Obsessed with a fictional Football Manager striker: The week’s best sportswriting

1. “Everything was fine for his first couple of seasons at Celtic Park. I’d not been at the club long myself after moving from Hearts, and this was just a normal game of Football Manager. I’d open the game up on my laptop after a hard day at work, while away a few hours pressing the spacebar, and sweeping all that came before me in Scotland because that’s just what Celtic do. Then, two years into Strok’s time at the club, we reached the Champions League final. That’s when things began to change for Celtic, for Ivica Strok, and for me.”

Jonny Sharples is obsessed with fictional Football Manager star Ivica Strok for Vice.

2. “I’ve got dementia,” he told me several times between wonderful recollections of a football life, many repeated again and again during the same interview. “The doctors tell me it’s blunt force head trauma. I’m usually okay if you ask me about 20 years ago; 20 minutes ago, we might be in some trouble.”

On Deadspin, Dave McKenna interviews former NFL Washington Redskins and New England Patriots defensive back Rickie Harris about stealing the coin toss coin and battling with dementia.

3. “This is Magomed Abdusalamov, 34, also known as the Russian Tyson, also known as Mago. He is a former heavyweight boxer who scored four knockouts and 14 technical knockouts in his first 18 professional fights. He preferred to stand between rounds. Sitting conveyed weakness.

“But Mago lost his 19th fight, his big chance, at the packed Theater at Madison Square Garden in November 2013. His 19th decision, and his last.

Now here he is, in a small bedroom in a working-class neighborhood in Greenwich, in a modest house his family rents cheap from a devoted friend. The air-pressure machine for his mattress hums like an expectant crowd.”

A sobering piece by Dan Barry in The New York Times about former a Russian heavyweight boxer who has been left bedridden by the sport.

4. “Suarez’s irrepressible energy and deceptive power has turned out to be the perfect complement. Suarez beats up the defenders, runs them into the ground, opens up the spaces for Messi to do his work. Paradoxically, by taking over the central attacking position in which Messi had excelled for several years, the Uruguayan has liberated Messi to become an even more dominant figure in the play.”

Ken Early on how the arrival of Luis Suarez to Barcelona has freed up Lionel Messi to arguably play the best football of his career.

5. “Fifty years from now political and social historians will look back upon our generation with the same sense of wonder the past is always regarded with. And if they search for the sporting contest that best symbolises our era and encapsulates the predominant spirit of our time, Mayweather-Pacquiao is what they will unearth.

“That may be a pretty sad indictment of society today but neither Floyd nor Manny should be blamed for it. Of course Mayweather is no Louis or Ali: but no boxer, sportsperson, or member of any other walk of life is. We live in a very different time. A time in which cash, or in the sport of boxing, Money, remains king.”

6. Seven days on from ‘The Fight of the Century’, Paul Gibson of ‘The Balls of Wrath’ says in my many ways it summed up our greedy times on The Guardian.

“What Simmons said was, in itself, harmless. Roger Goodell is a liar, as more or less everyone in sports media had said long before Simmons took to his podcast to wonder why no one was saying it. Simmons being Simmons, his “it’s such fucking bullshit” was presented in the spirit of bold truth-telling. Daring ESPN to suspend him came off as an adolescent tantrum, if not a non sequitur. Bristol being Bristol, it wasn’t taken that way.”

For the week that’s in it, Barry Petchesky of Deadspin recalls how Bill Simons lost ESPN.

7. “Was it representative of America’s unhealthily slavish devotion to football? Of the players’ admirable single-mindedness amid chaos? Of the spectators’ idiotically misplaced priorities? Of the quaint absence of fire safety protocols in America?

And, especially: What on earth was going on, that a football game would continue uninterrupted while a major fire raged so near?”

The story behind an iconic sports photograph, told by Sarah Lyall for The New York Times.

Did you read anything worth sharing this week? Let us know below. 

In pictures: runners on their marks for Darkness Into Light event this morningDrinking on the job, and Gattuso’s move to Junior B GAA! It’s the Comments of the Week

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