The concussion-prone Collingwood defender accepted the medical advice to retire at 25 with grace and he emerges with great credit Just before Covid hit, and just when Australian sport was beginning to properly come to terms with the effects of concussion, the former Hawthorn footballer Tim Boyle wrote a piece for The Sunday Age titled “The new form of courage may be not to play at all”. I thought of that piece when Daniel Venables retired, when Angus Brayshaw retired and when Collingwood’s Nathan Murphy called time on his career on Tuesday morning. These days, when a footballer retires, they s ..read more

Leverkusen won first Bundesliga because of their brilliance – under their coach now only victory feels inevitable In other contexts, it might have been seen as tempting fate, daring to anger the football gods. Leverkusen was set for a day of celebration like never before. Approximately 10,000 people lined the streets to greet the team bus leading up to the Bay-Arena with Bismarckstrasse renamed Xabi-Alonso-Allee for the day with its new moniker plastered on street signs. Yet Bayer Leverkusen weren’t just expectant. They were ready. Unlike Borussia Dortmund, who had stumbled agonisingly on the ..read more

Five-time Masters champion is maybe the only person who hasn’t cottoned on to the fact he is playing exhibition golf The sun rose at 6.58am on Sunday in Augusta, a full three hours after Tiger Woods. Across the city, people were asleep and sharing the very same sorts of dreams, about the view down through the pines along the first fairway, the shots over the water at Amen Corner, the long walk uphill to the 18th green, where the club chairman Fred Ridley and last year’s champion Jon Rahm would be waiting ready with that freshly pressed Green Jacket. Woods says he still has these thoughts himse ..read more

Conceding early and failing to take chances have been recurring themes and were on show in defeat to Crystal Palace A corner, nine minutes after half-time. A clutch of players jump together. The ball drops eight yards out. Darwin Núñez pivots. All he has to do is keep it low. All he has to do is get it on target. He does keep it low, he does get it on target. But the ball hits the right knee of Dean Henderson, the Crystal Palace goalkeeper, and bounces wide for a corner. Was that the moment the title was lost? It wasn’t, of course, in part because no season ever truly comes down to just one mo ..read more

Swede has shown the easy confidence of a young man while French golfer has nerves of an older pro during the Masters There are 20 ways to make the Masters, from winning the thing, or any other of a dozen leading competitions, to making it into the top 50 of the world rankings in the week before the tournament starts. The official listings will tell you that Ludvig Åberg and Matthieu Pavon both came the very same way, by route No 17, “Individual winners of PGA Tour events that award a full-point allocation, from previous Masters to current Masters”. Åberg did it by winning at the RSM Classic at ..read more

Trainer adds I Am Maximus’s success at Aintree to his Gold Cup and Champion Hurdle wins at Cheltenham this season lA gentlemanly nod of the head. An appreciative tip of the cap. That is the way Willie Mullins likes to celebrate his major triumphs. Such is his preternatural calmness, you half‑suspect the arrival of the Four Horseman of Apocalypse would be greeted with a simple shrug of the shoulders. Yet on a raucous afternoon, the 67-year‑old Irishman was bellowing every bit as loudly as anyone else in the 70,000 crowd. It came as the 7-1 joint favourite, I Am Maximus, soared over th ..read more

This season’s title race is thrilling because all the contenders are imperfect. Sport is nothing without a sense of jeopardy In Chad Harbach’s 2011 novel The Art of Fielding, the shortstop Henry Skrimshander is approaching the US college record for the most consecutive errorless baseball games when a throw inexplicably goes awry and hits a teammate in the dugout. At that, his confidence evaporates to the point that he can no longer execute the most basic skills; he gets the yips. What lingers from the novel, for me, is the crushing sense of pressure of having errors recorded like that, appeari ..read more

With no mobile phones allowed, fans queue for two hours to capture their own unusual piece of Masters history The first thing you see when you make it through the gates at Augusta National is the grass, which, for the first time in your life, really is greener on the other side. Then it’s the rainbow of azaleas and above them the trees, dogwoods, magnolias and firethorns, snaking down around the driveway. It will be around about now, as you are making your way along towards the course, that you will begin to notice all the people cutting back against the flow of the crowd. Soon enough, you wil ..read more

Selection has a near-perfect profile for the biggest betting race of the year in terms of his age, talent, stamina and form to date The more pessimistic forecasts for rainfall at Aintree this week failed to materialise but the going for Saturday’s race will still be the most gruelling for 23 years and only thorough stayers should be considered for inclusion on backers’ shortlists. In that respect, the betting market has already done a lot of the legwork, as all but a couple of the runners priced up at 33-1 or below have stamina as one of their strongest suits. Narrowing them down to three or f ..read more

Unlike Greg Inglis’s Rabbitohs fairytale, Latrell Mitchell is struggling with the responsibility that comes with the No 1 jersey He arrived at Redfern overweight, riven with injury niggles, in a cloud of negative headlines. But he was a champion, a representative player at state and national level and a talisman in the Indigenous community. South Sydney knew this man could supercharge a golden era. He’d debuted as a teenager, won premierships as a centre but his true destiny was as a fullback. That’s where you park the prestige vehicles in rugby league – and it’s why you pay top dollar. Sure e ..read more