1.What was on the menu the day before an All-Ireland final? A bowl of Coco Pops and a glass of orange juice. Some mornings if he wakens me earlier I might make some bacon or boil eggs but the majority of the time now it is toast and banana or a bowl of cereal. Probably not ideal, but I eat a lot throughout the day.
I leave for school at around 8:10 each morning with the 15-minute journey having me in school on time before the children start arriving at 8:30.
On my way to school, I could feel the nerves in my stomach bubbling — ‘here we go’ I thought to myself.
The school is decorated with bunting, flags, banners from the school and the club as well as posters drawn by the children stuck around all the classroom windows (except for mine).
As I walked through the front door, I was met by our principal Mrs McAlinden, who greets everyone at the door every morning, and also a child from my class worrying after forgetting her homework. ‘Don’t worry,’ says the principal, ‘there will be no homework marked or tests today in Mr Morgan’s class’.
2.We’re sitting around talking about the next day’s match, and they’re telling stories about the old neighborhoods, all factory and mill workers, all Irish, all Catholic.
A few pints in and they start cracking on each other. I love hearing Duff’s stories about the time he did in Strangeways jail, or his former career as a shoplifter. Duff’s work is all set in “the Heartlands,” as he calls it, that area of northern industrial Manchester where he was born and raised. Once he visited Tupelo, Mississippi, and when he saw the childhood poverty of Elvis Presley, he immediately understood him as a brother, a comrade. The Super League didn’t surprise him one bit.
“It’s capitalism, isn’t it?” Duff says. “Capitalism doesn’t care. It’s a Ponzi scheme that will one day fail. I’ll be dead when it fails, but it will fail. My kids are angry and my grandkids will grow up angry. So sooner or later the Ponzi scheme fails but enough people have to get angry. And those United fans got angry. When they got angry they showed what people can do. They can storm the Winter Palace. They can storm the Bastille.”
3.On the eve of the opening ceremony in Barcelona the Olympic Council of Ireland announced that for the first time ever a woman would carry the flag. Michelle Smith was thrilled. “It is an absolutely tremendous honour,” she said. “I hope to do my family and my country justice, to lead the Irish team into the Olympic Stadium will be a memory to treasure forever.”
There was just one snag: her best event, the 400m individual medley, was the following morning. In Seoul she had opted to rest and watched the parade on TV. Something had changed. “I wouldn’t have done it,” O’Toole says, ‘but I think in her own mind — and I’m surmising here — she had decided, ‘This is it. I’m not going to be back at another Olympics again.’”
It was also the last hurrah for O’Toole. He had spent his life dreaming about Olympic glory and put a promising career in medicine on hold, but could not repeat the heroics of Bonn. “I’m always amused when I hear words like ‘death’ and ‘devastating’ used in sport,” he says, “but yeah, it was devastating. I found it very, very difficult to deal with.”
Smith was handling it better. She had met a guy in the Olympic village and invited O’Toole to join them one evening at a bar on the Ramblas. “I don’t take an instant dislike to people but I found Erik to be instantly dislikeable,” he says. “I got the impression he was looking down his nose at me and was tut-tutting anything I said.
4. The first thing you must understand about these fans is that transfers are the barometer by which they believe all footballing achievement must be gauged. Liverpool had a relatively quiet summer on the transfer front this year, but they still solved the most obvious hole in their squad by signing centre back Ibrahima Konate. Of course, that was never going to cut it for fans who deem “winning” the window as the most telling metric on whether or not a club is in good health. It’s fair to say that Liverpool Twitter in the closing days of window was in a state of anarchy.
Liverpool had an amazing run at the end of last season to secure Champions League football, including Alisson’s titanic last minute winner against West Brom. Yet plenty of times I’ve seen a variation of the statement, “What was the point in qualifying for the Champions League if we’re not signing anyone?” as if those wins (and iconic moments) didn’t matter, and the sole reason we would participate in the tournament is to make money to facilitate bigger, better, and more expensive transfers. I’m not exaggerating when I say they made the recent military coup in Guinea about transfers.
5.Essentially the argument boils down to whether you value fairness or inclusivity more. Either way, critics on both sides believe World Athletics’ current policy is not fit for purpose.
Then there is the Tucker paradox, which was brought up by Semenya’s lawyer at Cas. “The foundational premise of World Athletics’ policy is that testosterone gives males an advantage over females,” Prof Ross Tucker, who testified on behalf of Athletics South Africa, explained to me. “Now that’s inarguably true in the shot put, which lasts less than a second, as it is in a marathon, which lasts thousands of seconds. Yet its policy only covers between 400m and a mile. That doesn’t make sense. There’s a disconnect between World Athletics’ principle and its policy.”
He is right. Much of it goes back to the case of the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand in 2016, after which Cas ruled it would be discriminatory for World Athletics to require all athletes with a DSD to take medication, unless it provided more evidence. Because of the over-representation of athletes with a DSD in the 400m and 800m, World Athletics decided to just focus on those events and the 1500m and mile. But this was based on disputed research, which has since been found to have been “misleading”.
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In search of Michelle Smith, the battle for the soul of Man United, and the week's best sportswriting
1. What was on the menu the day before an All-Ireland final? A bowl of Coco Pops and a glass of orange juice. Some mornings if he wakens me earlier I might make some bacon or boil eggs but the majority of the time now it is toast and banana or a bowl of cereal. Probably not ideal, but I eat a lot throughout the day.
I leave for school at around 8:10 each morning with the 15-minute journey having me in school on time before the children start arriving at 8:30.
On my way to school, I could feel the nerves in my stomach bubbling — ‘here we go’ I thought to myself.
The school is decorated with bunting, flags, banners from the school and the club as well as posters drawn by the children stuck around all the classroom windows (except for mine).
As I walked through the front door, I was met by our principal Mrs McAlinden, who greets everyone at the door every morning, and also a child from my class worrying after forgetting her homework. ‘Don’t worry,’ says the principal, ‘there will be no homework marked or tests today in Mr Morgan’s class’.
In the Irish Examiner, Tyrone goalkeeper Niall Morgan gives an exclusive diary insight into the making of All-Ireland champions.
2. We’re sitting around talking about the next day’s match, and they’re telling stories about the old neighborhoods, all factory and mill workers, all Irish, all Catholic.
A few pints in and they start cracking on each other. I love hearing Duff’s stories about the time he did in Strangeways jail, or his former career as a shoplifter. Duff’s work is all set in “the Heartlands,” as he calls it, that area of northern industrial Manchester where he was born and raised. Once he visited Tupelo, Mississippi, and when he saw the childhood poverty of Elvis Presley, he immediately understood him as a brother, a comrade. The Super League didn’t surprise him one bit.
“It’s capitalism, isn’t it?” Duff says. “Capitalism doesn’t care. It’s a Ponzi scheme that will one day fail. I’ll be dead when it fails, but it will fail. My kids are angry and my grandkids will grow up angry. So sooner or later the Ponzi scheme fails but enough people have to get angry. And those United fans got angry. When they got angry they showed what people can do. They can storm the Winter Palace. They can storm the Bastille.”
Wright Thompson on Super League rage, Ronaldo mania and the fight for the soul of Manchester United.
3. On the eve of the opening ceremony in Barcelona the Olympic Council of Ireland announced that for the first time ever a woman would carry the flag. Michelle Smith was thrilled. “It is an absolutely tremendous honour,” she said. “I hope to do my family and my country justice, to lead the Irish team into the Olympic Stadium will be a memory to treasure forever.”
There was just one snag: her best event, the 400m individual medley, was the following morning. In Seoul she had opted to rest and watched the parade on TV. Something had changed. “I wouldn’t have done it,” O’Toole says, ‘but I think in her own mind — and I’m surmising here — she had decided, ‘This is it. I’m not going to be back at another Olympics again.’”
It was also the last hurrah for O’Toole. He had spent his life dreaming about Olympic glory and put a promising career in medicine on hold, but could not repeat the heroics of Bonn. “I’m always amused when I hear words like ‘death’ and ‘devastating’ used in sport,” he says, “but yeah, it was devastating. I found it very, very difficult to deal with.”
Smith was handling it better. She had met a guy in the Olympic village and invited O’Toole to join them one evening at a bar on the Ramblas. “I don’t take an instant dislike to people but I found Erik to be instantly dislikeable,” he says. “I got the impression he was looking down his nose at me and was tut-tutting anything I said.
Part One of Paul Kimmage’s ‘In search of Michelle Smith’ in the Irish Independent.
4. The first thing you must understand about these fans is that transfers are the barometer by which they believe all footballing achievement must be gauged. Liverpool had a relatively quiet summer on the transfer front this year, but they still solved the most obvious hole in their squad by signing centre back Ibrahima Konate. Of course, that was never going to cut it for fans who deem “winning” the window as the most telling metric on whether or not a club is in good health. It’s fair to say that Liverpool Twitter in the closing days of window was in a state of anarchy.
Liverpool had an amazing run at the end of last season to secure Champions League football, including Alisson’s titanic last minute winner against West Brom. Yet plenty of times I’ve seen a variation of the statement, “What was the point in qualifying for the Champions League if we’re not signing anyone?” as if those wins (and iconic moments) didn’t matter, and the sole reason we would participate in the tournament is to make money to facilitate bigger, better, and more expensive transfers. I’m not exaggerating when I say they made the recent military coup in Guinea about transfers.
Dean van Nguyen on the Cold World of the ‘Extremely Online’ Liverpool Fan.
5. Essentially the argument boils down to whether you value fairness or inclusivity more. Either way, critics on both sides believe World Athletics’ current policy is not fit for purpose.
Then there is the Tucker paradox, which was brought up by Semenya’s lawyer at Cas. “The foundational premise of World Athletics’ policy is that testosterone gives males an advantage over females,” Prof Ross Tucker, who testified on behalf of Athletics South Africa, explained to me. “Now that’s inarguably true in the shot put, which lasts less than a second, as it is in a marathon, which lasts thousands of seconds. Yet its policy only covers between 400m and a mile. That doesn’t make sense. There’s a disconnect between World Athletics’ principle and its policy.”
He is right. Much of it goes back to the case of the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand in 2016, after which Cas ruled it would be discriminatory for World Athletics to require all athletes with a DSD to take medication, unless it provided more evidence. Because of the over-representation of athletes with a DSD in the 400m and 800m, World Athletics decided to just focus on those events and the 1500m and mile. But this was based on disputed research, which has since been found to have been “misleading”.
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