England’s super sub praises England boss Sarina Wiegman for giving her hope ‘when she didn’t have any’

“I AM not God, but I am something similar.”
These words were once spoken by Panamanian legend Roberto Duran, whose ring name Hands of Stone captured the primal character of a man who faced nothing in the ring that ever came close to what he faced out of it.
Having just defeated his latest and perhaps most deadly opponent, Covid-19, Duran is a man for whom the label ATG (all-time great) most accurately applies — who even in his most humiliating moment — his “no mas” surrender to Sugar Ray Leonard in their 1976 rematch in New Orleans — retained an aura of dignity consonant with the struggle for survival and to escape the grinding poverty from whence he had come.

Mary Kom’s fists made history in the boxing world. Malak Mesleh’s never got the chance. One story ends in glory, the other in grief — but both highlight the defiance of women who dare to fight, writes JOHN WIGHT

The Khelif gender row shows no sign of being resolved to the satisfaction of anyone involved anytime soon, says boxing writer JOHN WIGHT

When Patterson and Liston met in the ring in 1962, it was more than a title bout — it was a collision of two black archetypes shaped by white America’s fears and fantasies, writes JOHN WIGHT

In the land of white supremacy, colonialism and the foul legacy of the KKK, JOHN WIGHT knows that to resist the fascism unleashed by Trump is to do God’s work