Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 112

Marcus Rashford's campaign victory came from football's power to effect change | Jonathan Liew

Ignore the cynical grumblings and, as this inspiring 22-year-old says, concentrate on what can be done when we work together

Some PR stunt. In securing free school meals for deprived children in England over the summer holidays, Marcus Rashford has generated more tangible good with his voice than he ever will with his feet. In forcing the prime minister into a hasty spin of the heels, Rashford has delivered a timely reminder that football’s influence and cultural currency stretch well beyond its own borders. And by reaching beyond those borders in an urgent and worthwhile cause, he has demonstrated the power of common resolve and common purpose, at a time when – as he himself put it – society “appears to be more divided than ever”.

I don’t even know what to say.
Just look at what we can do when we come together, THIS is England in 2020.

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Published on June 16, 2020 11:06

Reaction to the powerbroker behind Fury v Joshua is a mirror to boxing itself | Jonathan Liew

Boxing has always been a flawed and dangerous game – the emergence of Daniel Kinahan is no betrayal of the sport

The footage is horrible, harrowing, traumatic. All the same, you can’t look away. The scene is the Regency hotel in Dublin in February 2016, the event a nondescript weigh-in before the big fight the following night. There’s terrible rock music playing. A couple of gormless-looking bald men standing on the podium bearing clipboards. A local cruiserweight called Gary Sweeney steps on to the scales in blue Superman briefs. The gormless bald men peer forward and write on their clipboards. Sweeney steps aside. All of a sudden, we hear the whip-crack of an assault rifle.

At which point, a lot of things happen at once. There’s breaking glass, chairs being overturned. We see a blurred Sweeney, still in his briefs, desperately fleeing for safety through a side door. Through the pop-pop of bullets and the din of grown men shouting, a single piercing child’s voice: “Daddy, what was that?” Within minutes the gunmen have departed, leaving one man dead and two wounded. But the main target of the attack, according to Irish police, has already left the building. Daniel Kinahan will live to fight another day.

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Published on June 15, 2020 12:13

Black Lives Matter has exposed sport's underlying failure to deal with racism | Jonathan Liew

The discussion needs to go on every day and every week, once the protests have died down and live sport has started again

The Premier League has decided that next week, black lives will matter. Or at least, it has decreed – at the behest of several club captains – that for the opening round of fixtures when the season resumes next week, the phrase “Black Lives Matter” can be borne on players’ shirts, in place of their names. It hasn’t formally decided whether black lives will matter beyond next week or for the rest of the season. But rest assured it will be consulting key stakeholders and making an announcement in due course.

All flippancy aside, it’s perhaps instructive to mark out the steps that have brought us to this point. In and of itself, the shirt messages are a laughably piffling gesture: a bit of fabric stitched to another bit of fabric, a show of support with the emphasis on the former rather than the latter. Yet it’s a gesture that would still have been inconceivable just a few years ago; perhaps even a few weeks ago, before the killing of George Floyd incited a wave of righteous fury that has challenged the very assumptions and orthodoxies upon which our society was built and in so doing forced all of us – sport included – to take a look at ourselves.

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Published on June 13, 2020 00:05

George Floyd's killing matters too much for corporate sport's on-brand insincerity | Jonathan Liew

Statements barely addressing an unarmed black man’s death are closer to obligation than any commitment to social justice

On Saturday, five days after the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota, the NFL spoke out. It released a short statement by its commissioner, Roger Goodell, offering his condolences to the Floyd family, stating the “urgent need for action” without identifying what that action might be, addressing “systemic issues” without specifying what those issues were. The words “police”, “black” and “racism” were not mentioned. It was a word salad, reading like the cryptic statement of a surly 61-year-old teenager, fed through the yoghurt pot of a corporate communications department, and spat out on to the internet in a shareable meme format.

The NFL’s commitment to social justice may have come across a little more sincerely had the sport not so ruthlessly ostracised the San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick when he made his on-field protests against police brutality in 2016 and 2017. As Joe Lockhart, the league’s former vice-president, admitted last week, the decision by NFL owners not to hire Kaepernick was an ideological choice. “No owner was willing to put the business at risk over this issue,” he said. And as Goodell himself put it at an owners’ meeting in Texas last December: “We’ve moved on.”

There is virtually no trend, no movement, no conversation that big brands will not try to centre on themselves

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Published on June 02, 2020 11:00

Football is back and all it took was the spectre of financial catastrophe | Jonathan Liew

Project Restart has shrunk the sport to an elite pursuit within a sterile bubble, throwing up questions no one can answer

Well done, everyone: we did it. They said it wasn’t possible. They said it wasn’t safe. They said it would be tactless to start up one of the world’s most lucrative sports leagues while thousands are dying. They said it wouldn’t be a fair competition. They may still be right about all of this, of course. More on that in a moment.

But for now, football is back. Watch it. Drink it in. Lose yourself in a pure six-week football bender: 92 Premier League fixtures, spread across every day of the week and every conceivable time slot, all of it live on television, much of it free to air. Take that, null-and-voiders; dry your tears, PPG; up yours, Troy Deeney. Football is back and all it took was the spectre of financial catastrophe and the sight of Germany handling things far more adeptly.

Rarely has football felt less like a vital service and more like a commodity

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Published on May 29, 2020 16:01

Rafael Nadal the beacon of sport's old power despite new normal

Lockdown has revealed a lot about athletes but tennis’ king of clay will want to catapult us back in time come September

One of the most refreshing aspects of sporting lockdown, in the absence of watching athletes do things, has been watching athletes talking. Properly talking, I mean. Most of the time, what normally passes for athletes talking is actually just athletes making noises: contrived and arbitrated noises, synthetic to the point of worthlessness.

Here, sweaty athlete at your most distracted and dishevelled: please summarise your many as-yet unprocessed emotions in a pithy, uncontroversial 30-second soundbite to a live audience of millions in front of a bit of sponsored cardboard, before you’ve even had a chance to see your loved ones. What’s that? Great to get the win, you say? Illuminating stuff. Back to the studio.

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Published on May 25, 2020 12:00

Barry Hearn: 'The mental health of a nation is strengthened by sport'

The promoter says the balance sheet feels irrelevant amid a pandemic but hopes snooker will lead live sport’s return

“It’s a strange thing about this covid epidemic,” Barry Hearn says, in a contemplative mood. “I find it really stimulating in a bizarre way. We’re against the odds, everything’s in bits, everyone’s nervous. It’s a dreadful thing for so many people. And yet life must go on. And sport in particular.”

Perhaps it will not remotely surprise you that even in our darkest hour, Hearn has somehow managed to locate the silver lining. Salesmanship always did come naturally to the veteran promoter, albeit one currently devoid of any events to promote. It is why he enthuses about the return of live sport with the zeal of an evangelist, one who also just so happens to have shares in the church.

I had a mild heart attack. I've just got the OK to do 50 minutes of exercise a day – my little treat

We judge our success on profit and loss but it's not necessarily so important any more

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Published on May 25, 2020 07:11

Illicit haircuts, Celtic's title and lifting morale – Football Weekly Extra

Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and Jonathan Liew discuss the Premier League’s return to training, rogue trims, Celtic being crowned champions of Scotland, the future of women’s football and plenty more

Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

Max, Barry, Jonathan Wilson and Jonathan Liew discuss the latest news surrounding the return of football in Britain, with Celtic crowned champions and a rift growing in England’s lower leagues.

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Published on May 21, 2020 09:29

Ghost player for the ghost game: Thomas Müller is perfect for the pandemic | Jonathan Liew

Bayern Munich returned on Sunday and so did the forward for whom spatial distancing is his entire job

The silence, really, is only a problem if you want it to be a problem. We football fans are an adaptable bunch. What at first feels disconcertingly novel soon becomes part of the furniture. We survived animated advertising hoardings. We survived Saturday 12.30pm kick-offs. We survived club mascots taking part in the minute’s silence. We’ll get through this too.

Perhaps, conversely, it helps to see the silence as an opportunity. As live Bundesliga football returned to our screens over the weekend amid empty stadiums and eerie hush, it was only natural to wonder how the aural void could be filled. Canned crowd noise feels a bit North Korea: Behold, Our Glorious Footballers Undertaking Athletic Endeavours For The Edification Of A Grateful Nation! If it has to be a crowd, might as well make it a real one: simply assemble the home club’s millions of fans on one giant Zoom call, and pipe in the real-time mayhem.

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Published on May 19, 2020 00:00

It's offensive for Premier League clubs to suggest they are the ones at financial risk | Jonathan Liew

Is the Premier League vital when grassroots organisations, lower-league clubs and the women’s game are under threat?

Another week, another Zoom. On the morning after the 2019-20 Premier League was supposed to finish, its 20 clubs will once again gather in their virtual conference room to decide how it will actually finish. There, emboldened by the successful resumption of the Bundesliga over the weekend, they will vote on the league’s protocols for returning to training, before debating how they will play the season’s 92 remaining fixtures, and what should happen if they cannot.

If the first part should be simple enough – the clubs are overwhelmingly expected to vote through the new medical protocols, allowing players to return to formal training by Tuesday morning – then what follows promises to be a good deal more contentious. A potential restart date will be mooted, with 19 June seeming to be the frontrunner at present. At which point, the same people who brought us the VAR armpit debacle will try to convince us, with an entirely straight face, that they can run an impenetrable bio-secure league in the midst of a global pandemic.

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Published on May 17, 2020 09:50