My Favourite Cricketer: Justin Langer by Glenn Mitchell

As part of our continuing series, World Cricket Watch and Balanced Sports invited Glenn Mitchell, sports broadcaster and mental health advocate, to write about his favourite cricketer, Justin  Langer.  Glenn's website is glennmitchell.com.au and he tweets @mitchellglenn



I
clearly remember standing in the middle of a rain-soaked Sinhalese
Sports Club in September 1999 as the third
and final

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Where to now for Blackburn Rovers?

When a club is relegated
from their country's top division, any attempts to remedy that
situation are based upon a number of key principles.




Firstly, one can most
often safely assume that the club's owners want the club to succeed.
Pursuant to this, those same owners must also be capable of
understanding the ramifications of relegation both on their balance
sheets and fan emotions. An

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Book Review: Sheilas, Wogs & Poofters - Johnny Warren

by Ben Roberts


This
is my second foray into Australian football literature, the first having been spectacularly less than impressive. The good news is that the now decade-old 'Sheilas, Wogs and Poofters', a seminal work by the late and revered Johnny Warren is
far better.   The bad news is that Warren fell into the standard traps
of all passionate Australian soccer figures.







Cover image

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Football's most operatic week

It may be cliché, but what a week we've seen in football. There have
been more twists, subplots and stories than your average season of The Wire,
passing everywhere from England, through France and Italy to the
Iberian peninsula. To wit, we catalogue (briefly) the past ten days in
football:

1. Chelsea defeated Barcelona (away from home, with the
winning goal from a most unlikely source) in

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Pep Guardiola: football's J.K. Rowling

Pep Guardiola reels into
the Catlunya spring sunset punch-drunk, deserving a rest, his job
well done. Most agree that he's likely to take a significant break
from management – perhaps an eternal one – before moving back to
the scrutiny of club control.



To witness the change inhis appearance from appointment to last week's press conference is to
see what daily hour-long media sessions will do

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Graphic: Pep Guardiola over time

The things four years of crazy media exposure and inhuman stress levels will do to a guy.  The following photo shows Pep Guardiola at his introduction as Barca coach in 2008 and compares it to an image taken at the presser last week in which he announced he was leaving the club for a sabbatical.



Click to enlarge


Photo credits: fourfourtwo.com and thesun.co.uk 

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Book review: Game for Anything - Gideon Haigh

If Bill
Simmons is the everyman sportswriter full of pop culture,
in-jokes and homer-isms, then Gideon Haigh is his antithesis. You
read Simmons as he thinks aloud, a man down at the bar with his
mates. However, he's just
self-aware enough to know that because he monopolises the
conversation he should fling jokes about to keep his audience
engaged. There's obvious research, but done on the

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