This week’s roundup also features spectacular bow and arrow work, the SCG, FA Cup and the Golden Horseshoe Crokinole tournament1) The BDO World Darts Championship starts this weekend. Here’s 25-year-old Terry Down throwing as slowly as possible in 1985, much to the disgust of Jocky Wilson; Paul Lim’s 1990 nine-darter, the first in the world championship; also that year but from the World Youth Championship, an interview with a 16-year-old Wayne Mardle; and a bonus: Mardle not knowing he’s on telly and choosing his language accordingly.2) The Sydney Test match is in full swing. Here are highlights of the 1995 classic, in which England wisely declared with Graeme Hick on 98 not out, then narrowly failed to record a win;...
The horrifying on-field mishandling of a Houston quarterback’s head injury highlighted the limitations of the NFL’s concussion protocol. What can be done?In a sport of hard hits, the NFL has taken more than its share this season. Off the field issues have drawn more attention than the play on the field – particularly the debate over kneeling and the national anthem—and football’s ever-present nemesis, concussions, remains one of the NFL’s biggest problems.Publicly condemned and legally liable for ignoring the long-term effects of brain injury, the NFL seems to have learned from its mistakes and has swiftly tried to respond, primarily through the implementation of a concussion protocol. The protocol, developed in 2009 and amended periodically over the past eight seasons,...
If we’re being honest about 2017’s most impactful player then we have to say it was the quarterback who was deemed toxic for the crime of making us thinkSomeday people will look back at the just-completed 2017 NFL season and behold the brilliance of Tom Brady at 40 and Drew Brees at 38. They will marvel at how eight teams made the playoffs who had not done so last year. They will chuckle at Cleveland’s 0-16 record and wonder how the New York Giants could have tumbled to 3-13.But these recollections will be footnotes in a record book. The 2017 NFL season had little to do with what happened on the field. It wasn’t about the quarterbacks who defied age...
On New Year’s Eve 1967, Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys contested the NFL Championship in temperatures so cold that the referee’s whistle frozeNew Year’s Eve marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most remarkable American football matches in history. A game that almost certainly should not have been played on New Year’s Eve 1967, it remains as renowned for the hideously bitter conditions in which it was contested as its thrilling denouement.The Green Bay Packers, managed by the legendary Vince Lombardi, were aiming to make history by becoming the first team in the history of the play-off era to win three consecutive NFL titles. Similarly venerated Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry and his men had the difficult job...
US sport – from NFL to basketball and Olympic skiing – is caught up in actions of a president unafraid, and determined, to change the rulesSports and politics have always existed at a very public intersection in the United States, but you would be hard-pressed to recall a time when the illusory firewall keeping them apart was more nakedly exposed.Over the past year Trump has co-opted American sports as not merely a proxy battle in the culture wars that reflect a country’s deep divides but the primary theatre. It is fair to say there was no more influential sports figure this year than the president, whose bellicose rhetoric and crisp volume counterpunching have had far-reaching effects on the industry (ask...