugby World Cup winners
John Mitchell is one of only four people to have played for, captained and coached the All Blacks, and he thinks that Ireland have a good chance of winning the World Cup. This is big news for a country who have never made it past the quarter-finals of the tournament. Ireland’s best ever player retired last year but that has not hindered their remarkable ascent under Joe Schmidt. Since losing to England last February, they have completed an impressive run of 10 straight victories. They could still miss out to Wales in the Six Nations and crumble against England at the World Cup, but this is an optimistic moment in Irish rugby and their fans should be dreaming.
4) An interview with DJ Pat Nevin
Every self-respecting football fan knows that Pat Nevin has been DJing for a long time. The upstarts over at Vice are only working this out now but, to their credit, they have taken the time to interview Nevin about his double career as a football pundit and an indie DJ. As always, Nevin is in good form, even when correcting the details of his own mythology:
Is it true you once asked to be taken off early during a football match so that you could go to a Joy Division gig that night?
Yes, but wasn’t Joy Division, it was Cocteau Twins. I was pre-season at Chelsea and I said, I will sign your contract if you take me off at half time next Friday night because they’re playing Festival Hall. I was quite adamant, and the manager agreed to it. “You’re off your head, but fine.” We weren’t flashy back then, but we did train near Heathrow so sometimes I would hit a gig on a weeknight - get a last minute ticket and fly off somewhere. So it might be a gig in France, Berlin, Scotland. I would stay in a crap hotel, fly back the next day for training. Nobody was any the wiser.
5) A week on my bike
So many of the things written about cycling feel strangely alienating. A lot of journalism on the topic either focuses on the unspeakably rigorous standards at the top end of the sport – Dave Brailsford, marginal gains and how washing between thumbs and fingers properly improves times – or it’s about the dispiriting drugs culture that has sucked the soul out of the peloton. It all feels so unobtainable and clinical. By contrast, this article by Corbin Smith in The Classical is warm, approachable and honest.
Smith is not a professional cyclist. He rides his bike because he doesn’t have a car and because he cares about the environment. Even then, he struggles with laziness, boredom and the feeling that he would rather not bother. But when he sits on his baby blue Trek District and manages to propel himself forwards, he experiences a tremendous sense of wellbeing. It’s hard not to cheer him on:
Learning to force myself to ride up steep hills has been my biggest accomplishment on a bicycle. I am a seeker of comfort, an avoider of hardships. The act of seeing the hill, thinking this is a big hill, and I don’t really want to ride up it and doing it anyway has revealed to me that I can push myself. I will get up the hill, and it will be an accomplishment when I am done. This is a simple and obvious thing that most people know, but it has taken a lot of effort for me to know it.
6) Post-it players
The title says it all really.
Great request from @MattyBullock. Here's Aaron Lennon's 'buzzing' face... pic.twitter.com/57RrXTHaAy
— Post-it Players (@PostItPlayers) February 23, 2015
Harry Kane! I can't believe this run! Fair play to him pic.twitter.com/9JdBm3laWr
— Post-it Players (@PostItPlayers) February 7, 2015
7) Tiger Woods: stranger than fiction
Tiger Woods has entered his freak-show phase, which is not a line you would have expected to read a decade ago. Woods’ whole career has been unbelievable, but he is now veering dangerously close to Michael Jackson or Mike Tyson territory. The way his marriage and body fell apart has made for an engrossing if depressing tale. Michael Weinreb pieces it together in Rolling Stone:
There are, of course, people who are fascinated by the way mega-celebrity and competitive pressure can drain the human psyche; it’s interesting to speculate how Woods might be handling the notion that the one thing he was always good at – the one thing he was physically and mentally constructed to be good at from a tender age – has spiraled completely out of his control. It almost feels novelistic, the way his life imploded all at once, like something out of, hell, a Dan Jenkins novel; but there’s also something inherently depressing about it, too, for those of us who grew up watching Woods transform golf into something counterintuitively electric.
8) On fatherhood and football
Ian King, the man responsible for the wonderful 200% website, is going to be a father. Congratulations Ian. This is an exciting time, but it is not without its worries: “Even the question of whether my first born child will actually have any interest whatsoever in association football or not hangs in the air like Denis Law. If he or she has much psychological genetic code from their mother, the answer will most likely be a resounding ‘no’.”
Beyond the question of whether the kid will enjoy the game is the more complex issue of which team the newborn will support. Ian is concerned that, even if he manages to convince his child to pick a decent team by “striking early, while the child’s brain is still malleable,” other children could ruin his plans:
The danger with all of this is, of course, the influence of outsiders. It’s easy enough to ply a young child’s mind with propaganda to the point at which, by the time they start school, they may well believe that Glenn Hoddle might actually be a saint rather than merely somebody who believes that he’ll be beatified upon his death. There comes a point at which, however, my child will have to interact with other children, and this will most likely come in a school playground, where, as everybody knows, children are at their cruellest. After a week of being surrounded by other, Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea supporting children will my child return home one day having performed a sudden and decisive volte face over who they wish to support? This scenario has become something of a comedy trope over the years, but the possibility of it happening is very real, particularly in the case of my offspring. After all, if the genetics of his or her parents are anything to go by he or she will be small, bespectacled, geeky and most likely unable to defend themselves in a playground fight without considerable martial arts training. How will he or she cope if bullied over supporting the wrong team?
9) Life on Major League Soccer’s minimum salary
The Columbus Crew defender Ross Friedman was paid $36,500 last season. While Friedman was earning the MLS minimum wage and living at home with his parents, his team-mate, Federico Higuain, was on the altogether more handsome salary of $500,000. Thankfully Friedman is not motivated by money – although he has a few interesting things to say about life in an unequal dressing room:
It’s really interesting. A lot of people don’t know this. We had five, six, seven guys on our roster that lived at home. A lot of the home-grown guys lived with their parents. Guys living together in subsidised housing from the Crew. That’s kind of the rookie life in the MLS. You’re just trying to survive. You’re not doing it for the money. And then you’ve got guys who are making a lot of money, rolling in in their Porsche or their big SUVs or whatever they have. So you can actually see the disparity just in the parking lot of the training facility.
10) The Women’s Boat Race
After a long battle for equality, the Women’s Boat Race is finally going to be held on the same day as the men’s race. About time. The Oxford and Cambridge women’s crews have been competing against each other since 1927 but their race has been relegated to a shorter stretch of river, run on a different day and generally ignored by sponsors, the media and the public. Before their very first race, a member of the Cambridge crew had to meet with university staff to agree on a dress code that would preserve the rowers’ modesty. We have come a long way in 88 years but this latest leap forward is one of the most satisfying for the athletes involved.
