With Australia’s World Test Championship hopes resting on Joe Root’s men drawing a series they trail 2-1, it’s a difficult time for fans who would happily back North Korea against England“It feels bloody terrible,” he said, head bowed over his pint. “Suddenly everything gets turned upside down. I don’t know how to feel about it.” Picture a couple of men huddled over a table in the corner of a pub – there have been millions of variations of a conversation like this. In the beer garden of the Great Northern hotel in Melbourne last week, though, I was offering solace to a friend about having to support England in a cricket match.The World Test Championship final in June will feature...
Her second Australian Open – and fourth major – will not be the last shiny trophy engraved with Naomi Osaka’s nameAs a coral sun set behind the Melbourne skyline, Naomi Osaka walked to her mark, danced lightly on the balls of her feet, rapped her left thigh with her left fist two times, and crouched, ready to receive Jennifer Brady’s serve. She did this over and over: jig, tap, dip; jig, tap, dip. It was a meditation that secured a second Australian Open title and a fourth grand slam for the dominant force in women’s tennis.Both finalists powered through the draw behind dominant first serves, but an unexpectedly cool and blustery evening proved disruptive. The wind was not strong, but...
Australian Rules Football is proposing a trust for players suffering brain trauma and rugby could learn from this A fortnight or so ago I had an email conversation with a man who used to work as a development officer for the Rugby Football Union. We were talking about the opening round of the Six Nations, about concussion, chronic traumatic encephalopathy and what he called the “cognitive dissonance” involved in enjoying the physicality of the game while also recognising the damage it can do to the players. And then we got around to an interview I’d just done with Peter Robinson, whose boy, Ben, died of second impact syndrome while he was playing a school game in Northern Ireland in 2011....
The world No 1 has never operated alone and, as she marches towards the Australian Open final, continues to thrive with her support crewWhen Ash Barty talks in first-person pronouns, she does so in plurals. “We” is generally the most utilised option in her lexicon.“I think if you would have told me a few months ago this is the start to the year we’d have, we’d take it with a massive smile on our face,” the world No 1 said after her fourth-round Australian Open win. “We come out, have fun.” Related: Rafael Nadal into Australian Open quarter-finals with win over Fognini Related: Australian Open 2021: Barty wins, Nadal through, Berrettini withdraws – as it happened Continue reading...
The 2013-14 series left genuine scars in the England team, but there is still a chapter to play out against AustraliaIt seemed too easy at the time. Three weeks ago, Australia’s cricketers lost a Test for the first time in 33 years at the Gabba – deepest, dankest dungeon of the Australian sporting soul, and a kind of mental disintegration portal for meeker, less thrillingly chosen races. So yeah, they got beaten there by India’s B team. But at the end Justin Langer was out in the celebrations looking humble and magnanimous and weirdly invulnerable – all the while wearing that familiar alpha dog, kungfu, zen master smile, the look of a man who, to quote John Updike, has just...