1. “Cluxton is fiercely protective of his privacy. In his profile on the Dublin GAA website, he says that the best piece of advice he’s ever received is ‘Don’t talk to the media.’ Sure enough, when the whistle blew, he celebrated briefly with his colleagues, commiserated with some of his opponents, and headed straight to the changing room. The man whose action had just won the biggest prize in Irish sport for arguably the biggest team in Irish sport departed the scene without a word to us: no platitudes, no poetry, no nothing.

On the Classical, Fredorrarci looks at why Cluxton, Paul Scholes and some of the top sports stars of their generation have no desire to ever step into the media spotlight.

2. “A glancing blow from Marques unsteadies Padilla; his feet get tangled. At the apex of his fall, he still has time to right himself, escape the bull. His chin tilts up: There is the wheeling sky, all blue. His last-ever binocular view. This milestone whistles past him, the whole sky flooding through the bracket of the bull’s horns, and now he’s lost it. The sun flickers on and off. My balance—”

One of Spain’s most famous bullfighters, Juan Jose Padilla was back in the ring five months after he lost half of his sight in a horrific goring accident. For GQ, Karen Russell meets the one-eyed matador.

3. “Naturally the ceremony will involve another sensuously messianic public appearance by Sepp Blatter, trembling as ever with magisterial condescension, a man who with each passing year increasingly resembles the World Cup itself: gleaming, burnished, perfectly rounded, palms raised in a cartoon of glazed and perma-tanned personal wonderfulness, and seizing here his chance to pet and cosset like a knee-stroking stepfather the Fifa top three – Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and Andrés Iniesta – plus many other excellent footballers who have absolutely nothing to do with him but who are on this occasion presented to the world as evidence of his enduringly bounteous despot-virility.”

The Guardian’s Barney Ronay wants to be sick of the FIFA Ballon d’Or circus — but how can you be sick of a contest between two footballing greats like Messi and Ronaldo?

4. “Descriptors that come to mind when thinking about Goldberg: chubby, loves food, lazy, surprisingly athletic, not the best but steps up when it counts. You can’t tell me those aren’t perfect ways to describe Carmelo Anthony. He’s not the most talented guy on Team USA, but he’s a rock. Even though the ball will most likely not be in his hands should they ever need a last-second shot (much like the substitution of Goldberg for Julie ‘The Cat’ on the last shoot-out), his presence cannot be overshadowed.”

Did you ever wonder what the US Olympic basketball team could learn from the Mighty Ducks? Remebert Browne did on Grantland, and it’s brilliant.

5. “Hurling snobs are the oddest of breeds. It’s not only that they just dislike football and complain about the lack of skill, but in many cases they are ignorant towards their own sport as well. If it’s not about Kilkenny or Dublin, about Cork or Tipperary, about the two provincial championships that make up the Liam McCarthy Cup and flit by with so few games to get hearts beating at pace, then it simply doesn’t matter to them. Ask a football person about the strengths and weaknesses of a lower-tier team like Carlow or Leitrim and you’ll get some sort of an answer. Ask a hurling person about the strengths and weaknesses of a mid-tier team like Kildare or Armagh and you’ll most likely get a laugh.”

Ewan MacKenna spent some time with the Fermanagh senior hurlers this summer where he saw first-hand the struggles of a county trying to make its presence felt outside the top tier.

6. “Before Logan could attend a visitation and a funeral, there was a football game he felt he needed to attend. His father would have wanted him to. It could’ve been like every other varsity football game for Logan, a long wait on the sidelines before shaking hands with players who actually played. But it wouldn’t be like every other football game. For Logan, it would provide a moment of solace. For the Thompsons, it would provide some bit of light in the darkest of weeks. And for the St. Clairsville (Ohio) High School players, led by 2014 Michigan commit Michael Ferns, it would be an opportunity to show the meaning of the word ‘team.’”

The death of Logan Thompson’s father led to one of the most moving moments of America’s high school football season. ESPN’s Chantel Jennings tells the story of Thompson and the St. Clairsville (Ohio) team.

7. “Micah True went off alone on a Tuesday morning to run through the rugged trails of the Gila Wilderness, and now it was already Saturday and he had not been seen again.”

The legendary ultra-runner Micah True, immortalised in Christopher McDougall’s book Born To Run, died in March at the age of 58. Barry Bearak looks at the last run of Caballo Blanco in the New York Times.

8. “The first signs that the progeny of Galileo and Kind might not only live up to expectations but exceed them emerged on a July morning in 2010, the day of Frankel’s first proper gallop, with Queally in the saddle, on the vast Limekilns training ground a couple of miles outside Newmarket. Among those watching was Prince Khalid’s racing manager, Lord Grimthorpe, whose job it is to liaise every day with the 14 trainers of the prince’s 250 horses worldwide, and report nightly to his patron. In a lifetime in racing, he said, he had never seen a spectacle like it. One moment Frankel was bunched up with his stablemates, the next he was streaking away as if the others were hauling ploughs.”

As flat racing prepared to say its goodbyes to Frankel in October, the Telegraph’s Brian Viner told the full story of the world’s greatest racehorse.

9. “It was a classic match by any measure, two future Hall of Famers exploring the limits of their talent. Fans ringing the court applauded lustily, and the other players toasted the two men as they walked off at the end. The following day’s New York Times gushed that the match ‘was declared by old-timers to be one of the hardest fought tennis battles seen during the 22 years of tournaments at Longwood.’ Something gave the encounter a deeper texture, however. Few press reports mentioned it, and those that did hardly played it up. Certainly neither Williams nor Behr discussed it openly. Nor did the fans at Longwood seem to be aware of it. But just 12 weeks earlier—and 100 years ago next month—the two players, traveling separately, had survived the most famous maritime disaster in history.”

More than 1500 people died when the Titanic sank a century ago but two of the world’s best tennis players survived the disaster. Twelve weeks later they met on the court. L Jon Wertheim tells the story of Richard Williams and Karl Behr in Sports Illustrated.

10. “When Michael Buffer read the scorecards Saturday night in boxing’s worst robbery in a major fight since Pernell Whitaker and Julio Cesar Chavez fought to a ‘draw’ in 1993, I was sitting beside a columnist for PhilBoxing.com, a news site that often reads like the Manny Pacquiao Ministry of Propaganda. We were six or seven rows back from ringside, and when it became clear that Timothy Bradley Jr. had been declared winner by split decision over the heavily favored Pacquiao, my companion shot out of his chair and shouted: ‘WHAT’S HAPPENING? WHAT’S HAPPENING?? THIS IS MADNESS! WHO IS THAT GUY WHO DID THIS?’”

Before Juan Manuel Marquez landed the punch heard around the world, Manny Pacquiao was beaten in controversial circumstances by Timothy Bradley. Rafe Bartholomew tried to make sense of it all on Grantland.