The former Rabbitoh returned to haunt his old NRL club with a hand in four tries, one of his own and six goals from six attemptsWhen Adam Reynolds ran onto Olympic Stadium on Thursday night, South Sydney fans were flummoxed. The local boy who had grown up a spiral kick from Redfern Oval, won a premiership with Souths in 2014 and captained the Rabbitohs to the 2021 grand final, had come home in a once-unthinkable form: captain and talisman of the Brisbane Broncos.It was a year since Reynolds announced he was trading Redfern for Red Hill. After nine years bleeding red and green the club had deemed him fit for only a one year extension. Reynolds believed he had more...
Victory over the Crusaders has the potential to have a ripple effect beyond the borders of NSW to the world of rugby beyondThe date 30 April 2022 will live in renown, not just for the NSW Waratahs, but more broadly for Australian rugby and the Super Rugby Pacific competition as a whole. The Waratahs upset the Crusaders 24-21 at Leichhardt Oval on Saturday afternoon to confirm the resurgence of the men in sky blue under new coach Darren Coleman.There has been a marked improvement in the Waratahs’ play this season, but no one saw that stunning result coming. NSW were rank outsiders, but that was not apparent as they took on the most successful team in the history of Super...
There is mounting evidence that this rule is working and essential to the overall health of the gameOn Easter Monday, the general consensus seemed to be that football was stuffed. Halfway through the third quarter of the Hawthorn-Geelong clash, the gentleman in front of me announced to the entire bay that he was going home. Ripples of applause broke out, for he had been an insufferable twit all afternoon. Hell, if an absurd 50m penalty was the price we had to pay for ridding him from our lives, so be it.The Easter round had been a mix of the piddling, the bewildering and the infuriating. The crackdown on dissent meant the game was suddenly bogged down in the most pettifogging...
Make or Break’s behind-the-scenes look at the World Surf League engages fans and non-fans alike even if some hard questions remain ignoredThere is a moment early in the first episode of Make or Break, a new series from Apple TV+ about the World Surf League, when Tyler Wright neatly encapsulates the tension at the heart of professional surfing. “We come from a sport of, ‘aww we’re hippies’,” says the Australian surfer, a two-time WSL champion. “We’re not. We’re competitive little assholes.”Surfing has long grappled with this bipolar identity; a sport initially beloved by the counter-culture movement that grew popular, some would say too popular, on the back of booming commercial and competitive success. Make or Break, an entertaining seven-part series,...
With their ACL and ALM finals hopes hanging by a thread, Australian football’s most successful club finds itself in an unfamiliar positionCertain points in the history of the A-League Men can be seen as seminal moments that have forever altered the competition’s young landscape. Brisbane Roar turning to a manager whose most recent gig had resulted in relegation from the Victorian Premier League is one example. The bitter congress wars of the late 2010s and resulting independence of the leagues from Football Australia is another.The decision by Sydney FC in 2014 to appoint Graham Arnold as their manager is yet another. For all the notoriety gained from Alessandro Del Piero’s two-year stint at Moore Park, the double-winning campaign of 2009-10...