Sports Poets Society

Kevin McKenna's Diary  19 Jan 2025 - The Herald YOU can’t really overstate what Denis Law represented for my dad’s generation and for those of us who began to love football while this great Scottish international was still playing. You often hear phrases such as “they transcended their chosen career” when someone truly gifted has died. I heard it used recently with the release of Maria, about the final days of Maria Callas.  What people mean, I think, when they say this, is that the individual came to define an era and captured the mood of society at a certain point in its history. For a while, they had embodied a cultural shift. Denis Law, along with his Manchester United teammate George Best achieved this status, as did the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Andy Warhol, Mary Quant and Eva Peron. If Law had been an actor he’d have portrayed pirates or popular legends like Robin Hood, fighting the forces of the establishment to provide relief for the poor. Like Errol Flynn, his fi...

Coach has taken journey from unwanted one to special one as Champions League fairytale continues ‘The adventure with Brest happened when I did not believe it could happen any more’ 19 Jan 2025 - THE OBSERVER / Sport Philippe Auclair At the very end of 2022, Éric Roy was convinced the ship he had hoped to board had sailed a while ago. How could it be otherwise? He was now in his 57th year, and his last – his only – coaching assignment had ended more than a decade previously. He had resigned himself to carrying on working as a pundit for French television, as he had done since 2012, with a three-year spell as sports director with first Lens, then Watford from 2017 to 2020 sandwiched in between. The irony of the situation was not lost on him: he was better qualified now than he had been when, in March 2010, his home town club, Nice, had called on him to manage their first team. He had accepted the role despite having no managerial experience whatsoever – and no coaching badges either. Ni...

Nottingham Forest’s simplicity is deceptive: it looks easy because it is so well planned 19 Jan 2025 - THE OBSERVER / Sport Jonathan Wilson There was a period when datawallahs insisted confidence didn’t exist – which came as a surprise to almost everybody who has ever played sport at any level. There are days when you feel invincible, when every putt drops, when every ball pitches in the right place, when you claim every cross. And there are days when your club may as well be a Toblerone, when catching the easiest dolly seems an impossible feat of calculation and coordination, when your legs simply will not function. Vast screeds were written dismissing the “hot-hand fallacy”. Then, in 2020, the journalist Ben Cohen wrote The Hot Hand , which demonstrated a flaw in previous calculations and decided that the hot hand – a term from basketball referring to a player on a scoring streak – does exist. From a layman’s perspective, the tests employed always seemed so artificial to be highly qu...