Top five Cherries of season
One Cherries fan has joined BBC Radio Solent to give his top five Bournemouth players of the 2024-25 season - and he thinks his number one choice may be "controversial".Do you agree with his picks?Listen to his selections here on BBC Sounds
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Daily Mail
36 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Footy great Dermott Brereton reveals secret health battle that is making even simple daily tasks impossible
AFL legend Dermott Brereton has delivered an emotional account of the lifelong toll football has taken on his body, revealing he now struggles to perform even the simplest tasks like putting on shoes or shaking hands. The five-time premiership forward spoke candidly at the Melbourne Cricket Club during the Norm Smith Oration, detailing his painful daily challenges caused by a career built on fearless, physical football. The man who once played through shattered ribs now needs help tying his laces. 'I pathetically allow myself to become melancholy and even teary,' he admitted. 'Some mornings my beautiful partner Julie has to put on my shoes and socks for me. 'With the pain in my spine, where they inserted a cage, I can't reach.' Brereton revealed he sometimes cries from the physical toll football has taken on his body His body, once built to absorb contact and punishment, now resists everyday movement. 'Some days I have to walk down the stairs sideways. I haven't had cartilage in my knees for 40 years.' Brereton, 59, became a Hawthorn icon during the club's dominant 1980s era, playing from 1982 to 1992. He was known for his flamboyance and aggression, famously playing through broken ribs in the 1989 VFL Grand Final. That trademark fearlessness won him respect and five premierships—but it came at great physical cost. 'Some days I can't shake hands with other men,' he said. 'If they do, I fear they'll re-open the broken bones in my hands.' Reconstructed ankles, damaged shoulders, and arthritic joints now define his day-to-day life. 'Some days I crab my way down the stairs because my ankle won't flex anymore,' he added. Brereton's speech combined humour and heartbreak as he recalled his upbringing in Frankston and rise to stardom. He shared the stage with Essendon great Tim Watson, whose light-hearted stories brought laughter to balance the emotion. 'To be honest with you, Tim, those [mid-'80s] battles took you to the edge of safety,' Brereton said. 'And for me, that is always where you get the best view of life.' He admitted to using powerful anti-inflammatories for decades—Indocin, Brufen, and Voltaren—which left him with ongoing stomach issues. 'Some nights I sleep very little because of the arthritis in my shoulder joints,' he said. That joint damage stemmed from years of heavy weight training to survive the demands of centre half-forward. In perhaps the most revealing moment, Brereton questioned whether it was all worth it. 'I often ask myself… in that moment of weakness—was it worth it?' His answer: 'I'd do it all over again, exactly the same. Maybe next time, I might go a little harder.' He recalled receiving regular epidurals just to keep playing during his peak years. 'In '86-89, I'd go to Vimy House after games for an epidural. I'd lie in bed all day, then head home.' Post-retirement, Brereton moved into media and was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 1999. He acknowledged football had given him discipline, fame, romance, wealth, employment, and friendships. But it also took something dear: his long-term physical independence. 'It's also taken away something very dear to me,' he said. La Trobe University data, cited by the AFL Players' Association, shows 76 per cent of past players suffered serious injuries. Of those, 64 per cent say those injuries still affect their daily lives. Since 2017, more than 1150 past players have received reimbursements for joint and dental surgeries.
The National
an hour ago
- The National
Why your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man gives you the ‘ick' factor
That shimmering street grid, and those sandstone bases of unbuilt skyscrapers, will host the most everyday superhero of the current Marvel Universe. Everyday, in every way. It's not just Peter Parker's tentative romance with Mary Jane Watson (and her variants), or his wracked grief on the deaths of his adoptive parents, or his humdrum job as a freelance photographer. But it's also his powers; they too partake of the everyday. In his earliest incarnation, Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, escaped from an experiment. Spider-Man first appears in the nuclear-haunted, cold-warring mid-60s, where the lingering effects of radiation on babies and animals were well known. Not to mention the beginning of plausible genetic engineering. Watching the precursor to the forthcoming Glasgow-based movie, 2021's Spider-Man: No Way Home, it's notable that all the villains assembled – Doctor Octopus, Green Goblin, Sandman, Lizard, Electro – have gained their malevolent powers through exposure to radiation, or biological/cyborg experiment. Just like Spider-Man. READ MORE: 'Ludicrous': BBC bias claims reignite as majority of panellists back Labour Doth this 'good' mutant protest too much against the 'bad' ones? The citizens are consigned to the role of spectators (or squished collateral damage) as these super-humans fight for supremacy. No amount of Peter Parker homeliness – he is your 'friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man', after all, happiest when arresting street thugs – can hide his posthuman weirdery. No Way Home might be the eighth-biggest-grossing movie of all time, but it's lame in the way it resolves this tension – where body modification turns towards good or ill. Parker and friends test-tube up some remedies for the villains, transforming them back into their humdrum, benign human selves. But then Doctor Strange – played by a somnolent Benedict Cumberbatch – has to then 'magic' them back into the parallel universes they've come from. The current Spidey-verse – with a guileless Tom Holland in the title role – is, at this late stage in the Marvel franchise, a bewildering mix of superpowers. Under the techno-influence of Tony Stark, the old struggles with the Spidey costume – stitching it together, hauling it on, repairing rips – are now an automated swoosh from suit to suit. There's also a very funny sequence where previous Spider-Men from parallel universes (Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) explore their web-making powers. Garfield and Holland have to keep refilling their cartridges, while Maguire produces it subcutaneously from his wrist (which was creator Stan Lee's original mutation). 'Does it come out anywhere else?' asks Holland guilelessly. This is a nod to the obvious metaphor: the yearning young adult Parker suddenly suffers a condition where white sticky fluid unpredictably erupts everywhere … The actors are given enough room to riff on it. So we're laughing, these days. But I don't think any amount of irony and eyebrow-raised referencing can reduce the essential strangeness of Spider-Man – and for that matter, X-Men, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Black Widow, Ant-Man, I could go on. All of them are the victims of science and technology either gone wrong, or consciously applied to the body, resulting in imposed or desired superpowers. As the box office shows, the appetite is there for stories, however fantastic, of human biomodification. You could render them as giant compensation fantasies. We're coping with our everyday sense of bodily vulnerability to the outcomes of sci-tech, through entertainments that show us gaining power from it – not being polluted and made more fragile and dependent by it. Yet it strikes me that we are much more resistant to the transformations of bioscience than we are to the transformations of AI and automation. We consume all manner of creative narratives, both desirable and cautionary, about computers becoming conscious or purposeful – and it all seems more like a lubricant to the spread of AI in our lives than an inhibitor. When it comes to us and our bags of skin, however, we're just not as embracing of the radical bio-changes that the superheroes undergo, willingly or unwillingly. The safest vector is through disability or health. The pills and therapies that suppress appetite, attack viruses, enable pregnancies, and (who knows) slow down cell decay to prolong life. Even that avatar of techno-weirdness, Elon Musk, who wants to neurologically link brains and computers, does so first in service of the paralysed, giving them some much-needed agency and purchase in the material world. Yet we appear to have an unarticulated, deeply-set norm that kicks back against too much of this. The 'ick' factor is certainly present. Take the Enhanced Games that took place in Singapore the other week. Sportspersons competed in athletics which ignored the fuzzy line between legal performance-enhancing substances and illegal ones. But the games languished under waves of aversive, sometimes even revulsed press coverage. So we revel in the superheroic cavortings of cyborgs and mutants on our screens, while objecting to already finely-calibrated athletic bodies taking a few seconds off a track record, by expanding the pharmacopoeia of their drugs. I'm not complaining! Indeed, I'm desperately grateful that there seems to be some kind of natural, intuitive limit to the kinds of transformations we moderns of the 2020s are willing to undergo. Even the blockbuster entertainments are telling us something obvious, as the Earth is (yet again) threatened with total annihilation in their narratives. Which is that it ultimately, terminally matters how we humans consciously deploy our transforming powers in the world. I will admit to enjoying these bionic characters as modern mythological gods, cartoonishly laying out important dilemmas for us. However, I sometimes crave sci-fi tales in a much subtler register. Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go is interesting to set alongside these bombastic tales. In its way, it's hardly less monstrous. The whole society in this novel is stable, settled, orderly and utterly cruel: the institutionalised children in it are clones, being grown to adulthood so that they their organs can be harvested for clients. The supportive relationships that comprise much of the novel are to support the weakening young adults, as they are weakened by the surgeries they undergo. This is body modification, but all about submission to the process, accommodating its demands. It's far from radiation, gene therapy or prosthetics enabling you to leap tall buildings with a single bound. Bio-heroes in the blockbusters conduct their sparring in the public sphere, as if they're conducting an oblique argument about the society they're in. For No Way Home, they literally battle across the surface of a scaffolded Statue of Liberty. They're also constantly pursued by an Alex-Jones-like vlogger, casting Spidey as a public enemy. In Never Let Me Go, the bio-subjects are held in a pastoral enclosure, erased from the world that depends on their sacrifice. The crowds gawp at the superheroes: faced with Ishiguro's bureaucratic horror, the crowds avert their eyes. The superheroes at least ask: What happens when your body has power and potential, when what you can do with it amplifies your agency? Ishiguro asks: what happens when the body simply becomes somebody's property? The Spider-Man producer Amy Pascal says the new film will be about 'Peter Parker going to focus on being Spider-Man, because being Peter Parker was too hard'. Cute: his pursuit of Zendaya, as his girlfriend with a now wiped memory of him, will no doubt humanise the story. But Spider-Man – and we haven't even touched on arachnophobia (or is that arachnophilia?) – is properly odd, if you scrutinise him closely enough, and line him up with all his bionic pals. There are important tensions about humanity, technology and the future, hidden behind that bug-eyed mask.
The Sun
an hour ago
- The Sun
Gardeners' World fave reveals £2 Asda trick to feed family veg all summer – & it's perfect for small spaces
WHAT could you do with a square meter in your outside space? Turns out - quite a lot - says Gardeners' World presenter Nick Bailey - who's spearheading new campaign Make a Metre Matter. 2 2 He wants to get Sun Gardening readers involved too - supporting wildlife and sustainability - and making the planet a better place. 'There's 20 million gardens in Britain. If 20 million people just dedicated one metre, that's quite a lot of metres isn't it?,' he told me. 'There are loads of ways you can make a meaningful difference, including growing plants for pollinators, growing veg to cut down on food miles and creating a compost heap.' Nick's created a Headline Show Garden for BBC Gardeners' World Live later this month - with lots of Make a Metre Matter ideas to take home. He added: 'You can grow nine lettuces in that space. You could grow four compact courgettes and supply your family with more courgettes than you could eat for the summer." Currently Asda are selling courgette seeds for £2 - and you can get them in the ground now. 'You could choose to put acid compost in there and put four blueberries in there " he said. "Within your first harvest you've made your money back.' 'Equally you could just sow some British native wildflowers, which could be as cheap as £2 to £3 for a packet. 'It will give you a brilliant long run of colour from May through to October, with lots of interest for pollinators. Gardeners' World's Monty Don fears 'decayed' knees from years of gardening could cut short TV career 'You could also create a square metre pond. In the first month you'll have about 10 species in the pond. "A year down the line you'll have 20 plus species and it just goes up and up and up. 'Insect and bees will come and feed from there, you'll support birds, you're supporting the aquatic life itself. 'It doesn't have to be a big space to make a big impact.' If you're inspired to make a difference - you can register your meter to be entered into a Gardeners World prize draw to win a £1k voucher to spend at Crocus or two runner up Crocus prizes of £500. Visit for more information. Gardeners World Live takes place at Birmingham NEC from June 12 - 15. Top tips, news and a great competition to win a £100 Westland plant feed bundle. TOP TIP Salvias are coming into their prime right now - especially the Mexican hardy shrubby ones like Hot Lips, Limelight and Amistad. To ensure you get the best blooms all summer, we've got some top tips from expert William Dyson, from Great Comp Garden in Kent Grow them in pots, or in your borders - they like free draining soil and sunshine. If you give them an extra chop in mid to late of July - cutting a third of the growth- they'll spring back and reward you with tons of flowers until November. Companion plant with perennials to give a cottage garden look Or make a statement in a large pot. Don't let them get too dry - they do like to be watered, Don't feed them with nitrogen plant food because you'll get more leaves and less flowers. Great Comp's summer garden show is on August 9 and 10. NEWS! The Beardy Gardener - an award-winning garden designer, broadcaster and mental health advocate, is hosting his first ever Garden Gathering on June 21 at the Longstock Park Nursery on the Leckford Estate, near Andover. The event supports Andover Mind 's 'Garden for Mind' initiative, a therapeutic green space dedicated to enhancing mental health and wellbeing. The Garden Gathering promises a vibrant day filled with expert-led workshops, live demonstrations, plant sales, and family-friendly activities. For more info visit NEWS! The National Garden Scheme gives visitors unique access to over 3,500 exceptional private gardens across the UK while raising money for nursing and health charities. Visit the website to find a garden near you open this week. WIN! Thanks to Westland - we're giving away two amazing plant feed bundles worth over £100 each. Each one contains Boost Boost All Purpose Granules, plant feed, Big Tom, Rose feed, bug gard and others. To enter visit or write to Sun Westland Boost competition, PO Box 3190, Colchester, Essex, CO2 8GP. Include your name, age, email or phone. UK residents 18+ only. Entries close 11.59pm. June 28, 2025. T&Cs apply. JOB OF THE WEEK You can move a lot of houseplants outside now to make space or give them a bit of a boost with natural light. Water hanging baskets daily, start deadheading roses. TOP TIP - if you, like me, are struggling with blackfly right now - make a spray of washing up liquid (Ecover is best) and water - and give them a good soaking.
