In 2019, Richmond and Scott Morrison claimed miracle wins. And with canny leaders like Trent Cotchin, we should beware these wounded Tigers Just before half-time of Saturday night’s game at the MCG, two very different footballers went toe-to-toe on the members wing: Trent Cotchin, who looks like an articled clerk but plays a blue collar game, and Bailey Smith, who looks as if he’s just stepped off a float at Royal Randwick.With Cotchin right on his hammer, Smith spilled a chest mark. The 32-year-old Tiger, who recently relinquished the Richmond captaincy, has always excelled at ground ball scrimmages. On this occasion, he was better balanced, a bit cannier and that little bit more ferocious than his 21-year-old rival. Cotchin got...
US hasn’t always been a happy hunting ground, but the sport’s growing popularity gives cause for confidenceFormula One returns to Australia this weekend after a two-year absence since the sport’s blase attitude toward the oncoming pandemic left it reeling when the meeting in Melbourne fell apart. Mismanagement and hubris had brought F1 low but, finally back at Albert Park, it could not be in ruder health.F1’s insistence on pushing on with holding the race was wildly over-ambitious, up to and including allowing fans to turn up at the gates, only not to be admitted as the event was called off with Covid cases among the teams. That weekend was a nadir for F1’s owners and the FIA. But the recovery...
The undefeated Blues have a new coach, a watchable brand of football, a captain in fine fettle and a pretty soft draw aheadDavid Foster Wallace once wrote that Michael Chang had the unhappiest face he had seen outside of a graduate creative writing program. A few years ago, I was on a city loop train when a group of Carlton fans alighted at Spencer St. Suddenly, I was confronted with an entire carriage of Michael Changs. I have never seen a more miserable-looking bunch. GWS were basically playing with 16 men and were 100 points up with a quarter to run. The Carlton fans had seen enough. Their team had broken them. They had lost faith, hope, interest and, in...
It is not simply a special group of players at the top right now, but a seemingly never-ending talent factoryIf you have watched more than a fleeting moment of the Women’s Cricket World Cup over the past month, you will be intimately acquainted with Gin Wigmore’s Girl Gang – the song that accompanies the entry of the teams on to the field each match and plays on a seemingly continuous loop the rest of the time. On the surface it is an upbeat, peppy tune. In the context of the Australian team, though, its lyrics take on a more ominous tone. Suddenly the lines “I got the strength to tear it apart” and “we’re taking over the world” do not...
England all-rounder reached a spectacular 148 which was all in vain against Alyssa Healy’s record-breaking 170 for AustraliaAs the Olympic hurdler Rai Benjamin discovered in Tokyo last year, when he finished second to Karsten Warholm in one of the greatest races of all time, you can smash a longstanding world record and still end up losing. Nat Sciver can now relate. Her one-woman assault on one of Australia women’s best ever bowling attacks was the heartbreaking equivalent of breasting the tape just after it’s been broken by the person in front of you.In the mathematical and therefore most important sense, England got nowhere near the opposition’s total of in this World Cup final. And yet it felt so much closer...