Alexander Bublik: The Kazakh Jester Who Proves Tennis Is a Cosmic Joke In the grand, grotesque carnival that is professional tennis—where Rafael Nadal’s biceps are worshipped like minor deities and Novak Djokovic’s gluten-free aura is monitored by satellites—Alexander Bublik has chosen the role of the court jester. Born in St. Petersburg, raised in Moscow, naturalised…
Mikel Arteta, the accidental geopolitician, is currently conducting a real-time experiment in soft power from a bench in North London. While the rest of us doom-scroll through tariff wars, coups, and that inexplicable new TikTok dance, Arteta has quietly turned Arsenal Football Club into a multilateral alliance that would make the UN Security Council blush…
The Beautiful Game’s Ugly Cousin: Why the Whole World Is Now a Fantasy Premier League Colony By Our Man in the Ether Somewhere between the collapse of the post-war order and the rise of oat-milk lattes, the Premier League stopped being a mere English pastime and became the planet’s largest secular religion. The liturgy is…
Leicester City vs Coventry: A Microcosm of Global Football’s Existential Crisis, Now With Extra Rain By the time the final whistle blew at the King Power Stadium—somewhere between the 94th minute and the heat death of the universe—the only people still pretending this was just another East Midlands derby were the accountants at Sky Sports….
Berlin Marathon 2025: 42 Kilometres of Global Neurosis Laced with Electrolytes By Our Man in Schöneberg, still limping from 2019 The planet’s most efficient guilt trip returns to Berlin on 28 September 2025, when 50 000 anxious over-achievers will jog in formation past the Reichstag like a well-sponsored refugee column. For one Sunday, the city’s…
Sometime around 2 a.m. in Auckland, while most of the planet was doom-scrolling economic forecasts and wondering which hemisphere would catch fire next, the Women’s Rugby World Cup final kicked off like a polite riot in Eden Park. England versus New Zealand—two nations that once colonised each other’s accents—settled the matter with 80 minutes of…
Liverpool vs Everton: A Timeline of Friendly Hatred in the Age of Geopolitical Chaos By our man in the departure lounge, still waiting for a flight that left in 2018 1892 – Birth of the Rivalry While Europe was busy redrawing maps with crayons dipped in blood, two church teams in a damp English port…
The planet keeps smouldering—literally in some latitudes—but 1.2 billion eyeballs still found time last week to watch 22 women in mint-green and navy-blue polyester chase a red leather sphere across a rectangle in Mumbai. Australia Women vs India Women—sounds almost quaint, like an academic debate on colonial legacies, except the only thesis being defended was…
Australia 282-8, India 283-5 – the scorecard reads like an accountant’s ledger that accidentally got possessed by Bollywood. In the end the Women in Blue chased down the highest target in their history, and an entire planet of insomniacs from Perth to Patiala updated their group-chat status with the same three-word eulogy: “Well, that happened.”…
LIVERPOOL, England — In a city where everyone claims to be Irish on St. Patrick’s Day and half the population swears it voted for Liverpool in the Brexit referendum it actually lost, the 244th Merseyside derby unfolded last Sunday like a ritual blood-letting for the global streaming classes. A four-nil demolition by Liverpool over Everton…
Daniil Medvedev, the 6’6″ Russian scarecrow with the demeanor of a man who just discovered his espresso was decaf, has spent the last decade proving that tennis can be both geopolitical chess and performance art. To the casual observer he’s merely another baseline metronome, but to the rest of us—squinting from Warsaw to Wuhan—he is…
In the grand geopolitical circus that is Planet Earth 2024, where wars are crowd-funded and elections are decided by whichever septuagenarian can stay awake the longest, the most subversive act of rebellion might just be a 26-year-old Russian who smashes tennis balls instead of ballot boxes. Meet Andrey Rublev—world No. 5, part-time abstract expressionist with…
