1) Ryan Anderson tries to move on after girlfriend’s suicide
If you only read one of these articles, pick this one. Chris Ballard of Sports Illustrated has told the story of how basketball player Ryan Anderson coped with his girlfriend’s suicide. It’s not really about sport at all. It’s about all the things that matter – life, death, love, family, happiness and truth – and is more than worth your precious time.
2) Team sells its best players, and doesn’t pay for it
The Southampton executive director Les Reed tells a great story about the fickleness of football supporters in this New York Times piece about the club’s dramatic turnaround in the last five years. It’s summer 2014, just a few short months ago, and fans are furious about the club’s decision to replace all of their best players in the transfer window. “They were yelling at me, screaming at me: ‘Les, you better fix this, you better keep this together.’ And I remember sitting there, just being absolutely battered, and thinking, ‘We will.’” With Southampton now riding high in the Premier League, the supporters have changed their tune: “Now the fans are walking by waving at me and cheering. I always laugh. They say, ‘Great stuff, Les. I was with you all along.’” Typical.
3) The sportcaster’s dictionary
A lot of these definitions feel painfully familiar:
ensuing (adj.) — “Next” should never describe a kickoff when “ensuing” is available.
in-depth (adj.) — A warning that a TV segment will last more than 30 seconds.
“Pandemonium!” (exp.) — Loud cheering. Like a kickoff, it may ensue.
“You hate to see that … ” (exp.) — What an announcer says after a gruesome injury, as a cue to his producer to let us see it again.
4) A heartbreaking interview with San Marino’s goalkeeper
Aldo Simoncini failed to make it as a professional footballer but still managed to play in front of 55,990 people at Wembley this autumn. The young goalkeeper, who sees in his days as a computer science student, is the proud holder of 41 international caps for San Marino. He has been playing for his country for eight years now but he is yet to win or draw a match.
This relentless run of defeats has brought out his stoic side: “A professional player wouldn’t be able to tolerate a series of similar defeats. He would surely collapse. I live it all like it’s a dream, and I put all my effort into it: for me it’s a privilege, and all the matches I’ve played have been a great life experience for me.”
Life as an interloping underdog gives Simoncini the chance to share space with the world’s best footballers. Some of them are more respectful than others. As he tells Vittorio Cerdelli and Irina Dmyterko in this interview with Vice, Zlatan Ibrahimovic stood out as an impressive opponent: “One of my team-mates asked him to avoid pounding us because we were playing poorly. He said: ‘Don’t you dare see it that way, just focus on giving it your best shot.’ We lost 5-0, but at the end of the match Zlatan came over to congratulate me.”
5) Paris stories
Welcome to the future of football highlights.
6) The thrill is gone; so is Landon Donovan
Any article that references a BB King song in its headline is welcome here. But even without the link to the Blues Boy, this piece would walk into this week’s roundup. Landon Donovan is so much more interesting than most other footballers. He takes sabbaticals. He speaks his mind. He stands up for himself. He talks openly about going for therapy. He is smart enough to realise that the world of professional football is a money-making machine and that his star will burn brightly and fade just as quickly when he is no longer valuable to the people who employ him. He knows there is life beyond the narrow world of sport. And now he is off to explore it.
7) The NFL player who gave up $12.5m to become a farmer
“My agent told me: ‘You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.’ I looked right back at him and I said: ‘No I am not.’” Good man.
8) Are traditional football stadium names a thing of the past?
Rotherham United’s stadium will soon be called the AESSEAL New York Stadium. AESSEAL are “specialists in the design and manufacture of mechanical seals and support systems”, just in case that advertising was too subtle for you. Beyond the question of why a seal manufacturer would want to advertise to football fans, it’s worth pausing to work out if selling naming rights is good for the game as a whole.
Rotherham are far from the first club to swap a slice of their history for a sponsor’s money. In the Premier League we have the Emirates, Etihad, King Power, KC and Britannia stadiums. Where will it end and, if the money finds its way from the stadium’s name on to the pitch in the form of new players, do fans still care about a ground’s name? Nathan Spafford poses the question on Football Rants.
9) Hurling around the world
Who knew that Brian O’Driscoll was so nifty with a hurley.
10) Zlatan’s best 11
Zlatan Ibrahimovic has picked a fantasy team from his various team-mates through the years. The great man has turned out for five clubs that have won the European Cup, so the quality of the players involved is hardly surprising – but he has even found room to play God up front.
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