Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 114
April 6, 2020
English football's blame culture makes it unable to come together | Jonathan Liew
Matt Hancock is merely the latest patsy to offend a game that was dysfunctional even when it was awash with money
I don’t expect to make too many friends saying this, but perhaps it’s time we all gave Matt Hancock a break. Isn’t it typical how, as soon as things take a turn for the worse, everyone starts singling out the health secretary?
Yes, clearly he could be doing more to deflect our attention from the failings of his dangerously shambolic government and the chronic underfunding of the National Health Service. And he wants to do more, too.
Related: Liverpool reverse decision to furlough staff after fierce criticism
If you were trying to design a system hostile to solidarity, you could scarcely do better than English football
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March 31, 2020
ECB could delay the Hundred until 2021 and unveils £60m aid package
The England and Wales Cricket Board has given its strongest hint yet that the launch of the Hundred may have to be delayed until 2021. Announcing a £60m rescue package for the domestic game, the chief executive, Tom Harrison, said the sport’s “core audience” would be the priority amid what he described as “the biggest challenge the ECB has faced in its history”.
The prospect of a significant part of the 2020 season being lost appears to have focused minds, with one upshot being a marked shift in the rhetoric surrounding the flagship 100-ball competition. “It is at times like this when you go back to what is really important,” Harrison said via conference call. “We are going to have county fans who won’t have seen any cricket, players sitting around. All of our decisions are based on those factors.”
Related: Covid-19 checkpoints a possibility as ECB considers staging internationals
Continue reading...March 30, 2020
The pleasures of Small Sport can help us all through lockdown | Jonathan Liew
Jogging round the block. A bike ride in the park. An online yoga class. We must take what we can get
So, how’s quarantine going for you? For me, perhaps the most striking discovery of the past couple of weeks is the revelation that my many deferred and undone tasks – the books not read, the films not watched, the camera rolls not tidied, the shelves not rearranged – were never meant to be done at all.
Shakespeare may famously have written King Lear while in plague quarantine but then Shakespeare never had to contend with Instagram Stories, internet chess and an online quiz with the irresistible title “Name Every England Test Cricketer of the 2010s”. (Ajmal Shahzad is the one that gets most people.)
Related: Tokyo Olympics to start in July 2021 after coronavirus rescheduling
Related: My favourite game: Holyfield v Tyson, WBA heavyweight title fight 1997 | Kevin Mitchell
Continue reading...March 19, 2020
Football crisis, the A-League and Positivity Corner – Football Weekly Extra
Max Rushden, Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Wilson and Jonathan Liew discuss Uefa’s latest announcements, a call for Premier League help down the pyramid, games which didn’t happen and are still happening, plus a new Positivity Corner
Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.
We start by discussing the latest developments in the world of football in relation to the Covid-19 pandemic, before chatting to Nicky Bandini about the parallels this season has with the last Serie A season which could not be completed.
Continue reading...March 16, 2020
Beware sporting disaster capitalists not letting this crisis go to waste | Jonathan Liew
The imminent financial turmoil is likely to exploited by those who already have most of the power and money
You may have heard about the 13‑year‑old schoolboy from Leeds called Oliver Cooper who, it has been reported, was sent home after selling precious squirts of hand sanitiser for 50p each. Cooper’s scheme was rumbled when he recklessly tried to sell a squirt to one of his teachers, although not before he had made £9: a windfall that, according to his mother, is being invested in “a multipack of Doritos” and “a kebab”.
All good clean fun and on reflection almost certainly one of those stories that has been trumped up for the benefit of the gullible internet. But a reminder, too, that even in the thick of a crisis there will always be a few with an eye on the main chance, who in the words of the investor Warren Buffett are prepared to “be greedy when others are fearful”. At a time when it feels like the very terms of our lives are being renegotiated by the day, we should be vigilant of those who see in the crumbling of our social and economic norms an unprecedented opportunity to advance ideas that may, in less turbulent times, be taboo.
Related: Premiership Rugby suspended for five weeks over coronavirus pandemic
Might big European football clubs find this is their moment to form a breakaway league?
Related: Kelso keeps on racing with one man and his dog in the stands | Greg Wood
Continue reading...March 14, 2020
Sport’s enforced absence needs all our forbearance and fortitude | Jonathan Liew
As the industrial complex of global sport clanks to a halt it is only natural to feel shocked, concussed, perhaps even bereft
When did it become real for you? Perhaps it was when the first grisly footage started emerging from Wuhan, of deserted and dystopian streets, of a human catastrophe beyond understanding. Perhaps it was when an entire airline went bust, when plans and schemes were thrown into disarray. Perhaps it was when the Italian government decided in effect to put an entire nation of 60 million people under house arrest or when every school in Ireland shut down.
Or perhaps it was when they called off Fulham v Brentford on Friday night. If so, there’s no need to feel ashamed or abashed about it: for so many of us, sport isn’t simply a way of passing the time but a way of marking it. It offers a liturgy, a structure on which to measure the passing days and seasons. Tuesday and Wednesday: Champions League. Thursday: Premier League darts. Friday night: Super League rugby. And then the entire weekend, from the Saturday lunchtime kick-off to the PGA golf on Sunday night: hours and hours of it, all stretched out before us like a delicious picnic. In frightening times, virus or no virus, these are the rituals that offer the veneer of normality, a background noise as reassuring and immutable as the ticking of the clock.
Related: Karren Brady calls for Premier League to be made ‘null and void’ over coronavirus
The absence of sport offers a microcosm of the atomisation we can expect in the housebound weeks ahead
Related: Nigel Pearson: ‘It's the right decision to stop playing, even if it was made under duress'
Continue reading...March 12, 2020
Criticism of Diego Simeone's Atlético methods rooted in football snobbery | Jonathan Liew
Drilling a team to be totally secure in defence is no less an art form than producing one that relentlessly attacks, despite what Klopp might say
The acid reflux of defeat was rising in Jürgen Klopp’s throat, and you could tell he was trying to swallow it down before it went any further. “I realise I am a really bad loser,” he admitted. “They beat us, and we have to accept that. We accept that, of course.”
Given what else the Liverpool manager would say following Liverpool’s 3-2 defeat to Atlético Madrid on Wednesday night, you have to wonder exactly how Klopp defines not accepting it. Shock, disappointment, a sense of smouldering injustice: all these are accepted and acceptable tropes for the manager of a team who have had 34 shots at goal, won the xG 3.52-1.18 on the night, and nevertheless been dumped out of Europe at the first knockout stage.
Related: Liverpool's season threatens limp end after missed European opportunity | Jonathan Wilson
Continue reading...March 11, 2020
Spurs ponder where it all went wrong but this is as vital a moment as ever | Jonathan Liew
Tottenham’s future is hazy as players and fans pick over the post-mortem but no one factor lead to the failure in Leipzig
One by one the Spurs players filed past, clutching their vanity bags and refuelling snacks, politely spurning all interview requests. “I don’t want to talk,” Érik Lamela said with an apologetic expression as he bit into a cream cheese bagel. “Sorry,” whispered Japhet Tanganga, taking a swig of his energy drink. Even Harry Winks, normally such a keen and fluent talker, simply burrowed his face into his hooded tracksuit and looked straight ahead.
To a man they looked bereft, distraught, stunned. As if they had just lost a final in injury time, rather than been pinged 4-0 on aggregate by a far superior team. Which on one level felt slightly surprising, given what they must have suspected would happen here in Leipzig after losing the first leg at home. Given also that for weeks their manager has been telling everyone who will listen how weak they are.
Related: All players on Leipzig bench would play in my Spurs team, says José Mourinho
Related: Leipzig leave Lloris squirming and hurry Mourinho's stale Spurs to the exit
Related: Farewell not just to a Champions League campaign but also a Spurs era | Jonathan Liew
Continue reading...March 10, 2020
Farewell not just to a Champions League campaign but also a Spurs era | Jonathan Liew
Only 10 months after Tottenham reached the European Cup final they hit the buffers in Leipzig – it looks like a long way back
So farewell then, Tottenham. Who knows when our paths will cross again? A fixture they embarked upon with a puncher’s chance and plenty of underdog spirit ended merely in crippling defeat and more questions. A broken team that under the joyless stewardship of José Mourinho has been broken still further, they looked here exactly what they are: the eighth‑best team in the Premier League, exhausted and error-prone, bad in defence and bad in attack, with no discernible long-term strategy and no identifiable short-term plan.
Related: RB Leipzig leave Lloris squirming and hurry Mourinho's stale Spurs to the exit
Related: Champions League return a tall order for Tottenham, admits José Mourinho
Related: Josip Ilicic scores four as Atalanta beat Valencia to continue European dream
Continue reading...March 9, 2020
Marcelo Bielsa: a method actor in football's theatre of the absurd | Jonathan Liew
Leeds are homing in on a Premier League return, and it is hard to know just what the top flight will make of their unique and brilliant manager
It’s happening. Mateusz Klich plays a delicious back-heel to Pablo Hernández. It’s definitely happening. Hernández plays a first-time pass into the space that will shortly be occupied by Jack Harrison. This is not a drill. Harrison takes a look, doesn’t like what he sees, takes a touch, takes another look, crosses. The cross is deep, sailing over a sea of bobbing heads to the far post where Luke Ayling, having sprinted 60 yards from right-back, calmly smashes a volley into the roof of the net. You know, as you do. It’s happening. At this exact moment, the only able-bodied person at Elland Road not on their feet is Marcelo Bielsa. While his substitutes and coaching staff storm the pitch, while grown men scream “WHAT A GOAL! WHAT A GOAL!”, Bielsa remains perched on his bucket, takes a slow, measured sip of his coffee, as blank and expressionless as if this were a film he’s seen before.
In a way, he has. A few hours after Leeds had beaten Huddersfield 2-0 on Saturday, the club’s social media people put out a video of a recent training session at Thorp Arch, in which Ayling scores a near-perfect replica of that volleyed goal. Perhaps this is the curse of the obsessive: once you’ve seen all the tapes, logged every data point, mapped out every possible occurrence, reality itself must seem like a replay of something that everyone else is watching for the first time.
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