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29 December 2015

For a sportsman, studying doesn’t have to eat into the day – it can just replace PlayStation

Sport, especially English sport, has a blind spot about intelligence.

By Ed Smith

Sport, especially English sport, has a blind spot about intelligence. It often misinterprets intellectual curiosity as uncommitted dilettantism, mistakenly assumes that sport and intellectual life are entirely separate and misses the reality that elite games require high-level thinking.

Kudos to Duncan Watmore, Sunderland’s bright prospect, who recently graduated with a First in economics and business management from Newcastle University. There are lessons here for professional sport, for education and for the way we think about applied intelligence.

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