Max Gawn: ‘If I didn’t like walking to a cafe and talking footy, I probably wouldn’t have a beard’

The question takes Max Gawn, 249 games into one of the great AFL careers, by surprise. What has his life in footy given him but, also, what has it taken away?“I haven’t been asked that, probably because I haven’t retired yet, but I think 250 games is a good chance to talk about it,” he says in the lead-up to his milestone match against Carlton on Sunday.“I’ve always thought when AFL players snub the press conference on retirement, I’m like, ‘come on, the game has given you a lot’. And the game has given me a lot.“The game’s given me everything I am currently, really

Revealed: secret plans for two-day London Marathon with 100,000 runners

The London Marathon is in advanced talks about staging a two-day event in 2027, allowing tens of thousands more runners to take part in the iconic race and to raise tens of ­millions more for charity.While the Double London Marathon, as it is being called internally, has not been granted formal approval it is believed to have the backing of the mayor’s office for it to be staged on Saturday and Sunday 24-25 April next year.The one-off event would allow a world-record 100,000 amateur runners to take part over the weekend, with 50,000 running the course on each day. It is also expected that the elite men’s and women’s races would also be staged on separate days, in what would be a celebration of top-level and grassroots sport.Last year a record 56,540 finishers raised £87

The Spin | Cricket’s Tetris calendar is a recipe for player burnout and fan apathy

Clinical guidance suggests recovery from emotional trauma can take weeks or months. In some cases, the lingering pain can last for years. Elite cricketers, though, are expected to compress that timeline into days.Take Mitchell Santner. The New Zealand captain oversaw his team’s crushing 96-run loss by India in the T20 World Cup final on 8 March

Drama amid the deluge: 50 years since James Hunt won F1 world title in Japan

Flamboyant Briton won his first and only world championship in dramatic fashion in Japan in the last race of the 1976 seasonNiki Lauda once described James Hunt as “one of my few real friends in racing”, the great rivals sharing a genuine bond even as they fought fiercely for the Formula One world championship in 1976.Its destination was decided at the Japanese Grand Prix – where the sport heads for the third race of this season on Sunday – with this year marking the 50th anniversary of an extraordinary contest when Hunt won his only F1 title in an engrossing finale.The Fuji Speedway was shrouded in rain and mist and the race start was delayed on that afternoon in late October. Hunt, always tense before a race, was wound up like a spring. The battle between the two drivers, Lauda at Ferrari and Hunt with McLaren, had been hard-fought from the off but 1976 was exceptional more than anything else in that Lauda was still in the fight at all

The Celtics’ orca-loving Joe Mazzulla is an NBA oddball. He’s also a masterful coach

The 37-year-old may come across as corny and gauche. But he’s already won one NBA championship and it probably won’t be his lastThe Boston Celtics’ head coach, Joe Mazzulla, is a very odd man. He is also a very good coach.Take, for example, a story Celtics guard Derrick White told in an interview last November. According to White, the first sound at one Celtics practice wasn’t a whistle

‘I wanted the rollercoaster of being emotionally invested’: Ian Bell on coaching, England and the 2005 Ashes WhatsApp

Five-times Ashes winner has since had a varied coaching career and believes the red ball is still fundamental to the modern playerIt’s a sunny spring afternoon, a new season looms, and just a short stroll down the road from Knowle & Dorridge Cricket Club, Ian Bell is in his local stressing the importance of County Championship runs. One of the purest Test batters England has produced this century, Bell is also about to fly to the Indian Premier League for a spell of coaching.Not that the two are necessarily a contradiction. Bell is excited to be joining Delhi Capitals as their new assistant coach before the IPL that starts on Saturday – a significant opportunity in his second career. But as much as T20 has transformed the sport, Bell insists that time batting against the red ball is still fundamental to the modern player