1. As Northampton’s head of recruitment and retention, Paul Shields spends a lot of his day shifting through a snowstorm of spreadsheets and video footage. Every so often inside the blizzard, he will identify a gold nugget.

Shields remembers when he first laid eyes on Samu Manoa, then an electrician and part-time rugby player. He immediately told the then forwards coach Dorian West to drop whatever he was doing to come see this giant Polynesian back row too. When Manoa left Northampton a couple of years later, he signed a contract for Toulon that made him the best paid player in the world.

Those type of hidden gems are rare because there are so few hiding places in professional rugby but as Shields says “they do exist, it’s our job to find them”. Nearly every Premiership club will have its own head of recruitment who are scouring the same markets. And they are sophisticated operations as Shields patiently explains to Telegraph Sport, especially with the squeeze of the reducing salary cap this season. “It is like a gyroscope that is always moving in different directions,” Shields said.”‘The parameters are constantly changing.”

Daniel Schofield of The Telegraph meets former Irish player Paul Shields, now head of recruitment at Northampton. (€)

2. Why would the Times spend half a billion dollars to get into sportswriting? As Times executive Meredith Kopit Levien said in today’s announcement, the Times wants to grow from more than 8 million subscribers to more than 10 million—and it has to do so (mostly) without the help of Donald Trump. For maybe the first time since former executive editor Howell Raines tried to fatten the Times’ numbers by covering more college football games, management sees sports as a growth area.

But the Times has already profited from the bleed-out of local papers in a way The Athletic’s founders could only dream of. “The Times now has more subscribers in Dallas than the Dallas Morning News does,” a recent New Yorker story noted. How many more subscribers can a very good pack of Dallas sportswriters bring in? The purchase has the whiff of legacy media hugging a digital outfit, like Condé Nast buying Pitchfork seven years ago.

The Times reports that Mather and Hansmann will stay on; a Times executive, David Perpich, will be The Athletic’s publisher. The second question is: Who’s going to figure out how to make a horde of beat writers, investigative reporters, and draft experts operate inside an institution like the Times? The site’s founders? Sam Dolnick, who did a tour as deputy sports editor, and now has a spot on the masthead? Just about every writer at The Athletic I spoke to worried the site would lay off writers after a sale.

Then again, I’ve been listening to journalists predict that The Athletic would explode like a supernova for years. Mather and Hansmann deserve credit for piloting it into a safe harbor. Now, The Athletic’s future depends on how or if it can enhance the health of the 170-year-old Times. Welcome to the newspaper business.

Following it $550 million purchase by the New York Times, The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis explains how The Athletic set out to destroy newspapers and then became one. 

3. “A global shift will occur when each individual finds the courage to awaken from the mass amnesia.” Yes, I read the personal manifesto of Novak Djokovic’s wellness guru so you don’t have to.

It is no secret that the world’s No 1 celebrity Covid outlaw, currently awaiting his fate in an agreeably everyday Melbourne hotel, is a long-term student of somebody called Chervin Jafarieh, described, on his own website, as “one of the most respected and influential health experts in the world”. Jafarieh is a familiar type, the magnetic personality, the handsome and piercing spirit guide who accepts all major credit cards and looks like he might smell of musk and whale-song and concentrated human-power while he stands slightly too close to you in the lift.

The manifesto is lush and persuasive and, frankly, bang on about lots of stuff. Novak’s guy is worried about pollution and climate change, also “militarism, urbanization, carbon combustion, mining of metals and toxic materials, manufacturing of chemicals and biological poisons”. Mainly he’s obsessed with intake and the body, and this seems to be the thing about Djokovic’s vaccine hesitancy, at least in public. Djokovic has staged his own super-spreader event, has provided an anti-science role model, but he has also bought ventilators for hospitals, set up a Covid fund and done generous, charitable, believer-type things.

This is not alien lizard stuff. It’s not the great human cull or the fake-a-demic. Instead the resistance seems to come from somewhere else, from sunlit pagodas where magnetic people in crisp linen robes talk about their energy, their aura, their yacht, from a place of mind power and blood purity, of bamboo silica supplements and chocolate-flavoured Organic Longevity Mushrooms.

The Guardian’s Barney Ronay gives his view of the man at the centre of the world’s ire – Novak Djokovic. 

4. It is astonishing that this saga was ever allowed to reach such high farce. After all, Australian immigration officials had approved his visa at the point he began his journey in Dubai. Why was it left until the final checks at Melbourne Airport, involving everybody from Mr Morrison to the president of Serbia, for this to descend into an almighty diplomatic ruckus that lasted all night?

Very few in tennis or beyond are much inclined to see Djokovic as a victim. The most prevalent view is that he only has himself to blame, that he could have saved himself the trouble by being vaccinated, just like most of his peers.

It is still possible, though, to feel a touch uncomfortable at how a nine-time Australian Open champion, a figure who in 2020 donated money to help relief efforts from the country’s devastating bushfires, is being held up to such merciless ridicule.

That unease is magnified by the posturing of Mr Morrison and his ministers, which suggests Djokovic is less the architect of his downfall than a pawn in a cynical political game.

And for the Telegraph, Oliver Brown turns his attention to the role of Australian politicians in heightening  the Djokovic saga. 

5. Ian Wright sits quietly, head bowed, listening to the stories of the fallen. A 17-year-old student from Haringey, who had made an anti-knife video, dying of stab wounds. A 16-year-old murdered while sitting on a park bench in Tottenham, chatting to friends in the afternoon. An 18-year-old student, a refugee from Afghanistan, stabbed in Twickenham. A 15-year-old killed walking to school in Hayes.

The Arsenal legend doesn’t say anything as he hears about some of the incidents claiming the lives of 30 teenagers in London in 2021, the worst toll on record. Some had perished close to the Emirates Stadium. A 19-year-old, who dreamt of being a professional footballer, shot near Elthorne Park. A 15-year-old stabbed near Archway.

All over the capital, parents mourn slain sons, and communities hold vigils for the lost ones. A 15-year-old from Newham shot in his school uniform. A 17-year-old with autism dying in a machete and knife attack in Sydenham. An 18-year-old law student knifed protecting his mother from a robber in Walthamstow. A 14-year-old dying from multiple stab wounds in Croydon.

On it goes. “You could continue and continue reeling off names,” Wright responds eventually, taking in the immensity of events in his city. “If you only mentioned one of those who died from knife crime or gun crime it’s too many. We’re losing so many lives. My reaction is one of pure sadness.

As Arsenal get set to wear a special kit to draw attention to knife violence in London, Henry Winter of the Times discusses the issue with Ian Wright. (€)