It’s something the article could have done with - a video of one of his fast 147 breaks. Snooker tends to be more tense than exciting, and those videos are kind of the exception. Might as well post this one here...

I hope you’ve had a few regulars try the game and genuinely appreciate it - the hipsters who like things ironically, or because it makes their tastes more ‘refined’/‘unique’ are revolting, but it would be nice if some decent people got interested in it because of the hipster BS

The ‘cost-effective’ thing is dubious. England based the bid for 2018 on the basis that it had the infrastructure in place (and could run the tournament tomorrow), and part of the reason it lost the bid was because it had no ‘legacy’. Maybe the new FIFA heads will be more measured, but I doubt it...

You’d get hurt more (submission holds in reality are severely damaging to joints and bones), but you’d get better recovery periods, so there are advantages to both to the athletes

Is there some responsibility with both of them in that one? Balor maybe turns too early (or too far) and the contact goes to the back of the head rather than the side of the face? Or Jinder maybe throwing the elbow too late? It’s bad but doesn’t seem as egregious as the shoulder breaker botch

Ever thought about having a round table discussion with the other Deadspin writers about publicly owned stadiums? Just some questions that occur to me:
-Does the Franchise model make it impossible for an owner to commit to a stadium in case the team is moved? If so, how would you arrange the league(s)
[NOTE: Not trying…

It’s not about fitting a football pitch in the area of the NFL field, it’s about the ability to grow and maintain the surface. The MLS wants real grass, so for that you’d need to be able to move the pitch in and out of a dome - you can’t get that surface in a dome without trying to do what the Sapporo Dome does, and…

It’d be interesting to see what would happen if a city insisted that the finance, maintenance and operating costs should be met by the owners in the event of the franchise being relocated. Pretty certain that the owners would never agree to those terms...

The Stadia that do that are designed that way from the start - the cost of trying to retrofit an old stadium to do that may not be far off the costs of building a new one. As an example, the London Stadium cost £323m to convert from hosting athletics to football and that didn’t include anything as ambitious as a…

+ 1 Chris Kluwe and Brendon Ayanbedejo...

I would put Iniesta ahead of both him and Ronaldo - he contributes offensively and defensively, and is going to be incredibly hard to replace. I know he doesn’t get the goals, and does a lot of stuff that goes unnoticed, but that is the fault of BS around the Ballon d’Or (and I agree with Arsene Wenger about that…

He did, but Ronaldo winning the European Championships with Portugal doesn’t play well with his ego...

If your computer freezes/crashes and you swear at the screen, that’s one thing. If a co-worker annoys you, and you swear at a computer screen to disguise that it’s about them, you’re on shaky ground. If your colleague annoys you and you swear LOOKING DIRECTLY AT THEM, you’re pretty much hosed. Messi deserves no…

That’s why they allow the game to be paused to speak directly to the kids. You can’t allow that in a truely competitive game (since a smart coach could use it to disrupt an opposing attack) so you have this kind of recreational hybrid - that way, it’s done at the time it happens, but without making the kid feel bad…

If a kid learns to make the decision for themselves, it’s better. They develop the thought processes that they can apply going forward instead of leaning on the advice from the sidelines.

Like I said, the competitive thing is something that took a long while to be accepted in England. It’s counter-intuitive, but the…

Football is not about the greatest athletes - Alex Kiwomya has the British u15 100m record, and he is pretty much League 1/ League 2 level (in the English pyramid). He has retained his pace, but doesn’t have great instincts in beating players or great end product. Adebayo Akinfenwa is as strong as any soccer player on…

The shouting from the sideline IS problematic. It wouldn’t be happening at Ajax, the club that Barcelona and Man Utd copied (and largely the reason that Holland punches well above its weight relative to the size of its population). What you hear is people making the kids decisions for them “Mark him here, pass to…

You’ve hit the nail on the head about football living on team chemistry - I get so fed up of hearing people go on about “They’re professionals, they should be able to do anything” without appreciating that players have different preferences / tendencies, and sometimes you can make a team better by playing a more…

Like I said, if you know what you’re looking for, the Toulon Tournament does provide a great opportunity to look at talent. Marquinhos wasn’t ‘cherry picked’, he was noticable because of his positioning, his mobility and his tackling - it stood out, it’s not simply a case he did well. Sometimes kids do well in youth…

What a fascinating, well argued counter...