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Thanks to Chris Greenhough and Nick Whitbread, who emailed me within seconds of each other to nominate Paul Warhurst – as both noted, a utility phenomenon in the Premier League and Championship Manager, where he could play pretty much anywhere.

“One memorable utility shift was Ryan Bertrand, moved up to left wing in the 2012 Champions League final, sitting in front of Ashley Cole to track Arjen Robben. I believe he’s still the only player to have made his Champions League debut in the final,” says Rob Hobson.

The network’s fate has become a battle of corporate ownership, not a question of what benefits Americans

On Thursday evening, as rumors about the Brown University gunman swirled, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins posted on social media, noting the confusion and directing people to her network’s 9pm newscast.

CNN is certainly not a flawless news source, but her words rang true to me. The network is one of the outlets where you can find reality-based and largely dependable reporting – especially in breaking news situations like the one that was developing near a New Hampshire storage facility.

Gone are shots of puddings and sweets as advertisers try to market other foods to stay within rules coming into force on 5 January

The festive season is traditionally a time of national culinary overindulgence but eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed that this year’s crop of big-budget Christmas TV ads have been decidedly lean and sugar-free.

From Tesco and Waitrose to Marks & Spencer and Asda, the UK’s biggest exponents of extravagant festive food marketing have put their Christmas ads on a diet to comply with new regulations banning junk food products from appearing in TV ads before 9pm.

Who’s propping up the bar with quizmaster Keir Starmer? Answers below (no cheating now!)

Click here for a larger version of the puzzle

Spotted all the famous faces? See how you did …

1 Sydney Sweeney’s on the bar there, in her denims. Does this mean she is a eugenicist? No, it doesn’t. Are you OK?

The Strangers, a horror tale written during the playwright’s college days, appeared in the Strand magazine this week

As one of the 20th century’s most successful playwrights, Tennessee Williams penned popular works at the very pinnacle of US theater, including A Streetcar Named Desire and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.

Years before his almost unparalleled Broadway triumphs, however, the aspiring writer then known simply as Tom wrote a series of short radio plays as he struggled to find a breakthrough. One is The Strangers, a supernatural tale offering glimpses into the accomplished wordsmith that Williams would become, and published for the first time this week in the literary magazine Strand.

Ryan Coogler’s critically acclaimed horror blockbuster had people talking all year, proving industry naysayers wrong and breaking various records

It was the film that was supposed to destroy Hollywood: a vampire horror about life and times in the Jim Crow south peopled by a majority Black cast, and shot on Imax 70mm. Ryan Coogler, the acclaimed director who rose to prominence steering Marvel’s colossal Black Panther franchise, was thought to be out of his depth for trying to midwife a script he himself said he cobbled together in two months. Warner Bros, the studio fronting the film’s near $100m budget, was supposedly out of its mind for not only throwing that much money behind the project, but further agreeing to singularly favorable authorship deal terms that gave him control over the film’ final cut and full rights over the film after 25 years. Hollywood machers were convinced the film would never make money and that Warner Bros’ big gamble “could be the end of the studio system”. But Sinners never let that cynicism in.

Sinners landed in theaters on Easter weekend and delivered its own miracle resurrection, racing to a $368m gate on the way to becoming the highest grossing original film in the past 15 years, and the 10th-highest domestic-grossing R-rated film of all time. (That’s right: higher than Terminator 2 and the Hangovers.) At a time when Black heritage and culture are once again under intense political assault, Sinners provoked zeitgeist-y discourse around Black history, cultural erasure and entertainment industry politics. And the online memes poking fun at juke-joint scenes hit as hard as the thinkpieces unpacking the venue’s under-appreciated contributions to the American musical canon.

A sci-fi playscape at an exhibition in Gateshead had the photographer’s granddaughter entranced

Anne Rayner was enjoying a day out with her husband, Bob, and two-year-old granddaughter Phoebe when she took this photo. The three of them had headed into Newcastle city centre to find some fun, while Rayner’s daughter-in-law was caring for Phoebe’s siblings, six-month-old twin boys, at home.

Walking along the quayside and crossing the Gateshead Millennium Bridge, they pointed out landmarks to Phoebe as they went: the Tyne Bridge, the Glasshouse International Centre for Music. They arrived, eventually, at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, where Harold Offeh’s exhibition The Mothership Collective 2.0 was showing (it’s on until 18 January).

The government is preparing a £50m bailout for Ineos’s Grangemouth plant, after Jim Ratcliffe asked for help in October

Chemical companies owned by the billionaire Jim Ratcliffe had already been granted as much as £70m in UK state aid in the past four years, before this week’s £50m government bailout for its Grangemouth plant in Scotland.

State aid to Ineos in the last year alone was between £16m and £38m, according to government disclosures published this week. Since August 2022 the company has received between £28m and £70m.

• Batter accepts ‘uphill battle’ to keep Ashes series alive

• Crawley backs Ollie Pope after dismissal for 17 in Adelaide

Zak Crawley has promised England will still be hunting for victory on the fifth day of the third Test in Adelaide, despite slipping to 207 for six in pursuit of a record fourth-innings run chase target of 435.

“It’s an uphill battle from here,” Crawley said at close of play on Saturday. “But the boys are going to give it a good crack tomorrow. Obviously we’re staring down the barrel, so it’s disappointing. But we’ll never give up.”

The justice department is using a variety of tactics to try to obfuscate the US president’s connection to the sex offender

The justice department’s partial release of the Epstein files on Friday signaled how the agency is using a variety of tactics to try to bury and obfuscate Donald Trump’s connection to Jeffrey Epstein.

As the department raced towards a legally mandated Friday deadline to release its files, little emerged about what it planned to release. There never really seemed to be a doubt that the department would release the files late on Friday afternoon, deploying the well-worn Washington trick of burying unflattering news before a weekend.

Family who said they paid cash were left embarrassed after being accused of not paying £20.01

Drivers have accused a leading petrol station security company of issuing “false” fuel theft debts, which left one family unable to fill up their car at more than 1,000 filling stations for more than a year.

Amjad Khan and his family were barred from multiple petrol stations around Blackburn for 19 months after he was accused of driving out of an Esso petrol station in Manchester without paying for £20.01 of fuel.

Most Americans have yet to see this boom – but they’ve certainly heard a lot about it from the president

Moments into his second term, opening his inaugural address, Donald Trump was unequivocal. “The golden age of America begins right now,” he declared.

At a White House reception last weekend, a little over 10 months later, the US president appeared to acknowledge just how far his timeline had shifted.

Heating means pests breeding and spreading faster, warn scientists, with simplified current food system already vulnerable

• How climate breakdown is putting the world’s food in peril – in maps and charts

The destruction of food supplies by crop pests is being supercharged by the climate crisis, with losses expected to surge, an analysis has concluded.

Researchers said the world was lucky to have so far avoided a major shock and was living on borrowed time, with action needed to diversify crops and boost natural predators of pests.

The second series of the Tom Hiddleston-fronted drama is first le Carré adaptation not based on author’s own work

It was in a market square in the Colombian city of Cartagena when Georgi Banks-Davies wondered if she had bitten off more than she could chew.

The director of The Night Manager’s second series was shooting a scene in the bustling location, with just a few minutes to capture the action.

The actor on impersonating Elvis, her stint as a magician’s assistant on a cruise ship, and having eyes like currants

Born in Hertfordshire, Sarah Hadland, 54, attended Laine Theatre Arts college in Surrey. From 2009 to 2015, she played Stevie in the Bafta-nominated sitcom Miranda, and her other television work includes Horrible Histories, Waterloo Road, W1A, The Job Lot and Daddy Issues. This Christmas, she appears on The Festive Pottery Throwdown and The Celebrity Apprentice, and stars as the Wicked Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Marlowe theatre in Canterbury. She lives with her child in London.

What is your earliest memory?
I remember putting on my sister’s dungarees – they were purple and flared – to do an Elvis impression and my family laughing, and thinking: “Oh, this is good.”

Some might regard it as ‘brain rot’, but the first word of the year just for tweens and teenagers could be the most hopeful development of 2025

What connects the word “vape”, the crying-laughing emoji and the phrase “squeezed middle”? No, it’s not just a biting crossword clue for “millennial”: they have all previously been crowned word of the year. Admittedly, there are now so many “words of the year” that, if they were physical objects, they could make a decent-sized museum collection. Which, as it happens, is exactly how I like to imagine them – artefacts of their time, telling a story of a changing society.

This year’s winners – from “parasocial” (Cambridge Dictionary’s choice) to “rage bait” (Oxford English Dictionary), “67 (six-seven)” (Dictionary.com) and “slop” (Merriam-Webster) – will join the group, though where in the “museum” remains to be seen. Will they sit in the permanent collection, along with 2005’s “podcast” and 2015’s “binge-watch”? Or the archive, where irrelevances such as 2007’s “w00t” are packed off to, to see out their days alongside David Cameron’s lesser-remembered very bad idea: not Brexit (Collins, 2016), but “big society” (Oxford, 2010).

Coco Khan is a freelance writer and co-host of the politics podcast Pod Save the UK

Australia’s captain marvel, the ultimate flat-wicket operator, stormed into this third Ashes Test like he had never been away

On a redundancy scale, attending the Adelaide Test and noting that Pat Cummins was good is in the realm of noting that the Torrens was wet or the cathedral was spiky. Still, on day four, any one of those obvious things might justifiably have caught an observer’s eye. Perhaps it’s more notable just how natural, how inevitable, it felt that Cummins was indeed bowling at his best in his first match back after a nascent stress fracture cost him the first two Tests of this Ashes series and any match preparation before that.

England observers will spend four years until their team’s next visit pondering explanations for this year’s poor showing, inevitably including much examination of the lack of chances for their bowlers to adjust to Australian conditions. Cummins spent five months in the gym and the nets without once seeing the middle of a ground, latterly powering through what might have been a few months of rehab in the space of a few weeks, then hit the pitch for a Test match like he’d never been away.

A knighthood, a lifetime achievement award and a hit theatre production of The Line of Beauty… the author on a year of personal success and political change

If there can be a downside to receiving a lifetime achievement award, it can surely only be the hint of closure it evokes. I put this as tactfully as I can to Alan Hollinghurst, this year’s winner of the David Cohen prize, which has previously recognised the contribution to literature of, among others, VS Naipaul, Doris Lessing and Edna O’Brien. It does have “a certain hint of the obituary about it”, he concedes, laughing. “So I’m very much doing what I can to take it as an incentive rather than a reward.”

But there have been plenty of rewards recently. Hollinghurst was knighted in this year’s New Year honours list, a couple of months after the publication of his novel Our Evenings, the story of actor Dave Win’s journey from boarding school to the end of his life, which received rave reviews. In the Guardian, critic Alexandra Harris announced it his finest novel to date, noting that it “forms a deep pattern of connection with its predecessors, while being an entirely distinct and brimming whole”.

• Alabama overturn 17-point deficit in CFP opener

• Freshman Lotzeir Brooks scores twice in rally

• Crimson Tide set Rose Bowl clash with Indiana

Ty Simpson passed for 232 yards and two touchdowns, and No 9 seed Alabama rallied from a 17-point deficit to beat No 8 Oklahoma 34-24 on Friday night in the first round of the College Football Playoff.

“I just couldn’t be more proud of these guys,” Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer said. “Resiliency. It’s been kind of a theme all season long, but it showed up tonight on the road. Down 17, coming back the way we did just one score at a time – just really stayed the course.”

Five multiple-choice questions – set by children – to test your knowledge, and a chance to submit your own junior brainteasers for future quizzes

• ​Submit a question

Molly Oldfield hosts Everything Under the Sun, a podcast answering children’s questions. Do check out her books, Everything Under the Sun and Everything Under the Sun: Quiz Book, as well as her new title, Everything Under the Sun: All Around the World.

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Continental corner: There are some eye-catching games around the European leagues today, no less than Real Madrid v Sevilla (8pm GMT) which rounds off the day in La Liga. Dortmund went second in the Bundesliga last night but RB Leipzig can reclaim the position if they beat fourth-placed Leverkusen at 5.30pm. In Serie A, Juventus v Roma (7.45pm) is fifth v fourth but both sides will have designs on the top three.

The Coupe de France takes centre stage in, well, France, with PSG, Lille, Lorient and Toulouse among the top flight sides in action, going away to lower league opponents.

The Frenchman, who has been named the best male footballer in the world by the Guardian, has benefitted from PSG’s focus on the team rather than individuals

What makes a good player great, and a great player the best? This question has been occupying me since 2014, when the Guardian first asked me to contribute to its inaugural Next Generation feature. My job was to look for a France-based talent born in 1997 who could go on to have a stellar career.

After a great deal of research, I narrowed it down from my shortlist of five by asking questions not about the players’ football ability, but about other attributes: resilience, adaptability, decision-making, creativity, work ethic, response to feedback and willingness to learn. Qualities we cannot see, and are harder to measure.

The Celtic manager wants to focus on the things that matter but after starting with four defeats he may not have the chance

Years ago when sport was good, you didn’t have optics. You just had what happened. And what happened was what you had seen happen.

Things are different now. If you haven’t lent into optics when discussing your underperforming team, then you’re missing out. One dictionary definition for you: Optics (1) “The way in which an event or course of action is perceived by the public.”