The Rugby World Cup final and World Series went against the form book and most academics regard ‘the M word’ as a trick of the mind“Never underestimate the value of momentum.” That’s what Sir Clive Woodward advised after England’s rugby players lacerated Australia a fortnight ago. And how wise those words seemed when New Zealand were also scattered and flayed, and it seemed England’s name was all but engraved on the Webb Ellis Cup. And then, without warning, the team’s hot hand turned Arctic and the World Cup was ripped from their grasp by South Africa.“Momentum is so important in football.” That’s what Dimitar Berbatov told us on Friday, before predicting Manchester United would win their fourth match on the...
Sticking to the principle of freedom of speech can be uncomfortable when commercial gain in China is at stakeIf you have problems with the term “late-stage capitalism”, I hope you can get behind the alternative “ironicidal capitalism”. This is the bit where democracies are so evolved and self-assured they sell their freedom of speech to totalitarian regimes. I know! But kind of logical, when you think about it. There was basically nothing left to flog.For those who’ve missed the saga of the NBA’s travails in China, have no fear. It isn’t going away any time soon, with last weekend’s development being groups of fans wearing masks and “Stand With Hong Kong” T-shirts standing in protest at the Brooklyn Nets pre-season...
The Warriors still want to be the newcomers, the radicals shaking up the sport. But they’re the establishment nowAfter Detroit’s Chauncey Billups-inspired demolition of the Los Angeles Lakers in the 2004 finals, perhaps the NBA’s greatest post-season upset of the early 2000s came in the first round of the 2007 Western Conference playoffs. The Dallas Mavericks, owned by billionaire Mark Cuban and led by MVP-in-waiting Dirk Nowitzki, had come off a record-breaking regular season in which they’d won 67 games and lost just 15. The Golden State Warriors had not made the playoffs since 1994; their squad included a number of oddballs and castoffs from other teams such as small forward Stephen Jackson, who was traded by the Indiana Pacers...
The bad chemistry and bad fortune undoing the Lakers have wrought the unthinkable: an NBA playoffs without LeBronIt’s looking like LeBron James in the NBA playoffs isn’t the forgone conclusion we’ve come to presume.On Monday, the Los Angeles Lakers lost to the Clippers, 113-105, slumping to a ho-hum 30-34 record, six games adrift of the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference with 18 games left in the regular season. Not only will James almost certainly fail to extend his preposterous streak of eight consecutive NBA finals appearances, it’s looking more and more likely that he’ll miss the playoffs altogether for the first time since the 2004-05 season, when he was a 20-year-old in his second year. The...
Administrators are arriving at a better understanding of the extent of anxiety and depression among top sportspeople and a finger is pointing at social mediaOn Friday night the NBA’s commissioner, Adam Silver, made a statement that was both shocking and profound: many of the league’s players, who have an average salary of $7m a year, were “truly unhappy”. He told the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference: “The outside world sees the fame, the money, all the trappings that go with it, and they say: ‘How is it possible they even can be complaining?’ But a lot of these young men are genuinely unhappy.”As he warmed to the theme of his players’ mental health, Silver told his audience that the NBA...