Jonathan Wilson's Blog, page 99
May 16, 2020
Football has always adapted to hard times. Its return might help us feel less alone | Jonathan Wilson
Premier League was right to stop when it did but with every other UK industry looking at how to restart, why not football?
It is now 10 weeks since league football was last played in England, the longest suspension of the game since the inauguration of the League in 1888 (although there used to be a respectful pause for three months in the summer for cricket). Even during the wars, football did not stop for as long as this. As the Bundesliga resumes and the Premier League steps up its plans for a restart, it’s worth considering why. Money may be a prime driving force now, but that hasn’t always been the case; since it was invented there has been an urge to get football played.
Related: Single failed Covid-19 test spells quarantine for Premier League squads
Related: Premier League's Covid-19 code of conduct form explained | David Hytner
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May 9, 2020
PSG's record £198m splurge on Neymar will stand for years as symbol of crisis | Jonathan Wilson
Elite clubs will prey on desperate ones in the hunt for bargains as the game reels from its biggest financial hit since the 1930s
Even at the time – in 2017 – the fee Paris Saint-Germain paid Barcelona for Neymar was extraordinary: £198m was 125% more than the previous record, set a year earlier when Manchester United had signed Paul Pogba from Juventus. Transfer records simply aren’t broken by that amount in the usual run of things. It was a statement signing, a deal designed not only to land the player, but to emphasise PSG’s financial power, to highlight their status as a super-club while inflating the market to a level at which only the mega-rich could compete.
Three years on, with football suspended across the globe and major leagues desperately seeking ways to get games on to stave off financial apocalypse, the world looks very different. A model predicated on constant growth has received an abrupt shock.
Related: Player wages and contracts will bankrupt EFL clubs: it's time for the PFA to act | Mark Palios
Related: World Cup stunning moments: the Conte Verde's trip to Uruguay in 1930
Related: Premier League critics should recognise football cannot wait for ever | Jonathan Wilson
Continue reading...May 2, 2020
Premier League critics should recognise football cannot wait for ever | Jonathan Wilson
The objections to restart plans are understandable and the game should pay attention, but ultimately clubs need to play games to survive
With each week the plans become a little more refined and with each week any final decision is pushed back. Football may return, and this is how it may look if it does, but nobody is sure, and any proposed date can only be provisional. Which is as it should be. In an age that often favours decisiveness over the decision itself, there is something vaguely comforting about a process that accepts the wisdom of waiting.
But in the background there is a crucial, nagging voice, and what it is saying is this: if football isn’t prepared to return, at least initially, in a form very different to the one it took before the virus, it may not return for a very long time – and for many clubs that means never.
Related: Premier League must exercise caution in return fraught with lethal hazards | David Conn
The vital point, perhaps, is this: that measures may be necessary not only for this season but for next as well
Related: Amiens and Lyon threaten further action after Ligue 1 issues final table
Continue reading...April 25, 2020
Sunderland's Victorian all-stars blazed trail for money's rule of football
The 5-3 win over the Scottish champions, Hearts, by the 1895 First Division winners was set against a backdrop of unease
The Club World Cup has never stimulated universal enthusiasm. “The whole case goes to show how undesirable such events are from a sporting point of view, and what a prostitution of titles they are,” raged the Edinburgh Evening News, but that was 1895 and it wasn’t talking about the soft-power festival of greed that, in the distant days before the virus, was supposed to be taking place in China in the summer of 2021.
Rather it was talking about the first meeting of league winners of England and Scotland, of the match played 125 years ago on Monday, in which Sunderland became world champions.
Related: The English Game's few charms lie in the background, not centre stage | Jonathan Wilson
Related: My favourite game: Sunderland v Chelsea, 1992 FA Cup replay | Jonathan Wilson
Related: Pivotal Pivatelli: how random events helped elevate two great Milan sides | Jonathan Wilson
Continue reading...April 23, 2020
Inverting Jonathan Wilson, plus the Toon takeover tussle – Football Weekly Extra
Max Rushden, Barry, Glendenning, and Jonathan Wilson discuss Roker Park, an Indian monastery, Jimmy Hill, how best-selling books come together, Amnesty International v the Public Investment Fund and Dolly Parton
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Max and Barry talk with Jonathan Wilson about his early memories of football, why his games of Subbuteo took much longer than they should, how he got his first break in writing and how Inverting The Pyramid has changed his life.
April 18, 2020
Carlos's 1986 World Cup foul and the value of rethinking our villains | Jonathan Wilson
For years I thought I hated a goalkeeper for denying Bruno Bellone and it seemed a black-and-white case. Until I met him
Football can give you completely the wrong idea about people. One incident in one match can skew the perception. For years I thought I hated Carlos, the Brazil goalkeeper who pulled back Bruno Bellone after the France forward had gone round him in the 1986 World Cup quarter-final and somehow went unpunished.
How, four years after Harald Schumacher’s horrendous assault on Patrick Battiston, could that glorious France – Platini! Tigana! Giresse! – be cheated once again by a goalkeeper? Carlos’s offence had nothing like the raw violence of Schumacher’s, but it was cynical. And so, for compounding the injustice of Seville 1982, he went on the blacklist.
Related: World Cup questions: Why didn’t the great Dutch teams of the 1990s win it? | Barney Ronay
Related: David Squires on ... Brazil v France and their epic 1986 World Cup quarter-final
Continue reading...April 14, 2020
My favourite game: Sunderland v Chelsea, 1992 FA Cup replay | Jonathan Wilson
The night many Sunderland fans heard the Roker Roar for the first time and our team felt like they mattered
What stands out still is the silences. After every line of every chant, the silence was complete: everybody was joining in, nobody shuffling or muttering, 26,000 people united. We’d heard the stories, of course. We knew about the Roker Roar. We thought we’d heard it – but we hadn’t, not till then, not till the night Sunderland beat Chelsea to reach the 1992 FA Cup semi-final.
The sense that something extraordinary might be happening came with a 3-2 win at West Ham in a fifth-round replay. We were second division, hopeless. Denis Smith had been sacked at Christmas and his assistant Malcolm Crosby, who looked like Robin Williams playing the wacky manager of a toy shop in an oversized prosthetic nose, took over on a caretaker basis. Then we nicked a draw at Chelsea with a late John Byrne header. None of this made any sense. We clearly weren’t any good but somehow, in the Cup, fortune seemed with us.
Continue reading...April 13, 2020
Italy v Brazil 1982: Paolo Rossi, samba skills and classic kits – Football Weekly
Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning, Barney Ronay and Jonathan Wilson discuss the 1982 World Cup meeting between Italy and Brazil, widely regarded as one of the best and most significant games of all time
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Max, Barry, Barney and Jonathan discuss Italy 3-2 Brazil, a game whose significance has echoed through time as a major marker in the development of football tactics. The kits are really nice, too.
Continue reading...April 11, 2020
Pivotal Pivatelli: how random events helped elevate two great Milan sides | Jonathan Wilson
Gino Pivatelli does not have a prominent place in the hearts of Milan fans but a foul in a European Cup final and telling Arrigo Sacchi he wasn’t good enough changed history
You can plan, you can plan and you can plan some more and then something happens over which you had no control, that you couldn’t reasonably have been expected to foresee, and everything changes. That’s not to say that there’s no point in coaches and directors planning, but it is to say that there are times when entirely external events take control – and that doesn’t have to mean something as enormous as coronavirus. Football can turn on events that seem random, unconnected, unpredictable – the bounce of a ball, the shape of the goalposts, the eruption of an Icelandic volcano – or on the unlikely influence of one man.
Take, for example, the case of Gino Pivatelli, a forward for Bologna, Verona and Napoli who was top scorer in Serie A in 1955-56 and won seven caps for Italy. At the end of his career, he played 37 games for Milan, by which time he had lost some of his pace and sharpness in front of goal. He never managed them. And yet without him, the first two of their eras of European pre-eminence may never have come about.
Continue reading...April 4, 2020
The English Game's few charms lie in the background, not centre stage | Jonathan Wilson
The latest series from Julian Fellowes starts badly and barely improves but it is a reminder football has never stood still
You can see how The English Game must have sounded in conception. It’s the birth of football. It’s toffs against proles, the rivalry of one of the great aristocrats of the early game, Lord Arthur Kinnaird, and the Glaswegian stonemason who was the first great professional, Fergus Suter. It’s about an idea going out into the world and being profoundly changed when it is taken up by the masses.
But Netflix’s new series comes nowhere near what it might have been, and is little more than a mishmash of Downton Abbey stereotypes and trouble-at-mill cliches. The toffs are habitually awful, the banks are always foreclosing, and the proles, salt-of-the-earth brawlers and charmers that they are, can’t help themselves but get everybody unhelpfully pregnant.
Related: The English Game review – Julian Fellowes football drama is an own goal
Related: David Squires on … The English Premier League Game
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