A pair of sporting stories in the UK newspapers

It’s in the nature of this world that necessity is the mother of invention. One potentially positive aspect of this coronavirus crisis is that the lockdown has prompted a wide range of people to come up with unusual, novel and inventive ways of “doing those things that they always intended to get around to at some point but hadn’t managed so far”.

It can work both ways, of course.

For every would-be writer that has used incarceration to begin, or even complete, that “great first novel we all have in us” it would be logical and fair to assume that there is someone else, possibly a person who earns their living as a writer (or has done in the past), who has succumbed to a sustained ‘writer’s block’.

In short, to their intense frustration – far from being able to use the enforced isolation as an opportunity to make progress – they’ve found their proverbial gearbox completely stuck in neutral and are wallowing in inertia on the creative front.

Here are some items from the newspaper sporting pages that caught my eye overnight:

First up, an interesting perspective upon the phenomena of what in my youth were called “golden ducks” in elite cricket, penned by Scott Oliver for a new cricket magazine call The Pinch-Hitter, apparently from the same stable that produced The Nightwatchman – not that I’ve ever come across either myself.

It appears today upon the website of – THE GUARDIAN

Secondly, here follows a piece by Kate Rowan upon research being done into issues and effects arising from the menstrual cycle upon the performances of female rugby players generally.

Against a background of what is admittedly a pronounced  historical male bias in all aspects of sports medicine and research into well-being, physiology, physiotherapy and thereby prospective means of performance-enhancement (non-drug-produced, naturally), there is undoubtedly a long way to go before a specific body of equivalent analysis and research into the bodies of elite sportswomen and athletes is amassed.

See here – as appears today upon the website of the – DAILY TELEGRAPH