1. Two River fans sat next to me in the last row. They talked softly to themselves, but my translator could hear.

“This could change my day so much,” one said.

His friend looked at him.

“No,” he replied. “My life.”

He paused.

“I went to the psychologist Friday and only talked about this,” he said.

ESPN’s Wright Thompson witnessed Buenos Aires lose its mind as it prepared for the game that never was.

2. Soon after, in the summer of 1994, Gibney quietly slipped out of Ireland, firstly to Warrender Swimming Club in Scotland. Working for the Sunday Tribune as a sportswriter, I informed the club about who they had employed. 

One of the committee members in Warrender was a medical doctor. She was part of the panel that had interviewed Gibney and said he had been an impressive candidate, that they had no idea about the court case in Ireland. They fired him.

In 1995, he turned up at the North Jeffco Swim Club in Jeffersen County in Colorado. I again contacted the police in Arvada County and spoke to a detective called Joanne Xreppa. Soon after, Gibney moved on again to California and from there to Hillsborough County in Florida. And here we are again.

The Irish Times’ Jonny Waterson on the case of George Gibney, Irish sport’s most notorious child abuser.

3. When Charles Barkley’s mother, Charcey Glenn, passed away in June 2015, Barkley’s hometown of Leeds, Alabama, came to the funeral to pay respects. But there was also an unexpected guest.

Barkley’s friends couldn’t quite place him. He wasn’t a basketball player, he wasn’t a sports figure, and he wasn’t from Barkley’s hometown. Here’s what I can tell you about him: He wore striped, red polo shirts tucked into khaki shorts and got really excited about two-for-one deals. He was a commuter. He worked as a cat litter scientist in Muscatine, Iowa. In short, he was everyone’s suburban dad. More specifically, he was my dad.

“You know, it was obviously a very difficult time,” Barkley told me recently. “And the next thing I know, he shows up. Everybody’s like, ‘Who’s the Asian dude over there?’ I just started laughing. I said, ‘That’s my boy, Lin.’ They’re, like, ‘How do you know him?’ I said, ‘It’s a long story.’”

Shirley Wang on a beautiful, unlikely friendship between her father and one of the NBA’s biggest names. 

4. “They had met in the Tally Ho (bar in New Street in Longford). So I said I’d meet him there at half two on the following Tuesday. 

“The first thing he did say to me was ‘Mick, can I have a private word with you?’ He said, ‘let’s be straight about this. If I get this job, this will be the last meeting we will hold in a public house.’

“He wasn’t into that. He wanted everything done privately where nobody could hear what was said. He laid down the law very early. 

“I looked at him and said ‘Stephen, hold up now a minute! I’m only off the plane and back here in Longford. I hadn’t a clue where ye wanted to meet. I have no problem whatsoever. Ye can meet where ye like after this. 

“But anyway, after listening to him and talking to him, I said if you want the job, it’s yours.” 

RTÉ’s Conor Neville on Stephen Kenny’s origin story; starting out at Longford Town.  

5. “[T]he future manager of Ireland walked out on to the carriageway and flagged down the first passing bus. ‘Within ten minutes he was back,’ Fergus McNally, the kit man, said. ‘Somehow, and don’t ask me how, he explained the situation to the driver and persuaded him to give up his Friday and bring us to Derry. That’s Stephen, always calm. Present a problem, he’d find the solution.’”

And the Times of Ireland’s Garry Doyle excavated the same fertile ground, writing around the time of Kenny’s promotion to the Ireland U21 job. 

6.  It started with a belch and ended with a bite. But it was the kick in between that made UFC 1, celebrating its 25th birthday Monday, truly memorable.

It came out of nowhere, a visceral shock to the system, violence in a moment we’d been trained to expect anything but—when a man was down on his knees. Remember those quaint old days when attacking someone on the ground was as uncouth an act as you could imagine? Few do, but it’s part of UFC’s lasting legacy, one that began in the first 30 seconds of its first televised fight.

Jonathan Snowden of Bleacher Report tells the story of UFC 1, ‘the event that started an industry’.

7.  As a teenager, struggling with my sexuality, depression manifested because I didn’t have a way to verbalise those feelings.  To speak about them to anyone meant I’d need to address what was fuelling the problem.

At that age it wasn’t an option to let any light into that room. My way of handling it was to spend periods of time alone when I’d be very upset. This only happened every couple of months, so I could manage. Eventually, it got to a stage where every day I was waking up with instant dread. When I got really upset over something completely innocuous in college people began to notice, so I had to open up.

Dublin footballer Nicole Owens opens up about depression, sexuality, work-life balance and more in this important piece on The Sports Chronicle.   

8. You may feel this is a little abrupt, and perhaps not the way you do things down in Oz – give or take the odd dodgy text message – but I do have something important to tell you on the dawn of your farewell to Test cricket on English soil.

I love you. Not all of you, of course. I’m not crazy about the peroxide and the diamond ear studs, but then I’m old enough to know that no one’s perfect, not even you, Shaney.

We sadly lost one of the doyens of sportswriting this year as James Lawton passed away. This love letter to Shane Warne shows why so many enjoyed his work for so long.   

9.  His father only died last February so there isn’t a headstone yet, just one of those temporary wooden crosses we have to put up with for a year or so.

Around the top section of the cross, somebody had tied a green and white headband. And the man had posted the photo on Twitter to thank whoever put it there.

I suspect he had gone to the grave on Saturday evening or Sunday morning before he travelled to Dublin to the game. Now why do you think he did that in the first place? On that specific day? There’s a lot on, a lot to do. Why go to the grave on that day?

Why do you think? You know why. I don’t have to tell you.

And he saw the headband there. Wrapped lovingly there, by somebody — he didn’t know whom.

Now, what did that mean to him? Can you imagine that moment, when he passed the other graves, along a familiar path? Said a quiet hello, maybe, to somebody leaving the graveyard?

Then he saw the little splash of green and white on the brown wooden cross. Perhaps he was with his daughter or his son, or his wife. Can you imagine how he felt at that moment? Did he put his hand to his mouth? Were his eyes dry? Did he say something?

Tadhg Coakley unravels what hurling means to us, after that epic All-Ireland final in September. 

10. It was a Sunday get-together that featured Manchester United royalty. Sir Matt Busby was there and so was Nobby Stiles, among others. It was the early 1990s; the venue a wine bar in Sale, and the question was for Stiles, then in charge of the B team at Old Trafford. Who was the best up-and-coming youngster at the club?

Stiles did not hesitate. “Ben Thornley,” he replied. What, even including Ryan Giggs? “Ben is the closest I’ve seen to George Best in all my time at the club,” Stiles said. Busby did not bat an eyelid.

The Guardian’s David Hytner catches up with the Salford Boy who was top of the class of ’92, before injury robbed him of the career he seemed destined for.

11. Josie was gone. Never again to sit on the end of his bed, reading Roald Dahl until his eyelids grew heavy. Never to be seen behind the bar, the Clough Inn, they ran and lived over in Cloughjordan. Never again to smile. He was only talking about this recently in Tralee, to students at Gaelcholaiste Chiarrai.

About that moment of desperate, human scrambling that instantly follows tragedy.

Vincent Hogan meets former Tipperary hurler, Seamus Hennessy, who was just 11-years-old when his mother took her own life, as he planned to take on the Antarctic Ice Marathon. 

12. Things changed when he had his first child, and as his family grew, so too did his desire to know of his past. He wanted to know who gave him his deep voice and his muscular build and to whom he owed his pensive nature and quiet intensity. He wondered where son Dason got his height and which grandfather or uncle his bespectacled son, Daeh, might favor. He was so hungry for information that he never questioned whether the search might lead him to answers he couldn’t handle.

“I didn’t know what was going to happen,” McCullough says. “I didn’t know how people would receive things one way or another. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew I wanted to find out.”

Sarah Spain of ESPN writes about an NFL coach went searching for his biological parents and found them in a surprising place. 

13. In the summer of 2003, an area which knew well the face of tragedy was haunted by it once again. While travelling from her home in Kinuary outside Westport to see two of her sisters play for Mayo against Galway in a Connacht Championship game, Aisling McGing was involved in a fatal car crash.

She was just 18.

The previous year had been a momentous one for the McGing family. Aisling McGing, Sharon McGing and Michelle McGing had all been part of the Mayo panel which won the All-Ireland for the third time in four years.

Two months later, there would be further success when their club, Carnacon, won its first ever All-Ireland title.

Just three months after Aisling’s death, a Mayo team featuring Michelle and Sharon persevered through sorrow and won the All-Ireland.

PJ Browne of Balls tells the story of the 2003 Mayo All-Ireland victory.

14. ’Everybody is different. Personally, it didn’t bother me. I never got off on that sort of stuff. I was fucking loving it when everybody was yapping about us. But as a unit, there’s no doubt it was a huge distraction. I also remember that Friday night of the meeting in Limerick. It came on the late news, I was sitting at home with the mother, and “There’s Mikey Palmer,” I says. He was working with Lynch’s crowd, Lynch’s father doing the coal and the briquettes. A big Clare crowd had gone into the Limerick Inn. Then it was (erroneously) said Lynch’s grandmother was dead to make it worse. I was a bit distracted going to bed that night. I felt more for Colin than anything else because we were all wired for that replay against Waterford. Okay, he let rip but the punishment was miles beyond the crime.’

John Fogarty sits down with one of the great half-back lines to chat about Clare’s memorable summer of 1998.

15. The Declan Kidney-coached team caught the NZ Schools at the right time. You watch footage of the match now and it was clear the team in black had never played together before. There was the odd moment of individual brilliance, mainly from Lomu, Leota and blindside Matthew Grace, but few passages of cohesion.

Played at Rugby Park before it became Yarrow Stadium, Wilson kicks off and New Zealand would be 13-0 down before he touched the ball again. The Irish forwards splintered the New Zealand pack at will, Foley scoring off a lineout drive.

The match was played as a curtain-raiser to Taranaki’s second division clash with Thames Valley in what would be a championship winning season for the home team. Kevin “Smiley” Barrett was among Taranaki’s try scorers that day but if a 1-year-old Beauden was among the crowd, it is impossible to tell from the wobbly footage.

The New Zealand Herald’s Dylan Cleaver tells the tale of the young Irish side that almost beat the Kiwis’ most talented schoolboys.   

16. Did you hear what Dunphy said?’ is probably the starting point to a discussion that most Irish people have been involved in at some stage. He was clickbait before the internet even existed.

You could argue that his time has passed, but in some ways he was a man ahead of his time, well aware of the power of the sound bite.

Dunphy monetised that pulling power and the anger at his observations was still feeding the beast. Website editors will tell you about the value of Dunphy’s name in a headline.

Then again, there’s also a market for a website featuring cats that look like Hitler, and there comes a time when enough is enough, when the joke gets old.

The Irish Independent’s Dan McDonnell assesses Eamon Dunphy’s role and performance as a pundit these days. 

17. Jack Charlton didn’t build the Irish team, he redesigned it in his own image to reflect his convictions. These were English convictions inflicted on an Irish team. Hence the greatest sporting story of our time is rendered complex, is not amenable to conventional wisdom as reflected on television screens or the pages of newspapers.

Nor can this story be easily explained to outsiders; people in Ireland who don’t know soccer, people abroad who know soccer but not Ireland. It is a tormenting ironic probability that the hero of popular renown belongs with the latter.

After years of unfulfilled promise, the Irish soccer team needed Jack’s conviction. Some sense of purpose and identity – any sense – was better than the squandering of talent that had gone before. Talent without conviction is wasted. Conviction without talent is ugly. The tension central to this story is between conviction – Jack Charlton’s – and talent – the imagination, wit and creativity of players like Liam Brady, David O’Leary, Ronnie Whelan and Paul McGrath.

Jack Charlton’s convictions are the product of his experience as an English football man. Thus one element of what we are bearing glorious witness to today, one element.

The Irish story cannot simply be understood in terms of one man’s contribution. There is more, infinitely more, to the drama we are watching than most who are in the audience – which is now no longer a football audience – can possibly appreciate.

And if he is more showbiz than substance as a football pundit today, Eamon Dunphy produced pieces like Italia ’90 feature. The Sunday Independent reprinted the ‘tour de force’ as they launched their anthology, On The Seventh Day.  

18. It was 8am on Sunday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and in my hour of need I turned to Haile, the man they call the Emperor, for advice.

I was about to line up against 44,000 Ethiopians at Africa’s largest road race, the Great Ethiopian Run (10K), and I was hopelessly unprepared for what was about to happen.

“Oh, you’re running?” Haile said, seeming surprised. “Well, don’t push too much at the beginning.”

It had been four years since the one and only time I spoke to the Ethiopian great, when I interviewed him over the phone from a hostel dormitory in Prague while nursing a brain-shredding hangover. Maybe it was that memory that made Haile advise caution, but that would imply he remembered me, which he almost certainly didn’t.

Anyway, I walked to the starting line half-excited, half-terrified, like a student who hadn’t opened a book all semester hoping to somehow pass his finals. Here I was, about to take on a nation of distance runners over 10 kilometers at an altitude of almost 8,000 feet.

Irish journalist Cathal Dennehy took on a 10k race in Ethiopia to give us this hugely enjoyable piece. 

19. ‘An idea in the notepad. Don’t I see Ronnie talking about boxing a bit in his interviews these days, posting padwork,? He’s a fan of Spike O’Sullivan’s? I’d like to get them in a room together, see what they’d talk about. Who wouldn’t?

Eight months later, the snooker icon’s touring Ireland and, given I now know they’re following one another on Twitter, I’ve asked the Cork middleweight to help set it up (Spike: “LMAO i’ll tell him his tour will end on the first night if he doesn’t agree”). So here we are, sitting in a hotel on Leeside, looking into the past and into the future.

In a conversation that touches on stagefright, hunger, denial and Nikolai Valuez, Ronnie starts by telling us about his family background of Irish boxing men — “My uncle Danny holds the record for being knocked down the most times in one fight. It was 14 times in a world title fight. I’d love to follow my family tree (back to Ireland)” — but we’ll get to that later.’

Kevin Byrne gets ‘The fighting O’Sullivans’  Ronnie and Spike in a room for this great chat.  

20. Last week, Yahoo reporter Chris Haynes walked into the Lakers locker room and spotted LeBron James sitting alone. “LeBron is a different cat …” Haynes said later. “He’s got his headphones on. He’s playing music. He comes off like he doesn’t want to be bothered.”

“Man, I don’t care about that shit,” Haynes continued. “I walk over there. He takes his headphones off. We start chopping it up, talking in front of everybody.”

Any reporter who has been in an NBA locker room has seen this kind of flex. A writer snags a private interview with a superstar while envious reporters look on. Until now, the move didn’t have a widely agreed-upon name.

It has been called the “side interview” and the “sidebar” and, when employed as the player leaves the court, the “tunnel walk.” But I prefer the term ESPN’s Brian Windhorst uses: sidling. As in, you sidle up to the players.

Bryan Curtis in The Ringer on how sidling has become the great skill of the NBA beat.