Sunderland manager Martin O'Neill has outlined his ambition to have a team that plays with the style of Barcelona, though admitted "pragmatism has to be the order of the day" for the struggling Wearsiders at the moment. GettyImagesMartin O'Neill looking far into a future where Sunderland play like Lionel Messi and Co • O'Neill eyes Gyan recall European champions Barca have been described by some as the best side ever to have played the game and Pep Guardiola's charges have unquestionably set a benchmark in the modern era with their devastating tiki-taka approach. The Catalans have won many admirers and can count O'Neill among them, with the Northern Irishman keen to create a team in the future capable of emulating Lionel Messi and his team-mates. However,
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Playing Ball: In a Dark Time
I'm off on Friday, but here, for the weekend, is a slightly fictionalized story from my tennis past.In the spring of my junior year of college, I took an English class that had something to do with the Renaissance. I can’t remember the title of the course, and most of the reading we did also escapes me. I know there were discussions of Don Quixote and Petrarch, but beyond that what I recall most was sitting with five or six other students once a week for three hours, all of us huddled around a small table, in a bare-walled room inside the campus’s rickety Humanities building. The school I went to was liberal arts and Quaker, so no matter how much tuition they charged, the style
Playing Ball: First Tournament
When I was 11, in 1981, I traveled to Carlisle, Pa., to play my first junior tennis tournament. My parents drove me; it took an hour and a half from the town where we lived, down a two-lane road that cut through Central PA’s sagging, half-abandoned old coal towns. I didn’t notice much out the window, though. I was too busy spinning the handle of my orange-and-black Borg Donnay in my hand, thinking about my unknown opponent. Where was he right now? What did he look like? Had he played a thousand tournaments before? Would he snicker when he saw me, the blatant rookie? My forehead burned with anxiety. I didn’t feel any better when I walked in the front