Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 14

High-risk playing out from the back is at a tactical crossroads, but where to next? | Jonathan Wilson

Patient buildup from deep, Guardiola style, can no longer be an unthinking default so perhaps going long again is the answer

In 2021, I tried to take advantage of the October international break to go to a game as a fan. No sooner had I booked trains and hotels, though, than it emerged Sunderland had accumulated enough Northern Ireland internationals for their League One game against Oxford to be called off. So I did the only reasonable thing you can do in the circumstances, got in touch with the doyen of the non-league scene in the north-east, Harry Pearson, and invited myself along to whichever game he was going to.

We ended up at Seaham Red Star v Ashington in Northern League Division One, the ninth tier of English football. I’ve no idea what the score was, although I know Ashington had Steve Harmison’s brother Ben playing at centre-back and an Alice-banded dribbler on the wing, the Pitman Grealish. But most striking was that everybody passed out from the back. The difference from 25 years earlier, when I’d worked the turnstiles at Whitley Bay, was barely credible. I mentioned it to Harry, who explained that it had become entirely normal: the Guardiolisation of English football was universal.

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Smith Rowe and Bassey cook up Fulham victory as Nottingham Forest stumble

Wait long enough in football and you will eventually see almost everything. Calvin Bassey is a defenders’ defender. He stops opponents scoring. He is quick and good in the air. He is very good at looking authoritative when holding his arms out to craft the offside line. At the other end he offers rather less.

This was the 189th game of the 25-year-old’s senior career and it brought the fourth goal. A year less a week since his only other strike for Fulham, Bassey headed his first goal at Craven Cottage and so Nottingham Forest joined the short list of Falkirk, Volendam and Manchester United as teams he has scored against.

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An FA Cup shock shouldn’t unhinge Liverpool, but football isn’t logical

Plymouth showed the world’s oldest football competition still has life but Arne Slot won’t be too worried despite his team winning just five of their last 11 games

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It was, it has to be acknowledged, a much-changed Liverpool lineup. Of the 11 players who began Sunday’s FA Cup fourth-round match at Plymouth Argyle, only Luis Díaz had made more than 10 league starts this season and only three others had made more than five. Even allowing for that, Plymouth’s victory registers as one of the great shocks of recent times, only the fourth time the leader of the Premier League has ever gone out of the competition to lower-division opposition.

As their quietly charismatic 42-year-old Bosnian coach Miron Muslić pointed out afterward, it was a day that will go down in Plymouth’s history, that will be recalled for generations, as a one-off result more impressive than anything they achieved in reaching the semi-final in 1983-84. It was Liverpool’s ninth defeat to lower-league opposition this century but, in terms of the scale of the shock, it felt perhaps most akin to their exit against non-league Worcester City in 1959 when they were a second-flight club, a defeat that precipitated the decline that led to Phil Taylor making way for the great Bill Shankly.

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Plymouth Argyle bring the magic in the FA Cup - Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and Troy Townsend as Plymouth Argyle put a stop to Liverpool’s quadruple dreams

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On the podcast today; Liverpool finally meet a tough opponent as the team bottom of the Championship, Plymouth Argyle, deservedly beat them 1-0 at Home Park to halt Liverpool’s hopes of achieving a quadruple.

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Straight to penalties? Greed is football’s real shortcoming, not extra time | Jonathan Wilson

Shootouts are the least bad way the game has found to settle drawn matches, but they should be a last resort

So Uefa is considering doing away with extra time, at least in the knockout stage of the Champions League, another grand old tradition swept away as the arc of history bends towards the generation of revenue for the already wealthy. This is the way of the world and so it is the way of football, all that is great and glorious about the game desecrated to produce more content to be sold.

But first, a caveat, an increasingly necessary one as middle age hurtles by. Is this about age? Are our responses to extra time conditioned by our formative years? My first FA Cup final was 1982, a drab game enlivened by Glenn Hoddle putting Tottenham ahead after 110 minutes and Terry Fenwick heading an equaliser five minutes later (Spurs then won the replay). The Schumacher-Battiston World Cup semi-final in Seville came six weeks later: at 90 minutes it was 1-1, by the 98th minute it was 3-1 to France and by the end it was 3-3 and West Germany had won on penalties. The following year’s FA Cup final also went to extra time as Manchester United drew with Brighton; although there were no goals in the added 30 minutes, there was the drama of Gordon Smith’s late miss.

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Joe Willock doubles up as Newcastle edge out Birmingham in thriller

A wet evening, a slick pitch and two committed teams and suddenly the FA Cup doesn’t seem in quite such a troubled state. A remarkable tie, played at remarkable pace, stuffed with incident and endeavour, and illuminated by a stunning goal from Tomoki Iwata, was settled in favour of the Premier League side by two goals from Joe Willock. Yet Birmingham will draw not merely a lot of pride from their performance but also encouragement that if they are promoted out of League One, they will be able to cope at the higher level.

Birmingham might also wonder whether Willock’s first goal crossed the line. “It’s a 50-50 chance the decision goes in your favour and it didn’t,” said the Birmingham manager, Chris Davies. Although Bailey Peacock-Farrell’s feet were well behind the line when he reacted sharply to punch away Willock’s close-range shot, whether the whole of the ball had crossed the whole of the line was an extremely close-run thing. With no goalline technology, the decision fell to the linesman Nigel Lugg, a former warehouse operations manager from Croydon, and he judged it had.

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Arsenal’s rout of Manchester City shows how great empires end | Jonathan Wilson

Pep Guardiola was thought to have stabilised City’s form, but Sunday’s 5-1 demolition by Arsenal shows that the champions’ reign is now surely over

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By the time Ethan Nwaneri whipped in Arsenal’s fifth, the mood at the Emirates was euphoric. The 17-year-old’s finish, arced into the bottom corner from that inside-right position through which so many of Arsenal’s attacks had come, felt like the perfect finale to a dominant 5-1 win over reigning Premier League champions Manchester City. And it was, in more ways than one.

Its youthful chutzpah seemed an appropriate way to round off a win in which 18-year-old Myles Lewis-Skelly had been the most eye-catching player, having scored the third goal with an impudent shimmy into the box. Yet there was a strange realisation on seeing the replay. Nwaneri’s finish hadn’t nestled in that close to the corner of the goal; it wasn’t quite as good as it had initially appeared. And that felt emblematic of the game as a whole.

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Neymar heads home from £322m Saudi calamity still a prisoner of his potential | Jonathan Wilson

Brazilian’s injury-blighted career highlights iniquities of the game, from inflated expectations to curse of celebrity excess

Never go back, but sometimes going back is all that remains. Just 18 months after he joined Al-Hilal, Neymar and the Saudi club have agreed to terminate his contract, allowing him to return to Brazil and rejoin Santos. Al-Hilal paid £77m to sign Neymar from Paris Saint-Germain on a salary of £2.5m a week. He will be paid 85% of that for the remainder of this season, meaning he cost the club £322m for seven appearances, three assists and one goal. Like so much of Neymar’s career, it all seems such a dreadful waste.

His is a story almost designed to highlight the iniquities of the modern game, from the impossible pressures placed on young players to the curse of celebrity and financial excess. Neymar’s great misfortune was to emerge just after Lionel Messi. Argentina had seemingly found a second Diego Maradona, so Brazil needed a second Pelé. When, in June 2011, the 19-year-old Neymar scored the opening goal in the final as Santos won the Copa Libertadores for the first time since Pelé had inspired them to the trophy in 1963, it seemed they had found him. But, of course, nobody can live with such comparisons and so Neymar remained always a prisoner of his potential.

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Lucky Liverpool? Possibly, but their spotless results make it hard to argue | Jonathan Wilson

Arne Slot’s team are masters of making their opponents, Bournemouth this time, look as if they are in poor form

Liverpool this season have been very good at being good enough. There have been very few games in which they’ve dismantled the opposition. They have won fewer league games by more than three goals than Tottenham have, but ended the day nine points clear at the top with their closest rivals to play the defending champions on Sunday. If Liverpool do, as they surely will, go on to win the title, it will have been an old-fashioned sort of success, a league won not by the spectacular or the flamboyant but by consistency and calmness, by ruthless accumulation.

This was Liverpool’s sixth 2-0 win in the league; more than a quarter of their games so far. It’s a scoreline that speaks of control, of winning games with a little to spare, taking freakish equalisers, ill luck and odd refereeing decisions out of the equation, without being flashy and demanding overexertion: 2-0 is the scoreline of champions. Arsenal, like Liverpool, began the season with a pair of 2-0 wins but, since then, they have won 2-0 only once.

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A chronic lack of ambition has laid waste to Tottenham | Jonathan Wilson

Ange Postecoglou has serious shortcomings as Spurs manager. But he has hardly been helped by a team trying to do things on the cheap

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The good news for Ange Postecoglou is that it seems relatively straightforward to recover from being Tottenham manager: his two immediate predecessors, Antonio Conte and Nuno Espírito Santo, are top of Serie A with Napoli and third in the Premier League with Nottingham Forest respectively. As the banner unveiled on Sunday by Spurs fans during the defeat by Leicester read: “24 years, 16 managers, one trophy”. Nobody really looks at Tottenham any more and thinks the problem is the manager.

But it is usually the manager who pays the price. Their past 10 league games have yielded four points. They have just lost against Everton, who had not won in six, and Leicester, who had lost their previous seven. They’ve reached a stage at which it feels possible that they could lose any given fixture. The only saving grace is that they are 1-0 up against Liverpool after the home leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final and that they are sixth in the Europa League table, assured of automatic passage to the last 16 if they beat the Swedish side Elfsborg on Thursday.

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