Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 10

Lewis-Skelly gamble pays off for Tuchel as he balances impatience and reality | Jonathan Liew

Young Arsenal left-back was the brightest light on an intriguing opening night for England’s new head coach

It was the 68th minute when Jarrod Bowen and Anthony Gordon trotted down the steps, stripped and ready to come on. As they waited on the touchline, Thomas Tuchel leaned conspiratorially close, imparting crucial last-minute tactical instructions. You, go left. You, attack this half-space. You, spin him around the diagonal. You, watch for the trapezium pass. Or whatever. I don’t really understand a lot of the jargon they use these days.

Meanwhile Bowen and Gordon listened intently, waiting for the break in play. And waited. And kept waiting. The clock ticked over to 69, 70, 71 minutes. Tuchel was still delivering little tactical messages. You, show him the roses. You, click-clack, flip-flap, bing-bong. You, always on the shoulder blade, always perceiving. On the field, England were still patiently passing the ball around, not out of any particular urgency or desire but just because it seemed to feel quite nice.

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A new Manchester United stadium isn’t about regeneration and never will be | Jonathan Liew

If ‘New Trafford’ is such a nailed-on wealth generator, then why aren’t Ratcliffe and the Glazers funding it themselves?

The roof of the proposed new Manchester United stadium has three points, which is more than can often be said for the team who will play underneath it. According to Nigel Dancey of the architectural firm Foster + Partners, the three giant masts will “create a distinctive presence on the skyline”, presumably in the same way that Roy Keane created a distinctive presence on Alf‑Inge Haaland’s knee.

But of course aesthetic quibbles are the least of our concerns here. If Manchester United want to erect a giant plastic canopy over their new 100,000-seat stadium in a way that evokes a chicken being wrapped before roasting, then frankly who are we to demur? Beauty is in the eye of the freeholder, and all that. The more pressing question – as someone who, unlike part-owner Jim Ratcliffe, still pays income tax in this country – is what exactly the rest of us are getting out of this.

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Relentless Newcastle can fashion new identity in their moment of history | Jonathan Liew

After decades of being a club built on resistance, this could be moment they finally joined football’s establishment

The last few minutes are a kind of perfection. Liverpool score after a video assistant referee delay to make it 2-1. Newcastle restart, pump the ball into the Liverpool corner and from that moment a kind of elemental life force seems to surge through them. This is what you came for. This is how you wanted it, where you wanted it. Remember your training.

Can there be any more forlorn, godforsaken assignment than trying to wrestle Newcastle away from the corner flag in the dying seconds of a Wembley final? Curtis Jones tries and Harvey Elliott tries and Jarell Quansah tries, but these are players desperately unsuited to the task.

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Last chance for Darwin Núñez to turn laughter into legacy at Liverpool

Carabao Cup final offers Liverpool’s entertaining and erratic forward a chance to write himself into club folklore

The prevailing sensation while watching El Chavo del Ocho is to wonder how this thing ever got made in the first place. It’s a low-budget Mexican sitcom that ran from the 70s to the 90s, centred on an eight-year-old orphan who lives in a barrel in an apartment complex. The boy is played by Roberto Gómez Bolaños, who was in his 40s when the series began and his 60s when it ended. Pretty much all the humour is derived from slapstick: situational farce, physical jokes, people getting their heads trapped in buckets. That kind of thing.

Try to imagine ChuckleVision gone global, to the point where it was a genuine cultural touchstone for hundreds of millions, to the point where Paul and Barry Chuckle have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and are unable to walk through Manhattan without being mobbed. That’s El Chavo. Even today it remains one of the most famous comic creations in the history of television: syndicated across the Americas, enthralling successive generations long after it was decommissioned. Including – at some point in early 2000s Uruguay – a young Darwin Núñez.

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Time running out for Liverpool to make themselves serial winners

Premier League almost won but contracts are ending and key players ageing, necessitating a summer of change

It’s the 94th minute at Estádio da Luz in October. Benfica are winning 4-0 and Atlético Madrid are in utter disarray. Zeki Amdouni runs the ball into an entirely unpatrolled Atlético area, gets a free shot from 14 yards and misses a glorious chance to make it 5-0. Nobody cares. Least of all Liverpool, even though this miss will in effect end up, five months later, knocking them out of the Champions League.

Of course, we’re in the realm of the absurd here, although when it comes to the new Champions League format this is a system with margins exactly, and absurdly, this fine. By virtue of this one goal not scored – and of course you could pick out many others – Benfica end up finishing 16th in the 36-team group phase rather than 15th: a position from which they, rather than Paris Saint-Germain, would probably have ended up facing Liverpool in the last 16.

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All-action Vitinha embodies new PSG as Luis Enrique shifts the culture | Jonathan Liew

The PSG midfielder covered every blade of grass at Anfield as his side frustrated Liverpool for 120 minutes

Afterwards, they carried on running. They had run for two hours, run themselves into the ground, run themselves delirious, but at the moment of triumph the players of Paris Saint-Germain somehow managed to find a few more yards in them. Ran towards their fans in the corner, ran in wild circles, tore across the Anfield grass as if it were the Champs-Élysées.

One man did not run. As Désiré Doué’s penalty hit the net, Vitinha simply crumpled, his legs finally giving way, his last drop of energy exhausted. Eventually, with his teammates still celebrating 70 yards away, he hauled himself to his feet and was the first to commiserate with Liverpool’s beaten players. Then, after they had dispersed, he simply stood in the centre circle for a few moments, as if finally claiming the turf for which he had spent the whole night fighting.

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Szczesny’s human touch lends higher meaning to Barcelona’s title charge | Jonathan Liew

The anarchic Barça goalkeeper may not be an idealised athlete but he is writing an extraordinary closing chapter to his career

Accounts differ on just how late Iñaki Peña was to that team meeting in Jeddah. Some reports say two minutes; some go as high as four. Either way, Hansi Flick is nothing if not a coach of fine margins, and by such fine margins was Peña summarily dropped for the Supercopa semi‑final against Athletic Club in January. His replacement: Barcelona’s third goalkeeper, a 34‑year‑old smoker by the name of Wojciech Szczesny.

I think it matters that Szczesny smokes. Not because smoking is cool, which any eye-rolling Gen Z will tell you is no longer actually true, but because there is the idea here of competing motivations: of instant versus delayed gratification, of compromise in a sport that brooks none. The bible of modern football reads: your body is your work. Hone it. Optimise every detail. Squeeze out every last drop of capital it has to offer. Szczesny responds by blowing a cloud of Marlboro Light right in your passive face.

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Liverpool go 15 points clear as Manchester United hold Arsenal: Football Weekly - podcast

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Liew and Nooruddean Choudry as Liverpool extend their lead at the top of the Premier League

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

On the podcast today: Nottingham Forest record a huge win over Manchester City as their dream of Champions League football returning looks even closer to reality. Victories for Chelsea, Brighton and Aston Villa will also have left the champions concerned.

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India see off New Zealand to complete clinical Champions Trophy triumph

Final: India, 254-6, bt N Zealand, 251-7, by four wicketsRohit smashes 76 after Kiwis unable to set big target

And so ends an impressively ­fatuous experiment: what happens when the best side in the world get the dice loaded in their favour? On a ­sultry night at the Dubai International ­Stadium, we got the entirely foreseeable answer. Pakistan’s tournament is India’s glory, by four wickets with six balls to spare: a triumph that felt as immaculately controlled as the months of sabre-rattling and politicking that preceded it.

None of which is to diminish the acclaim due to India’s players: men of skill and men of character, men who step up and deliver under pressure. They did not devise the format in which everyone else travelled, toiled and adapted while they stayed put. They did not construct the apparatus of a global game run in the interests of one country.

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All-action Muñoz to Aït-Nouri: 2024-25 may be year of the wing-back revival | Jonathan Liew

Wide defender unleashed as penalty-box poacher has been a subtle trend, but can the system ever work long-term?

“You’re asking for specialists throughout the team,” Gary Neville said recently of the wing-back system. Which presumably came as news to Daniel Muñoz, who before becoming one of the Premier League’s leading wing-backs had never actually played the position before.

Of course Muñoz – a winger in his youth – always had a strong sense of his true calling. In his first season at Nacional in his native Colombia, he scored seven goals from right-back. In his last full season at Genk in Belgium, he scored 11 as Wouter Vrancken’s side came agonisingly close to the league title. “I always liked being where a striker should be on the pitch,” he told Crystal Palace’s website last year. But it was Palace, and more specifically Oliver Glasner, who gave Muñoz full rein in the role he has now made his own.

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