Gareth Bale in action against Barcelona on Saturday night. Jack Abuin Jack Abuin

1. It is both sad and a little telling that some in Madrid would be happy to see him go. There has been an orchestrated note to the recent hostility in the media and closer to home. Bale is apparently called “the Martian” now by some of his teammates, a reference to his aloofness; to go with “the Golfer” as referenced by Courtois this week, tribute to Bale’s obsession with the sport, the time spent playing golf with his entourage from home, the replica professional course built in his garden.

This is all a little unnecessary. Bale is by all accounts a genuinely nice and humble superstar. He has been a brilliant player in brilliant patches, and a joyful one too. When he scored that goal in last year’s Champions League final, the kind of insanely staged overhead kick Pelé might score in some terrible 1970s American film about soccer, the reaction around me in the stadium was laughter. People cracked up, giggled, chortled at the sight of elite sport reduced to a playful absurdity.

Given the stage it remains the best single-touch goal anyone has ever scored. But it also feels instantly forgettable too, in the classic Bale style, the absence of anything sensual in what he does. This is a clean kind of sporting genius, a footballer as a machine made for winning.

If there is something missing in this superstar story, it is perhaps a little wildness, a little mud, some desperation. Bale has played the game brilliantly. But still no one really knows how good he could have been, what other gears he might have found in his peak club years with a little more emotional engagement.

Barney Ronay on the most forgettable of unforgettable careers, and the enigma that is Gareth Bale.

2. The final leg into Bluff was essentially two days rolled into one, as Newburn ran through the night to try to meet his target.

This, for many observers, is the hardest part to reconcile about the whole saga. Any legitimate claim Newburn had on the record disappeared long before he even hit the South Island. So why then did he try so desperately hard over the final 48 hours – running through high winds, torrential rain, and at one point sleet – to ‘break’ the record?

Newburn, too, struggles to come up with an answer for this.

“With the benefit of hindsight, I probably should have pulled the plug early in the piece,” he says.

Newburn’s willingness to flog himself for the sake of an already morally lost cause could have had far more serious consequences. Calder says he lost Newburn for over an hour in the early hours of the morning, after the veteran runner fell asleep in a ditch on the side of the road. When he awoke, a disoriented Newburn began running back in the direction he came from.

Stuff NZ’s Dana Johannsen explores an ultramarathon runner’s attempt to break a four decades old record for running the length of New Zealand.

Jose Mourinho exchanges words with Paul Pogba while manager of Manchester United. John Walton John Walton

3. “A club that is not ready to be a trophy-hunter immediately but with the ambition to be a trophy-hunter. That is my second item [requirement]. My first item is structural empathy. I want to work with people that I love. People I want to work with, that I am happy to work with, with whom I share the same ideas.

“I don’t want to be in a permanent contradiction [conflict] between what I think and the others think. I want to work in a club that understands there is a structure in place. I don’t want to work in a structure of no coincidence [unity] in the thinking.

“During my career I have been working in every possible circumstance. The most successful situations are not because of the structure but because of the empathy in the structure.”

Sam Wallace of The Telegraph sits down with Jose Mourinho for an in-depth interview about his future in management.

4. Before he came to Greece, Pitino was out of coaching for more than a year—and thought he might be out of coaching forever. After a federal investigation into bribery and fraud in college basketball—Adidas was accused of funneling money to high-profile high school players to steer them to teams sponsored by the shoe company, including Pitino’s Cardinals—Louisville fired the Hall of Fame coach in October 2017 after 16 seasons. Pitino was never charged in the scandal and remains defiant about his innocence, as does his lawyer. He wrote a book about the saga and insists he’s never given so much as $5 to a player. But after Louisville fired him, he feared no one in the college game would offer another gig no matter how much he pleaded his case. He was right. No one came to his rescue. At least not a college, anyway.

John Gonzalez of The Ringer meets Hall of Fame coach Rick Pitino, who has been exiled to the Greek basketball league.

5. Mobile phones and social media were still confined to science fiction, but an event on this scale went viral long before the concept even existed.

The signs were visible all over Cork.

Those alighting from the Dublin trains in Kent Station remarked upon the silence, and the small knots of people discussing the news quietly, while one man travelling in the opposite direction summed up the reaction on Leeside.

Then Taoiseach and a long-time teammate of Ring’s with Glen Rovers and Cork, Jack Lynch was heading to Dublin in his state car when he stopped for an Evening Echo near the Coliseum.

“Did you hear the news?” the Echo seller asked Lynch. “Ring is dead.” Shocked, Lynch said: “It can’t be,” and slumped back in his seat.

The Examiner’s Michael Moynihan on the death of the great Christy Ring, which rocked his native Cork 40 years ago yesterday.