1. Walking into a press box and seeing Brian Kerr sitting there is one of the most depressing sights in Irish life. It’s not that he doesn’t perform his media duties well. Far from it, Kerr is one of the most insightful and entertaining analysts around. But, at 60, he has much more to offer Irish soccer than opinions.

Written on the morning of Trap’s last stand in Vienna, The Star’s chief sportswriter Kieran Cunningham asks why the best man to lead an overhaul of Irish football is sitting in the stands.

2. If there’s a synthetic hormone out there that can soothe Nadal’s chronically tender patellar tendon and offset some of the pressure the torque of his violent two-handed backhand puts on his left knee — well, then, there’s a scientist out there who deserves our thanks and congratulation. Who wouldn’t want to see another 10 years “artificially” added to Nadal’s career?

Bloomberg’s Jonathan Mahler takes a different angle on the issue of drugs in tennis.

3. All great fighters come from somewhere, and not just in the sense that you and I come from somewhere. Early in their careers, boxers are defined by the place and circumstances of their childhoods as much as by their style and success in the ring. They wear flags on their trunks. Announcers belt out the names of their hometowns and countries as part of the pre-fight ritual. Julio César Chávez grew up in an abandoned railroad car in Sonora. Muhammad Ali was born to a sign painter in Louisville, Ky. Floyd Mayweather bounced between crack houses and boxing gyms in Grand Rapids, Mich. I’m in Juanacatlán because the youngest son of Santos Álvarez, Santos Saúl Álvarez Barragan, also known as El Canelo—the biggest fighter Mexico has seen since Chavez, and the latest in the long line of boxers to challenge the impenetrable Mayweather—grew up here.

Eric Nusbaum goes back to the roots of Mexican boxing’s newest superstar, Saul “Canelo” Alvarez. A great read.

4. Pre Italia’90, the worlds of music and England’s national football team had not so much clashed as gently bumped into each other to the sound of men in blazers struggling to sing a chorus. While a song to mark an international tournament was a good idea in principal, we were six years away from a goose-bumped Wembley singing “it’s coming home” and perhaps more pertinently, we were only two years on from a car crash of Stock, Aitken and Waterman’s making by the name of ‘All the Way’.

The brilliant In Bed With Maradona brings us this piece, by David Hartrick, on ‘World in Motion.’

5. Maybe it was because his 11-year-old son Peter played on the team that Rudy Mastrocinque took his role as coach of the King’s Park Celtic Under-12s so seriously. The morning of September 11, 2001, he forced himself out of bed half an hour earlier than usual so he could leave work that evening in time for a goalkeeping clinic he had organised for his charges. Vice-president for property claims at Marsh and McLennan Securities on the 100th floor of the World Trade Centre’s North Tower, he was at his desk by 8:30 a.m., 15 minutes before Flight 11 from Boston sliced through the building. Rudy was 43.

In the week of the 9/11 commemorations this piece, written by Dave Hannigan for the Sunday Tribune 12 years ago, deserves another read.

6. Ask an economist how to solve a problem, and he’ll tell you incentives are the answer. He wouldn’t be wrong. Punishment and reward are fantastic tools for  exploiting self-interest in the service of the common good. In football, they’re made up of red cards and penalties, trophies and relegation, and always in the interest of preserving the ‘beautiful game’. But incentives do not always respond the way we expect them to.

This gets a bit technical in places but it’s still good — Cafe Futebol’s Nicholas Cholst on why ‘three points for a win’ is damaging football.

Ever heard the story about the priest who put a lifelong curse on the Mayo football team in 1951?