The Finest of Margins
A common refrain heard in the crowds of the Tottenham Hotspur stadium on Saturday Afternoon was that the performance felt like a throwback to the worst of the Angeball era. As well as some of the ponderous buildup, a disappointing defeat to Bournemouth in the aftermath of a rousing victory against Man City also contained […]
Momentum is Everything (Momentum is Nothing)
Momentum is the most ephemeral of the footballing concepts. Some people will tell you it’s everything, others will tell you it’s nothing. A team can come in bang in form and blow the other team away, but we’ve equally seen plenty of times when the pre-match overwhelming favourite lays an egg and gets trounced by […]
Brave is Beautiful
Anyone who has played at any level of football has at one time done this: A goalie or a defender has the ball, you’re playing against a team that aggressively presses, and you “call” for the ball from a position where you know the player on the ball will never find you. The brave thing […]
Red Wings – Not Screwing Things Up
We are in the dog days of Summer from an NHL reporting perspective. That means a plethora of ‘ranking the offseason’ or ‘way too early prediction’ articles are coming out. As usual, there are plenty of opinions flying around, but one that seems to be consistent across these articles is that the Red Wings have […]
Injuries and Sporting Humanity
“He’s someone doing something that conventional wisdom says is not the thing to do,” said David Shaw, a Stanford graduate who was named the Cardinal’s football coach last month. “But the people here say, ‘I understand.’ ” If I told you the above quote was about Andrew Luck, it would probably not surprise you at […]
How it Happened | Ben Stokes Saves The Ashes
I had always planned to write a post at some point about why Test cricket is such a special thing in the world of sport, and while I already had ample fodder for that article, the events on the 4th day at Headingly just piled a whole load more on top. So to avoid covering […]
Clutch: Of Closers and Kickers
I’m going to borrow from the laziest of tropes for speeches and articles and drop in a dictionary definition for the intro to this post: clutch noun (DIFFICULT SITUATION) US a difficult and important situation that needs a lot of skill to deal with successfully: “This team was able to perform in the clutch every […]
A Tale of Two VARs
In the short-lived history thus far of VAR, it’s most significant moment to date was of course in the Champions League semi-final between Man City and Spurs. The debate over the merits or otherwise were therefore naturally amplified when the same technology intervened this weekend to again decide the course of the result against City. […]
THAT Ronny Rosenthal Hat-Trick
The 1994-95 season is the first that I have actual, tangible memories of football from. Oddly, neither are actually of the football action itself but instead both are recalling the emotions I felt sitting on the upper stairs (I lived in a townhouse with 2 separate sets of stairs) reacting to formative moments in my […]
Swing and a drive. Belted right…
Baseball is a sport that thrives on its history. The hall of fame ballot is an annual cacophony of debate, statistical milestones are tracked and followed with more fervour than some religions, and moments of note are known by single words or phrases. The catch The streak The called shot Mr October Baseball is nothing […]