Sport is part of a world spoiling for a fight

It would be appropriate in these pages to write about Wimbledon, or the Euros, or the local football, but what fills the various screens in my life is all in the form of aggressive opinion and semantics, not in sports action. The foremost contest in the world at this moment, even within our local sporting context, is one of ideas, ideologies and allegiances.

Ali, his life and body of work

As a white man in Australia one can admit easily to a state of ignorance about the experience of racism. But we should include in our stated ignorance any knowledge of the blood-run feelings that inspire acts of defiance from black athletes like Muhammad Ali, or the gestures of Adam Goodes on the MCG.

There's nothing more elusive than lost form

I saw Travis Cloke's brother, Jason, at a petrol station in the winter of 2006. That was the year he was delisted from the Collingwood Football Club. We'd just played in a VFL match at Box Hill and Jason lined up beside me before a tiny crowd on an oval that overlooked an intersection. Later at the station he was leaning against his car, watching the pump on auto-fill with his arms crossed in the wind.

Too much talk: TV's paralysis by analysis

When Damien Hardwick and Brendan Bolton defended their respective players against media criticisms this week, they were in a sense dismissing the word of some commentators, whose voices are today immutable and have even begun to set the agenda in the football world.

A friendship lost, nothing more or less

• COMMENT

It is not my desire to write about the private lives of Billy Brownless or Garry Lyon, but every sporting scandal is now a public tornado that before it ends gathers a range of voices that are sometimes more captivating than the story itself.

Alastair Clarkson – a statue in waiting

On a rainy day at Waverly Park in 2009 I saw John Kennedy Senior standing next to a brass statue of his younger self.

Drugs spotlight shines on us all

 Every time one of these little drug stories emerges from the dark matrix of football in October, you get reminded about how strange and ridiculous our current position on drugs really is, not to mention how outdated our appetite for scandal.

The kicks, the hugs and the superlatives

This grand final promised to be historic more readily than it promised to be great. Sadly, for those looking forward to a great contest, it was a promise delivered at the mid-point of the first quarter.

With a bit of luck, it may have been so different for Ross Lyon

In a recent interview on the ABC, Malcolm Turnbull alluded to the role of luck in his life using a reference to his time at Goldman Sachs.