The 32-player open and women’s championships include four GMs, while juniors make up nearly half the field, including a nine-year-old top seed

Finals of the annual UK Blitz Championships take place in Leamington Spa on Saturday (noon start), when the open and women’s titles will be decided by two 16-player all-play-all competitions and 15 rounds of speed chess.

The 32 finalists are survivors from an original entry of over 500, who competed at eight regional qualifying competitions across the UK. Four grandmasters are in the field: Eldar Gasanov of Ukraine, the 2472-rated defending champion; Danny Gormally, the 2490-rated top seed; the veteran Peter Wells, and England’s youngest GM Shreyas Royal, 15.

Northern Ireland’s tie with eastern European nation can be viewed as a win for president Alexander Lukashenko

The banner in Legia Warsaw’s near-empty away section said more than any action on a football pitch could. Down below, Dinamo Minsk were falling to a 4-0 defeat against the home side in last week’s Conference League fixture but nobody really cared. “Voices silenced but must not be forgotten,” it read, the slogan continuing beneath an image of Belarus repurposed to depict hands grasping at prison cell bars. “Free all the political prisoners.”

Afterwards, token attempts by exiled Belarusian media to engage Dinamo’s players in non-football conversation were stonewalled. The stakes were too high, the potential for retribution too great; everyone knew that really. Back across the border the away side went: another empty sham of a sporting institution representing little beyond the government of a pariah state.

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Shape of the game has tilted significantly since the latest law tweak that risks tactical monotony and a lack of charm

Steve Borthwick does not normally vent in public so when he does it means he is properly hacked off. “I don’t think any of us want rugby union to turn into Aussie Rules,” muttered England’s head coach, not even bothering to downplay his distaste for the new refereeing crackdown on kick chase ‘escort’ defenders that he fears will drag the sport down a path it regrets. “I am not sure everyone wants to watch more kicking and more scrums.”

Slightly ironic, perhaps, coming from a coach whose side barely played any expansive rugby for much of his first year in charge. On  this occasion, though, Borthwick is absolutely within his rights. Inside the last fortnight the shape of the game has tilted significantly, with the odds now in favour of athletic kick chasers who have greater freedom than ever to make life a misery for full-backs underneath high balls.

As the circus wheels on around him, Mike Tyson knows there is nothing new to say – so at his pre-fight press conference he said nothing

Mike Tyson sat in almost magnificent silence, refusing to engage in the bombast and bluster of the final press conference before he fights Jake Paul in a charade of a contest on Friday night in Arlington, Texas. As I stared at his familiar tattooed face I remembered what he had told me on a sweltering afternoon in the summer of 1991.

We sat then in a stinking Las Vegas gym and Tyson tapped me on the hand in reminder of a bleak truth. “Look what happens to fighters,” he said, “even the best of them. Joe Louis ended up a doorman at Caesars Palace. He was in a wheelchair at the end. Sonny Liston died in this town, a drunk and a junkie with no money. Even Ali, look at Ali. I love Ali but when they introduce him at my fights I look away. Sure, they cheer him, but where’s his beauty now, his speed, his talent? It’s gone … it’s gone.”

Unlike tribute acts or bands still going with no original members, the likes of Held By Trees and House of All are leveraging time spent in their former groups to make music that looks forward as well as back

Charlie Hollis – the son of the late Mark Hollis, the enigmatic creative force behind Talk Talk – is proceeding cautiously. “It’s so easy to be misconstrued,” says Hollis, who looks and sounds very much like his father, who died in 2019. “Lineage, DNA, influences, they’re all massively important for anyone making music. But I’d be very careful about using words like ‘tribute’, because it completely gives the wrong impression.”

Hollis is discussing his involvement in the group Held By Trees, described on their Bandcamp page as “an instrumental post-rock collaboration heavily inspired by Talk Talk/Mark Hollis, and working with musicians that played for them”. The band is a passion project of multi-instrumentalist/producer David Joseph, a 40-year-old Church of England minister from Bournemouth, who wondered: “What would it be like if a bunch of the musicians that worked on Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock, as well as Mark Hollis’s solo record, worked on new music?”

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There’s comfort in being surrounded by like-minded people, but challenge is important, and we may have to look for it elsewhere

Hell is other people. Or, more specifically, other people on social media. Hell is millions of people who would avoid each other like the plague if they met in real life, but who are shoved into each other’s faces and essentially egged on to punch each other online; it’s people endlessly winding each other up out of boredom or frustration or desperation to be part of some gang, which ends in viral bullying, death threats, children ripping other children to shreds on platforms they are legally not old enough to join.

Hell is a social circle so vast and remote that human brains just aren’t wired to cope with it: it’s sociability without accountability, and it was making us miserably stressed long before Elon Musk bought X and drove it at a wall . But even then, people stayed for the reasons people do stay in toxic relationships – inertia, fear of being lonely, misplaced hope it may get better – and because it seemed intrinsic to many working lives. You had to be on X because everyone else was, a circular logic that this week finally snapped: a stampede away from X has seen rival Bluesky add 1 million users since the US election, with several prominent Labour MPs joining the charge. What’s the point, the chair of the women and equalities committee, Sarah Owen, asked, in being on a site that’s “ gone from cat memes , to sharing Wordle scores, to calling people whores just for having a different political opinion”?

Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist