1. Of course, Qatar is staging the World Cup. Historians charting the events of our anxiety-ridden age will be able to use these twin World Cups, Russia-Qatar, as a neat practical example of the way oil and gas have driven power, conflict and wealth around the world; the way sport has been not only a metaphor for this, but an active and willing part of the process.

Oil built the past two World Cups. Oil just won the Champions League. Oil has a lease on the Premier League title. They should probably just go ahead and fill the World Cup ball with natural gas, stick the winning team up on podium with an oversized camping cylinder they can light up like a Bunsen burner.

Barney Ronay writes of Qatar’s World Cup for The Guardian. 

2. Footballers are symbols, an illustration of changing social and economic dynamics, of immigration and new communities that have taken root. I was born in 1992, during a time when Lewisham and south London had been imposing their will on British football. The early 90s, a time when Arsenal’s David Rocastle had come out of the Honor Oak estate in Brockley, and Wright had come with him. The Wallace brothers: Danny, Rod and Ray out of Deptford in the north of the borough, who went on to play for Southampton together, Rod winning the old first division with Leeds in the year before it became the Premier League. Chris Powell, Kevin Campbell, Michael Thomas, Paul Davis. Their collective presence was an indicator of how things were in south London, how things are, how they will be.

How a community comes to congregate in a road, a borough, a city often remains unwritten. These stories lie in family folklore, in oral histories that never reach official records. And so, while there is no definitive reason as to why Black communities wandered south into Lewisham, in the Characterisation Study published by Lewisham council in 2019, the suggestion is that Black immigrants arrived in the borough from the Caribbean throughout the 60s, searching for work in hospitals and on the railways.

Another piece in The Guardian, this by Aniefiok Ekpoudom on the football talent factory that is South London. 

3. In the early morning hours before Ruggs drove home drunk, Tintor was at a park with Max and a friend. She left to head home around 3:35, right around the time that Ruggs—whose blood was later measured at twice the legal alcohol limit—pressed hard on the accelerator. According to police, Ruggs’s Corvette was soaring down the middle of a three-lane street when it swerved into the far right lane. According to a statement from Kilgo-Washington, Ruggs looked up, saw the rear of Tintor’s slow-moving SUV and screamed, “What is this guy doing?!”

It was too late. Ruggs slammed on the brakes, but the front of his car collided with Tintor’s at 127 mph, the impact turning the Corvette into a crumpled tin can as it spun around and around for some 500 feet before coming to a rest near a stone wall. The Raiders’ receiver, not wearing a safety belt, was halfway ejected, his body left dangling from the vehicle.

In Sports Illustrated, Jeff Pearlman tells the story of the tragedy wrought by an NFL’s player’s drink-driving. 

4. Next month he’ll officially enter the ranks of the middle aged, turning 45. He still keeps in better nick than you or me but no longer subjects himself to the training regimen that produced that ripped body famously captured in that Tribune pic with him and the body ball in the basement of Ger Hartmann’s old clinic. (“For a fella who used to pride myself on self-training, Jesus, I’m poor that way now. I still watch what I eat and if I have a half-hour spare I might bang out a workout in the backyard or front room but I’d say it’s three years since I went out for a proper run or headed to a gym. When I’m packing the gear bag now it’s to train teams.”) And conversations like with some of the customers down in Innishannon that can really make him feel his age.

“Sometimes when I’m talking to another adult I forget that they can still be a good bit younger than me! Like, you could be talking about some music that you liked back in the day and they won’t even know who or what you’re talking about. Last year when the Euros were on I was in Quirkey’s Kitchen chatting to a couple of fellas in their late twenties before the Germany-England game and I said, ‘God, if it goes to penalties, the Germans will win anyway. They always win penalties.’ And they said, ‘Why do you say that?’ And I said, ‘Sure look at the record. The ’82 World Cup against France. 1990 against England. England again at Euro 96….’ I was rolling off names like Karl-Heinz Rummenigge and Lothar bloody Matthaus and they were looking at me as if I was stupid, like someone from Jupiter. I asked them, ‘What year were you born?’ ‘1992.’ Sure that explained it.”

Kieran Shannon of the Irish Examiner meets Seán Óg Ó hAilpín.

5. Professional cycling is full of these human orbits that pass exceptionally close to each other a couple times per year. They make for intense relationships, built on an understanding that you pick up where you left off, that the last conversation from the last meal flows seamlessly into the first meal at the next race, even months later. That orbit is broken now, and the last meal will not have a next. That is what I feel most today, I think.

Writing for Cycling Tips, Caley Fritz remembers the late Richard Moore.