Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 116

Atlético v Liverpool, City v Uefa and Deschamps v Cantona – Football Weekly Extra

Faye Carruthers, Barry Glendenning, Philippe Auclair and Jonathan Liew discuss the value of an atmosphere, metaphorical guns, Norwegian teenagers, a self-defence low blow and Barça stealing candy from a baby

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We start by discussing Liverpool’s 1-0 defeat in Madrid at a raucous Wanda Metropolitano, which Jürgen Klopp claims influenced the referee into giving Atlético preferential treatment – you can be sure of a noisy Anfield in three weeks’ time.

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Published on February 20, 2020 07:34

Lack of history no hindrance to RB Leipzig's dominance of Spurs | Jonathan Liew

Leipzig are a young club with a young manager, Julian Nagelsmann, who has drilled his team to a very high standard

It was the fans that were the most puzzling part. Thousands of them, packed into the north-east corner of the ground, all immaculately bedecked in Leipzig white and red, all loud and fierce and partisan, all of them singing about a club that barely even existed a decade ago. What had so hastily stoked their passion? At what point in their effortless rise through the divisions had these previously unattached men and women decided to commit to this strange new project, essentially hitching their identity to a can of energy drink?

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Published on February 19, 2020 15:58

Frank Lampard laments Maguire's red-card escape in Chelsea defeat

Maguire admits ‘catching’ Michy Batshuayi off the ball‘I don’t like the way we’re losing games,’ says Lampard

Frank Lampard said after Chelsea’s 2-0 defeat against Manchester United that he believed Harry Maguire should have been sent off.

Television replays showed the United central defender appearing to kick out at Michy Batshuayi as the pair tangled off the field in the first half. The incident was reviewed by video technology and no card was given; to compound Chelsea’s chagrin Maguire went on to score United’s second goal.

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Published on February 17, 2020 15:26

Bruno Fernandes offers vision of a thrusting United midfield after so long

Manchester United’s £60m playmaker showed enough creative spark in win over Chelsea to point towards brighter future

Back in my student days, when I was an editor on the campus newspaper, we ran a regular feature called “George W Bush’s Thought Of The Week”. It was an empty box with a blue border. We were 19 and, as it turned out, not as funny as we thought we were.

For much of the last decade you could make a similar joke about Manchester United’s midfield: an entity that seemed to be defined as much by its absence as by its presence. Through the Fletcher years, the Fellaini years, the Schneiderlin years and more latterly the McTominay years, United’s midfield has felt like a metaphysical puzzle: if it doesn’t do anything, can it actually be said to exist? Even the world-record capture of Paul Pogba seemed only to exacerbate the problem: a sort of footballing anti-matter that merely highlighted the paucity of his context.

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Published on February 17, 2020 14:33

Manchester City backers are not the sort to take Uefa's punishment lying down | Jonathan Liew

There is resentment among City fans about their treatment and word is that Abu Dhabi will be fighting back against Uefa

In 2011 Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the emir of Abu Dhabi and president of the United Arab Emirates, received a letter. It came from a group of Emirati intellectuals inspired by the recent wave of pro-democracy protests sweeping through the Middle East and north Africa, and requested a range of modest reforms, including an extension of the voting franchise which at the time encompassed just 2% of the country’s population.

No marching on the streets. No popular unrest. Certainly no disorder of any kind. Just a letter. Nonetheless, with a regime petrified to the point of paranoia by the spectre of political Islamism, the reprisals would be swift and merciless.

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Published on February 17, 2020 12:45

Manchester City are suffering over two-season Uefa ban, says Mikel Arteta

Arsenal manager worked as City’s No 2 under Pep GuardiolaMourinho mischievously asks if he could get 2018 title

Mikel Arteta has said Pep Guardiola and Manchester City are “suffering” after Uefa handed the club a two‑season ban from the Champions League and a €30m (£25m) fine.

The Arsenal manager, who worked as Guardiola’s assistant for three years until December, said he was shocked at the severity of the sanctions and had been in contact with Guardiola, who reportedly intends to at least see out his City contract, which expires at the end of next season.

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Published on February 16, 2020 12:31

Arsenal turn on the style in second half to thrash Newcastle

As the last few seconds of this game played out, as Arsenal knocked the ball around without inhibition and Newcastle chased them without conviction, a strange and discomfiting sensation seemed to descend on the Emirates Stadium. You might call it, for want of a better word, satisfaction. Not happiness, as such: Arsenal don’t really do happiness. But the soft and sleepy contentment of a game well won, an afternoon without qualms or catastrophic injuries or late drama or existential angst: this was the unfamiliar part.

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Published on February 16, 2020 10:51

Running reaches crossroads as Nike-led footwear arms race infects mainstream | Jonathan Liew

From Olympic and world records down to parkruns, Vaporfly’s sole technology thrives at the expense of a sport’s soul

There was a guy at parkrun the weekend before last wearing a pair of lime-green Vaporflys on the start line. At least he looked suitably sheepish about it – pointedly ignoring the sharp whispers, the discreet pointing, the gentle ribbing from his running club mates. With its clownish platform heels and lurid alien colour scheme, the Vaporfly is not a shoe for blending into the crowd. Even in a field of 600 anonymous runners the eye is always going to be drawn to the one wearing what looks like a mutant tropical fish on each foot. The race began and off he streaked: a blur of lime-green disappearing into the distance, leaving the rest of us, with our boring reasonably-priced shoes and sniggering moral judgments, in his dust.

Of course, it’s easy to scoff when the stakes are minuscule. Turning up for your local Saturday morning fun run in £250 space-age trainers: objectively very funny, and largely analogous to the guy who wears his Lionel Messi astro boots to Wednesday five-a-side (and leaves with several painful stud-shaped indentations in his ankle). What happens, though, when the stakes are far higher? When the prize is an Olympic gold medal, when the audience is global, when the margins are life-changing? Should it matter what shoes the competitors are wearing? And if not, why not?

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Published on February 10, 2020 13:44

The beguiling power of football behind Manchester City’s loss to Spurs | Jonathan Liew

Forget fancy formations and statistics. Tottenham’s win over City proves that the game remains riotously random

There came a point, some time between Ilkay Gündogan missing an open goal and Oleksandr Zinchenko getting himself sent off and Davinson Sánchez heading the ball against his own crossbar from point-blank range, when you realised that whatever they tried, whatever they did, Manchester City were not going to score. It happens. Some days you just catch a whiff of bad juju at breakfast, can’t shake the feeling on the bus to the stadium, miss a couple of early chances and the entire afternoon simply unravels with a strange and unstoppable momentum. Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, once wrote a book called The Ball Doesn’t Go In By Chance. This was the shorter and less acclaimed sequel: By Chance, the Ball Doesn’t Go In.

It’s possible, of course, to reverse-engineer these things with the benefit of hindsight. You could say City were profligate in front of goal, that Kevin De Bruyne lacked his usual precision, that Raheem Sterling looked like a man who needed a rest a month ago, that a more experienced defender than Zinchenko would have realised that the threat of a sprinting Harry Winks on the counter is really not very much of a threat at all. You could study the goals in agonising microscopic detail and draw little coloured arrows on the screen and make sombre statements like: “For me Brian, Fernandinho’s got to be quicker to close him down there, even if we have used digital technology to slow down his movement to one-12th of its usual speed.”

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Published on February 02, 2020 12:42

Chucking Jos Buttler from England’s Test side would be hasty and foolish | Jonathan Liew

England’s golden sapling has been underperforming in South Africa but it would be silly to apply normal rules to one of the game’s most thrilling talents

Spoiler alert: it’s Joe Denly next. And then Zak Crawley. Then, it’ll be time for Ben Stokes to be taken down a peg. Then probably Dom Sibley. Then, sometime next summer, Rory Burns or Jofra Archer. Then Denly again. Welcome to the England Test team in 2020, a toxic chalice of confected jeopardy in which somebody must always be in crisis. Somebody – anybody – must always be hovering just above the trapdoor.

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Published on January 27, 2020 10:08