Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 79

Manchester City are the team to beat again, but how can they be stopped? | Jonathan Wilson

Pep Guardiola’s side won the title at a canter last season despite a poor start and are aiming for a fourth Premier League crown in five years unless anybody can stop them

Last season Manchester City endured the worst start suffered by Pep Guardiola in his managerial career and still won the league, easing up towards the line, by 12 points. They’ve won three of the past four Premier League titles, in which time they’ve averaged 91 points per season. Last season they scored 10 more goals than anybody else and conceded four fewer. By the time this season gets going, they may have signed Harry Kane and Jack Grealish. How on earth, then, do you stop them?

The easiest way, perhaps, is to play them in the later stages of the Champions League, where Guardiola’s tinkering remains a major concern. Set up a difficult one-off game and give him time to think about it and there is a decent chance he will devise a way of playing that breaks his own side’s rhythm and ends up bringing about the fate he is so determined to avoid.

Related: Pep Guardiola confirms Manchester City want to sign Harry Kane from Spurs

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Messi saga springs from Barcelona’s grotesque mismanagement | Jonathan Wilson

Wherever perhaps the greatest player of all time ends up, this wretched tale shows what modern football has become

Perhaps football has never been about football. Certainly it’s a long time since those who pontificate about the separation of sport and politics have seemed anything other than peripheral cranks (albeit an alarming number of them serve on the IOC or at Westminster). But still, the saga of Lionel Messi’s contract is so profoundly sordid that you wonder whether Ebenezer Morley, if he had known where it would lead, would ever have written the letter to Bell’s Life magazine in 1863 that led to the formation of the Football Association a year later.

Morley’s main concern was to end “feverish” disputes about the laws. That geopolitics, rapacious capitalism and a pandemic might determine the destination of perhaps the greatest player the world has ever known would have seemed like a category error. And yet while wider forces are clearly at play, sympathy for Barcelona must be limited: the announcement on Thursday that Messi would not be staying at the club may be what it appears to be or it may be a piece of reckless brinkmanship, but either way it is a story of grotesque mismanagement.

Related: Lionel Messi leaving Barcelona after ‘obstacles’ thwart contract renewal

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Jack Grealish can be Manchester City game-breaker but first he must adapt | Jonathan Wilson

British record signing is imaginatively explosive but Guardiola will demand more one-touch passing and defensive work

Last November, after Belgium had beaten England 2-0 in the Nations League, Pep Guardiola messaged Kevin De Bruyne to ask what he had made of Jack Grealish. De Bruyne was effusive: Grealish, he said, was a player Manchester City had to sign. Back then Manchester United had seemed the most likely buyers but nine months on it is City who have landed him, for a fee of £100m.

Related: Jack Grealish seals record £100m Manchester City move from Aston Villa

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Celtic in crisis, transfer talk and Carabao Cup fizz – Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Flo Lloyd-Hughes, Jonathan Wilson and Ewan Murray for the glorious return of Football Weekly

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Football Weekly is back! The domestic season has barely began and Celtic are already in crisis. On the podcast today, Ewan Murray joins us to discuss their disastrous start to the season at home and in Europe.

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Gareth Southgate’s solid England risk being caught behind wave of history | Jonathan Wilson

The Euros showed that conservatism still dominates international football, but there are signs the club-style cohesiveness shown by Spain and Italy may be taking over

The broken glass has been cleared. Wembley Way is no longer sticky underfoot. As the sense of shame and disappointment fades, and the knee-zjerk panaceas melt away, it is perhaps worth reflecting that Euro 2020, however disgracefully it ended, was one of the great tournaments, perhaps the best since Euro 2000, and asking what that might mean for next year’s World Cup and beyond.

There was a long period in which international football represented the pinnacle of the game; that was where you saw the greatest concentration of the best players. Then in the late 70s, as coordinated systems of pressing became more widespread and time spent on the training ground developing mutual understanding became increasingly important, the club game took over. Tactically speaking at least, international football could be seen to lag a few years behind. More recently, international and club football have felt like different forms of the same sport, as remote from each other in strategy and feel as limited-overs and Test cricket.

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England battle for survival instead of control as deep-lying issue resurfaces | Jonathan Wilson

Gareth Southgate’s choice of formation was understandable but there was no doubt England lacked creativity

As England dropped deeper and deeper in the second half, as they succumbed to the same problem holding a lead that had beset them against Colombia and Croatia at the World Cup, the temptation was to wonder if anything had really changed. Why is it that England so often take the lead in big games and so often end up turning in on themselves, as though every battle must be turned into a re-enactment of General Gordon’s defence of Khartoum?

But perhaps that is unfair, or at least to oversimplify the issue. That England failed to hold a lead – again – does not mean that caution was the wrong approach, at least from the outset. Southgate’s strength in this tournament has been devising specific plans for specific games. And for over an hour here it worked. It did for a time seem that England were going to contain Italy. A substitute brought on slightly earlier, perhaps, and that slow doomed retreat might not have occurred. But then the best-laid plans can go awry: the two players Southgate brought on specifically to take penalties both missed.

Related: England’s charming lads separated from glory by the finest of margins | Jonathan Liew

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Tactical battle: where the Euro 2020 final will be won and lost | Jonathan Wilson

England may revert to a back three and must stymie Italy’s menacing left flank – but set pieces could hold the key

Before every game, the biggest question has been whether Gareth Southgate should go with a back three or a back four. Block in the opposing wing-/full-backs or give them a defensive problem? There is no definitive answer.

Related: Gareth Southgate’s special qualities can be lost amid political squabbles | Barney Ronay

Related: England’s origin stories: this is where football came home from

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Stubborn, controlled, deaf to critics: there’s plenty of Alf Ramsey in Gareth Southgate | Jonathan Wilson

England’s World Cup-winning coach changed team and tactics as he alone saw fit, and his successor at Euro 2020 does likewise

Alf Ramsey was not a man much given to drama, but when he read out the team for England’s final warm-up friendly before the 1966 World Cup, away to Poland in Chorzow, the players noted a distinct pause before he delivered the 11th name.

Alan Ball was in on the right, so everybody assumed that meant a conventional winger on the left, probably Terry Paine. But Ramsey’s grand reveal was a genuine surprise: Martin Peters. As he had against Spain the previous December, Ramsey was going without wingers. For only the second time in history, England would play 4-4-2.

Related: Gareth Southgate hoping for a final thumbs-up in the Colosseum

Related: How Pep Guardiola and Marcelo Bielsa primed England for glory

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Sterling and Saka lead charge as England throw off old anxieties | Jonathan Wilson

The hour of steadily mounting pressure on the Denmark goal was the like of which England have not produced in 25 years

Gareth Southgate values control almost above anything else. For England, this has been a tournament about control. He has talked about aping Portugal at Euro 2016 and France at the World Cup, of learning how to manage games. But there are two ways of controlling games. There is controlling games by attacking, as England did with remarkable intensity and consistency between the start of the second half and the end of the first half of extra time, and there is controlling the game as England did in the second half of extra time, keeping the ball away from Denmark with such efficiency that they managed only one touch in the England box in that period. Control, it turns out, doesn’t have to be boring.

Southgate had opted for a back four from the start, which meant, rather than match up shape-for-shape against Denmark’s wing-backs, he had Raheem Sterling and Bukayo Saka looking to attack the spaces behind them. After all the accusations of over-conservatism, in his biggest game for three years, Southgate opted for the more aggressive option. He could have started with the side he had used against Germany, when Kieran Trippier and Luke Shaw won the battle of the wing-backs and effectively nullified Robin Gosens and Joshua Kimmich.

Related: England emerge into the light after night of noirish Nordic drama

Related: England beat Denmark in extra time to set up Euro 2020 final with Italy

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England edge extra-time epic to enter final battle – Euro 2020 Football Daily

Max Rushden is joined by Lars Sivertsen, Jonathan Wilson, Barry Glendenning and Marcus Bean to discuss England’s semi-final win

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts , Soundcloud , Audioboom , Mixcloud , Acast and Stitcher , and join the conversation on Facebook , Twitter and email .

England squeaked past Denmark after extra time to make it into the Euro 2020 final – their first appearance in a men’s major tournament final since 1966.

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