Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 93
October 17, 2020
Everton's Jordan Pickford showcases the good, the bad and the ugly | Jonathan Wilson
The goalkeeper should have been sent off early in the Merseyside derby but went on to make some outstanding saves before getting away with a late blunder
Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Everton’s start to the season is not that they are top of the league, but that they are top of the league with Jordan Pickford in the sort of mood he’s been in for the past 18 months. He is a wrecking ball of pure energy, always up for it, a player apparently determined never to regret what he didn’t do. His performance against Liverpool was a characteristic maelstrom of reflex brilliance and damaging misjudgment: he nearly cost his team the game, yet he also made two outstanding saves. He may also have cost Liverpool the title.
How bad Virgil van Dijk’s knee injury is remains to be seen, but the point is that it could have been extremely serious – and given his importance to the champions, any game he misses is significant. The Pickford challenge that caused it was typical, of a piece with the pathological proactivity that led to Denmark’s penalty against England on Wednesday. There was no need for him to come flying off his line, and certainly no need for him to fling himself at Van Dijk, scissoring the Dutchman’s right leg so it bent back horribly.
Related: Liverpool denied by Everton and VAR in wild Merseyside derby draw
Related: Everton 2-2 Liverpool: Premier League – as it happened
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October 15, 2020
England see red, Scotland soar and Big Picture fades – Football Weekly Extra
Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jacqui Oatley and Jonathan Wilson to discuss England’s defeat to Denmark, plus all the latest Nations League games. We look at the implications of Project Big Picture being rejected by the Premier League, and Suzanne Wrack tells us what’s next for the Women’s Super League.
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Max, Barry, Jacqui Oatley and Jonathan Wilson discuss England’s double red-card horror show against Denmark, and whether Gareth Southgate needs his waistcoat back. Elsewhere, Scotland and Wales found success but both Northern Ireland and the Republic struggled.
Continue reading...Euros calling: how the top 10 contenders for glory are shaping up | Jonathan Wilson
After a hectic run of international matches we run the rule over the teams most likely to thrive at delayed Euro 2020
Didier Deschamps is a throwback. In a world of pressing and high lines, he is different. He sits his defence deep, gives the full-backs limited licence and keeps his midfield three relatively deep in front of them. But when you have a squad as strong and as gifted as France do, and particularly a forward as fast, intelligent and lethal as Kylian Mbappé, it works. There may always be a sense with France that they could be so much more, but they’re unbeaten in the Nations League, reached the final of the last Euros and won the World Cup.
Related: Grealish sums England's aspirations up but Mount is man of the moment | Jonathan Liew
Continue reading...October 10, 2020
Mars beware, my World XI may lack Messi but De Bruyne makes it tick | Jonathan Wilson
Picking a lineup is useful, less for who makes the cut than for what the process says about the current state of the game
The Fifa world rankings rarely fail to raise an eyebrow. Óscar Washington Tabárez is one of the world’s great coaches but are Uruguay, who scraped a 2-1 win over Chile on Thursday, really the sixth-best side in the world right now? Nobody who saw England’s notional first-choice centre-back pairing of Harry Maguire and Joe Gomez in separate action for their clubs last Sunday would feel comfortable with their ranking of fourth. Germany 14th: when do we start talking seriously about Jogi Löw? And Belgium, whom England face on Sunday, top? Even after 12 straight wins before Thursday’s draw with Ivory Coast, even as their Golden Generation lingers at the summit, how many of their side would get in an Earth XI to take on Mars?
There is a danger in posing such questions of sounding like Michael Owen, boldly insisting that no Croat would get into the England side after Steve McClaren’s team had failed to qualify for Euro 2008, twice losing to Croatia. But the exercise of picking a World XI is useful, less for the names included in the final lineup than for what the process says about the state of the game (or at least it does if you do it properly, rather than acting like Florentino Pérez in his gálacticos pomp and just ramming together loads of famous players).
Related: Transfer window verdict: how every Premier League club fared
The right-sided centre-back is Raphaël Varane, hoping Mars don’t press him in such a way that he loses his composure
Continue reading...October 5, 2020
Manchester United lack leadership and transfer PR fixes won't change that
Tottenham’s 6-1 win caps a miserable decline and Solskjær’s pat on the head from Mourinho reflects manager’s lack of authority
By the time the final whistle blew at Villa Park on Sunday evening, the temptation was to laugh and shrug and write off the previous nine hours as just one of those days. Freakishness can breed freakishness, as though the forces of chaos, once out of the cage, can be very hard to recapture. Manchester United had been hammered at home! By Tottenham! Liverpool had been battered away! West Ham had won a second game in a row! The temptation perhaps was to repeat the lie that in the Premier League anybody can beat anybody on their day. Or, more realistically, consideration was perhaps given to the extent to which the breakdown of order this autumn has been caused by fatigue, a lack of preparation time and the absence of fans.
But United’s defeat was not like Liverpool’s. It’s true the riskiness of Liverpool’s approach has been highlighted recently and that, whether you regard that as sloppiness or a necessary gamble, a defensive collapse, even if not quite of that magnitude, didn’t come totally without warning. But still, the 7-2 defeat at Aston Villa was a genuine shock and there is the (tenuous) mitigation that they were without their captain, the forward who leads their press and their first-choice goalkeeper.
Related: Transfer deadline day 2020: Cavani, Partey, Sancho and more news - live!
Continue reading...October 3, 2020
Ole Gunnar Solskjær's summer lit up by Fernandes becomes autumnal gloom | Jonathan Wilson
For all their expenditure, Manchester United are somehow still short of a wide forward, a left-back and a centre-back and are slipping back to where they were pre-lockdown
There was an anecdote the American philosopher William James liked to tell about a regular user of laughing gas. When he was under the influence, he believed, everything fell into place and he understood the secret of the universe, but as soon as he came round it was lost. So one night he left a notepad by his bed and, half‑waking from his dream, wrote down his vision before slipping out of consciousness again. When he fully came round, he reached eagerly for the pad. What had his great insight been? He looked at his words and read: “A smell of petroleum prevails throughout.”
There was a spell towards the end of last season when it briefly looked as though Ole Gunnar Solskjær had also cracked it, that the doors of his perception had been flung open and all the doubts had coalesced into a coherent tactical pattern. Here was the answer. But now, in the cold light of early autumn, as he prepares for Sunday’s meeting with Tottenham, he looks at the pad by the side of his bed and reads only the enigmatic words “Bruno Fernandes”.
Nobody is quite sure about David de Gea any more, especially when United attempt a high line. And then there’s Pogba
Continue reading...October 1, 2020
Champions League 2020-21: group stage analysis and predictions
Manchester City and holders Bayern Munich should secure straightforward passage but Manchester United must find a way past two of last season’s semi-finalists
The intrigue of a group is usually dependent less on the best two teams than the third side, and that means in Group A that much depends on Salzburg. They scored 16 goals in the group stage last season, but Erling Braut Haaland has been sold since, and five straight wins in Austria this season says little about their capacity to compete at European level. The champions Bayern lost their 32-game unbeaten run on Saturday but despite worries about squad depth they should go through comfortably enough with the side that eliminated them in the 2016 semi-final, Atlético. The hopes of last season’s Russian runners-up Lokomotiv Moscow probably vanished when they sold the forward Aleksey Miranchuk to Atalanta.
Continue reading...September 29, 2020
The Klopp-Keane exchange tells us much about how football has changed | Jonathan Wilson
Liverpool are not so much sloppy as playing the popular high-risk game that late-period Alex Ferguson eschewed
Football has changed. Most disagreements between managers and pundits are tedious affairs, rooted in complex and broadly impenetrable codes of respect and of concern only to professional axe-grinders. But the slightly spiky exchange between Roy Keane and Jürgen Klopp after Liverpool’s 3-1 victory over Arsenal on Monday was fascinating, less for the soap opera element of a bullish Klopp interrogating an awkwardly smirking Keane, or for Keane’s dry “touchy … imagine if they’d lost” rejoinder, but for what it revealed about how the two men view the game, and what that says about its evolution.
️ "Did Mr Keane say it was a sloppy performance? Maybe he is speaking about another game..."
Jurgen Klopp v Roy Keane pic.twitter.com/MIw47L6N0o
Related: Liverpool overwhelm Arsenal in familiar glimpse of football's old times | Barney Ronay
Continue reading...September 26, 2020
Mikel Arteta’s act of faith at Arsenal instils belief and purpose | Jonathan Wilson
The manager’s impact shows football still craves a charismatic leader in a world dominated by money and analysis
Deep in the English understanding of football lies a willingness for faith, a yearning for a messiah. Fans want to believe in a hero who will solve all their problems: “We all dreamed of a day when a saviour’d come our way,” as the lyrics of the original 1997-98 Sunderland version of Cheer Up, Peter Reid have it.
There may be complicated psychosocial reasons for that, related to historical governmental and ecclesiastical structures, but at the very least the sense was reinforced by the fact that as football entered its televisual age with the advent of Match of the Day in 1964, the English game was dominated by charismatic leaders.
Related: Intensity, pace and a sweet left foot: Arsenal's Gabriel has the full package | Nick Ames
Related: Arsenal place trust in Mikel Arteta with promotion to first-team manager
It may be that is simply the nature of messiahs. Their rainbows are not to be unwoven
Continue reading...September 25, 2020
How pass master Thiago Alcântara can help sustain Liverpool's highs | Jonathan Wilson
Jürgen Klopp has bought the Spaniard to ward off entropy and bring variety after running and pressing teams to death
All great sides are haunted by entropy. Even in their most transcendent moments, it is there in the shadows, hissing its insistent question: “What next?”
When Liverpool won the Champions League in Madrid the answer was clear: there was another peak still to be scaled, and they did it last season by winning their first league title in 30 years. But after two years in which they achieved the second- and fourth-highest ever points totals, how can they maintain that level? How can they avoid the trajectory of Manchester City who, after a pair of similarly brilliant seasons, suffered an 18-point drop-off? For Jürgen Klopp, the answer is Thiago Alcântara.
Related: Minamino and Jones the hotshots in Liverpool target practice at Lincoln
Related: Premier League: 10 things to look out for this weekend
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