IN NO PARTICULAR order every Sunday, we flick back through the week’s newspapers, websites, blogs and magazines to bring you the best sports writing.

1. “‘The big monster called relegation is there, ready to bite us on the arse,’ Steve Coppell once oddly observed while manager of Crystal Palace. Certainly, relegation can loom ominously like a creature rising from the dark and misty marshes, but whoever heard of a monster that specialised in taking chunks out of its victims’ rears? Relegation seems to me far more like the creeping onset of a serious illness.”

How to cope with your side’s demise at this time of the year, from When Saturday Comes.

2. “Yesterday Dromina, a little village in north Cork, had its day in the sun — or scouring rain, to be more precise — as the hurlers of Cork and Laois rolled in for a challenge to mark the opening of new GAA facilities. Time enough for them. Dromina have standards: they go all the way back to the start of the Association.  There were two men from the village in Hayes’ Hotel the day the GAA was formed, for instance, which is more than some counties can claim.”

The Irish Examiner’s Michael Moynihan cuts the ribbon on one village’s GAA history.

3. “But I think I am on pretty safe ground that Jackson, like every other basketball coach, did not make a single shot, or a single pass, or force a single turnover.

Getting up and calling for a timeout is not breathtaking strategy, although it required great exertion on Jackson’s part because he is 6-8. Nor is diagramming a down-to-the-wire play where most players, unless it’s the playoffs, dutifully huddle and fake listening when the far greater concern is which concubine in the stands to entertain tonight.”

Buzz Bissinger says Phil Jackson is over-rated as a coach. That’s a big shout.

4. “The first thing to catch your eye as you enter Gary Keegan’s office at the Irish Institute of Sport is the large photograph on the wall above his desk of the late Darren Sutherland kissing his Olympic bronze medal. His big smiley head, holding the medal up to his puckered lips in glorious technicolour. Keegan coached him as a boy, watched him raise a tricolour in the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing as a man and walked behind his hearse 20 months ago feeling like they were about to bury a son.

As he takes his seat behind the desk at 7.45 each morning, Sutherland’s face is the last thing he sees before he turns to switch on his computer. Doesn’t feel like it’s accidental.

Keegan doesn’t really do accidental.”

Malachy Clerkin meets high performance guru Gary Keegan in the latest of his excellent Day in the Life series for the Irish Times.

5. “You might think Kirstie Bowden is a little crazy when you read her story, but I don’t. You might think what she did was insignificant. Or excessive. Or strange. But if you’ve ever felt a visceral loyalty to a favourite player, you won’t.

Me? I think her act of devotion this season is one of the most beautiful things a football fan has ever done. Kirstie is 24. She’s a super-smart university student studying for a PhD in geography. She’s also a dedicated Exeter City fan.”

Oliver Holt in the Mirror on his favourite fan banner from around England’s football grounds this year.

6. “It was extraordinary to watch but then again Joost was an extraordinary player, the best and most indomitable Springbok I have ever reported on and there have been plenty to choose from. Around the world, as with Gareth or Barry, Gerald or JPR  he doesn’t need a surname. Joost suffices wherever he goes. This is the man who took Jonah Lomu head on early in that 1995 World Cup finals and convinced Bok supporters and others that a miracle win might happen.

He could be difficult and moody, or so I have always been told although the three or four times I have ever been called upon to interview him he was absolutely brilliant and very professional.”

One of my favourite rugby players Joost van der Westhuize will take on motor nueron disease the same way he played the game, writes Brendan Gallagher in the Telegraph.

7. “I know that people are cynical about this, and they have every right to be cynical about it. For so long, just about everyone around baseball — and I’m talking players, management types, owners, writers, broadcasters — were blind to the steroid story in baseball. There were a few people who saw it pretty clearly early on — this week’s Poscast guest, Bob Costas, was banging the drum quite a while back — but most of us didn’t. There was no testing. There was no outrage. The home runs were fun to watch, at least for a while.”

Why I think steroid are out of baseball – by Joe Posnanski in Sports Illustrated. Come on, that’s worth a read.

8. “What is it about Neil Lennon that incites people to acts that effectively amount to terrorism?

Even in casual conversation, one hears extraordinarily polarised opinions about him, like this, yesterday, from one of Lennon’s Northern Irish compatriots: “Sure, he’s a cheeky b*****d — the kind of kid you’d slap in the playground.”

Lennon, though, is not the target of metaphorical smacks, but of real and vicious assaults in the street, packets of live bullets (another bullet arrived at Celtic Park yesterday, addressed to the manager) and, most recently, a nail bomb, which would have found its way to him via the mail had it not been for the vigilance of others along its route.“

Roddy Forsyth, in the Irish Independent, attempts to get to the bottom of the ire the Celtic manager seems to prompt in Scotland.