Rarely in soccer has one team proved such an obstacle for one coach. No team coached by Gordon Igesund, from Manning Rangers to, recently, Ajax Cape Town, has succeeded in beating Kaizer Chiefs.
There is a story about a man who repeatedly hits himself on the head with a mallet. When asked why he does it, he says: “Because it feels so good when I stop.”
Clive Woodward has a repertoire of useful mantras, and one of them came out again in the immediate afterglow of Sunday’s triumph in Dublin. “We keep learning and moving on,” he said, finding one way to sum up the five years since he took over as England’s manager.
The blossoms may be blooming and the birds singing in crystal-blue skies, but it has been a miserable and ruinous spring for Britain’s bookmakers.
Even though he’s a Euro-millionaire many times over, Loris Capirossi must have been thrilled to win a BMW 330 Cd at the Circuit de Catalunya last month.
Before the cars tear on to the track for the first round of testing at this weekend’s Brazilian Grand Prix, they will in effect have absorbed every bump, bounce and undulation of the circuit without having been there recently.
There is no half-time in baseball and certainly no lunch or tea interval. There’s no need; spectators eat constantly.
In time Graeme Smith may come to wonder about the favours thrust his way by the United Cricket Board. Hurried into the captaincy before his cap has had time to bleach in the sun, Smith is now to be sent on his first assignment to Bangladesh without the benefit of a vice-captain.
Despite what CNN says, “embedded” reporters are nothing new. They’ve been around forever in sports journalism, and anyone at an Indian press conference during the World Cup would not have needed a proctologist to see that Sourav Ganguly has six or seven scribes firmly embedded near his colon.
Two icons collide next Friday in Denmark, when one of South Africa’s most loved sons pits his skills against one of the Nordic states’ biggest draw-cards.