News of the sudden and sad passing of Arthur Beetson on December 1 has prompted new appraisals of this ground-breaking footballer who was one of rugby league’s true characters. Arthur…
Cliffy’s gone off and done the final shuffle, twenty years after a single achievement made him an everlasting icon. Some devalue Cliff Young’s achievement that memorable day in 1983 when…
Farewell to three men of renown They flourished in different eras. A montage of their highlights would show very few similarities, but it would reveal that each was a hard…
We’ve been doing far too many of these lately. Two more great characters of the game, Frank Tyson and Lindsay Kline, passed since we last went to print. Normally we’d…
George Daldry introduced new conditioning methods at a time when a game like Rugby League was always going to frown upon a “fitness guru”. When “joggers” were a source of…
“Mystery spinners” are like outstanding batting champions and dizzyingly swift fast bowlers. They come along all-too infrequently, and when they do, the cricket world loves them. Richie Benaud ranked Johnny…
Life. To the Max Sometimes, when a beloved figure dies, it feels like an offence against humanity; an injury. When Max Walker passed in September to a sinister disease, nature…
At an age when most quicks contemplate a life of payback for the things they did to their bodies as young men, the remarkable Mitchell Johnson made the transition from…
As a social activist and courageous victim of a vicious, duplicitous establishment, he was one of the very few authentic existential heroes sport had seen. Yes, it’s true that he…
I’m writing this in the minutes after his passing. The cricket community is numb with grief. To those at the epicentre, to Sean Abbott and those closest to Phil Hughes…
What should I be commenting on? The recent, aborted bid to overthrow the leadership of world cricket? A revolution is brewing, after all. Or perhaps the heated debate over Pietersen’s…
In the last fortnight, boxing lost two famous world champions—Ingemar Johansson and Jose Torres. Johansson was the last white world heavyweight champion from the days when there was only one…