Martin McKenzie-Murray

Even at their peak, many didn't look like pro athletes. Now, two decades after becoming world champions and curse-breakers, the reunited group resembled bearish mechanics and happy butchers. Gathered recently at Fenway Park were the 2004 Boston Red Sox, a group dubbed “The Idiots” for their joyous cheek and disinhibition. Exactly 20 years ago, images of this raffish band of hotheads, goofballs and drinkers would rival the Pope's and JFK's for space on the lounge room walls of Boston homes. The Idiots had broken the long Curse of the Bambino, and last week they came together to remember it.

As a child, Ellie Cole dreamt of becoming a mermaid. She entered the water first as a site of rehabilitation, but it quickly became a place of comfort and affinity. Diagnosed with a rare form of cancer at just two, the following year of chemotherapy sickened her but did little to extinguish the cancer. One option was left: the amputation of her right leg from above the knee.

This week Alan Belford Jones, Australia's most successful broadcaster and famed former Wallabies rugby coach, was arrested and charged with 26 offences, including aggravated indecent assault, against nine male victims. The charges are yet to be tested in court and Jones has denied any misconduct through his lawyer.

It was billed as the co-main event, but as the preceding fight to Tyson v Paul it was obviously considered subordinate to one of the most ridiculous but globally watched bouts in modern history. Let some modest justice be done here, though: in a day of weird and gaudy hype, the Katie Taylor and Amanda Serrano fight was the best of the card, and perhaps of the year.

The first Test against India started promisingly enough, but Australia’s humiliating capitulation raises tough questions for selectors over the form and age of supposedly star players.

In October, the CFMEU's national secretary, Zach Smith, sent a message to union shop stewards fretting about declining membership rates and reminding them to enforce the “no ticket, no start” policy on sites.

For decades, professional wrestlers seemed to be dying in disproportionate numbers and in violent ways. Wrestlers were murdered, they drowned, they rolled their cars. They suffered overdoses, aneurysms and heart attacks. They died in the ring, after smashing their heads, or they killed themselves with guns or rope. The profession, once defined by steroids and unregulated painkillers, seemed morbidly blighted and its participants subject to terrible odds.

The Great War was just six months old and the trenches that would define it were still relatively crude. Carved from muddy earth and fortified by razor wire, their sides were strengthened by sandbags and planks. Machine guns sat above them. “Those were the early days of trench warfare, the days of the jam-tin bombs and the gas-pipe trench-mortar,” Robert Graves, a British officer in the war, wrote in his famous memoir

“The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life.” – Paul Morphy

The Olympics returned, and so did the spectators, liberated this year from the Covid restrictions that both delayed the previous games and cruelled Tokyo's atmosphere.