Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 20

Tottenham v Arsenal: blood feud or a bit of banter for bragging rights?

The Observer travels deep into the heart of north London to explore whether the bitter rivalry is all it’s cracked up to be

Stoke Newington on the verge of derby weekend is not a place for the faint of heart. Located right in the centre of the bitter turf war between the ­historic rivals Arsenal and Tottenham, even on a sunny Friday lunchtime its leafy parks and terrace-lined streets drip with menace. Take a wrong turn, or catch the wrong eye, and nobody can really say what will happen next. A King Charles spaniel yowls ferally on the approach to Clissold Park. The blood on the pavement outside the bakery turns out, on closer inspection, to be jam from a doughnut.

Such is the omertà around this 111-year feud, which resumes on Sunday afternoon at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, that local business owners feign impartiality or even ignorance of the forthcoming fixture, presumably wary of reprisals from rival fans. “Is it Spurs v Arsenal this weekend?” says a woman arranging the display of a local flower shop, who gives her name only as Laura. “I’m not much of a football fan.”

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Rico Lewis plugs in and offers new perspective on old left-back problem | Jonathan Liew

The Manchester City defender showed the influence of Pep Guardiola as he flummoxed Finland at Wembley

New vibes. New toys. New roles and perhaps even new rules. And, yes, the more familiar sight of Harry Kane banging in a couple of goals and wheeling off to the corner flag in that slightly leaden jog of his: less a man who has just scored for his country and more a guy who has just secured quite a good parking space.

But perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this routine win secured against routine opposition was just how mystifyingly un-routine it felt in parts: the same team, but somehow lit in a different way, filmed from different angles. It’s still probably too early to say whether this is the Lee Carsley effect. But it definitely feels like the No Gareth effect.

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Paris 2024 must learn from London’s broken promises if legacy is to be fulfilled | Jonathan Liew

Hosting the Olympics and Paralympics does bring change, but that transformation comes at a cost

Big news last week on the Olympic Park slide. Perhaps you missed it amid the euphoria and phantasmagoria of Sunday night’s Paralympic closing ceremony, as the curtain finally came down on the vivid summer panorama that was Paris 2024. In the circumstances, then, the chequered fate of the ArcelorMittal Orbit – the Anish Kapoor sculpture in east London that like all the best art was named after a global steel conglomerate and fitted with a giant slide against its creator’s wishes – stands as a kind of totemic, even cautionary Olympic tale.

Officially, the Orbit has been closed since the start of 2024 for maintenance work. In practice, visitor numbers have emerged largely unscathed. Original projections of 350,000 a year were, it turns out, just another of London 2012’s grand numerical fictions. The true figure averages out at about 93,000, which given its steep maintenance costs means London taxpayers are still effectively paying for it.

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Differing reactions mark closing stages of Luka Modric’s and Ronaldo’s careers

Croatia’s and Portugal’s greatest face each other in Lisbon with neither yet ready to tear himself away from international football

People have been trying to retire Luka Modric for more than six years. It was in the aftermath of the 2018 World Cup that friends first gently began to broach the subject: his contemporaries Mario Mandzukic and Vedran Corluka had called it a day after Croatia’s defeat in the final, and Modric himself knew there would be a certain elegiac poetry in taking his curtain call at the moment of his country’s greatest achievement. Plaudits ringing in his ears, the Golden Ball in his grasp. Leave them wanting more, and all that. But still, something in him rebelled.

“My heart told me to stay,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “Playing for your national team is one of the most fulfilling experiences; I still want to feel it. I feel fit and motivated. It’s true that retiring after the silver medal in Russia would have left the biggest impression. But I don’t care much about impressions.”

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Go big or go gnome: how Chelsea’s transfer dealings inspired my new venture | Jonathan Liew

Asking a rival to take one of your best players for no fee while still paying most of his wages is a level of hustle I cannot match

There is a famous satirical tweet that goes something like: “Last night I asked my landlord to increase my rent. That’s how much I believe in my grind/hustle.” Well, last week, Chelsea asked one of their biggest rivals to take one of their best players for no fee, with no obligation to buy and with Chelsea still paying most of his wages. Clearly, Clearlake Capital’s belief in their grind/hustle has some way to run.

For all this, there are plenty of people out there who will tell you that Chelsea’s decision to play Raheem Sterling in all six of their pre-season fixtures, then decide to sell him, then fail to sell him, then pay him £200,000 a week to play for Arsenal, is a stroke of underrated genius, 4D strategising on a level the financially illiterate among us will never truly grasp. In which case, I have a luxury hotel for you to sell yourself.

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Less is more: LA Olympic Games do not need every sport so let’s cut your favourite | Jonathan Liew

With five extra sports at LA 2028, events that feel peripheral, repetitive or involve horses should face the chop

Behold the giant feast. Courses upon courses. Over the past 17 days this has been a city engorged, its every nook and crevice stuffed with sport, to the point where they had to parcel some of it off to the outskirts and even wrap some of it up in a doggy bag and send it to Tahiti.

Are we not sated? As we stagger down the boulevards with a toothpick and a smug burp, trying not to think of the indigestion of Monday morning, the memory of Paris 2024 remains fresh and pristine. This remains the greatest sporting event on Earth, having weathered terrorism, plague, Nazis and the 1904 marathon, when several competitors were chased off the route by dogs and the man who finished first turned out to have had a ride in a car.

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Paris Olympics day 15: GB take both 4x400m bronzes, Bell shines in 1500m, US win basketball gold and more – as it happened

USA win fifth successive men’s basketball gold, New Zealand’s Hamish Kerr claims men’s high jump, USWNT win women’s football gold and more.

Jerry Spring has sent in a lovely email about sport climbing, which I was delighted to receive.

Glad you have enjoyed climbing. If you’ve never tried it , i hope you can get to your local gym or outside. It is just pure fun as you say.

Sadly there are some issues over some athletes restricting their weight and potential longterm effects on joints... but there is increasingly awareness so I hope these get resolved.

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Hayes courts disaster but leaves instant mark with US Olympic football gold | Jonathan Liew

Ex-Chelsea manager dropped Rose Lavelle and her team struggled to create chances but Hayes is now in credit

She checks her watch. She claps her hands. She points at things. She shouts at people. Trinity Rodman jogs past her on her way up the left ­touchline and she gives her a pat on the back. She is basically trying to convince herself that there are still jobs to do when, in fact, her work is done. We are deep into injury time, and Emma Hayes can no more ­influence this Olympic final than the fan in the Uncle Sam hat sitting 50 yards above her.

Finally, the whistle. The ­explosion. Hayes raises her arms, looks ­skywards, lets out a roar. It is, ­perhaps, the only moment of personal indulgence she will allow herself. While her victorious players are dancing in a huddle, Hayes has no interest in thrusting herself into the middle, a move known these days as the “Jorge Vilda”. Instead she walks towards the devastated Brazilian players, offers them a word of comfort, seeks out the retiring Marta to pay her respects.

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Fish out of water: why Léon Marchand is right to snub French chatshow | Jonathan Liew

Despite being the most famous man in France, perhaps the winner of four swimming golds already senses that Olympic champions are legends for a lifetime, stars for only a fortnight

Did Léon Marchand deliver a humiliating snub to Quels Jeux!? Let’s delve into the story that has scandalised the whole of France, if by “scandalised” you mean “mildly diverted” and by “whole” you mean the sort of people who frequent the gossip columns of downmarket newspapers and like to make snap judgments about people they’ve never met.

Quels Jeux!, the live late-night chatshow on France 2, has been one of the television smashes of the Games, delivering audiences of up to three million in its post-watershed graveyard slot. Filmed in the Club France headquarters in La Villette, it is where a procession of medal-winning French athletes have taken their curtain call, answering lighthearted and embarrassingly personal questions in front of a screeching and probably drunk studio audience.

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Nafi Thiam pushed to last drop of sweat by Katarina Johnson-Thompson

A classic clash between two giants of the heptathlon who deserve more recognition than they get from their most gruelling event

Nafi Thiam looks worried. Katarina Johnson-Thompson looks worried. It’s a little after 8.30pm and the final race of the heptathlon is about to start, but really these are largely incidental details. There is a pretty good chance that at any randomly chosen moment in their week, Thiam and Johnson-Thompson can be found mid‑frown, wearing the grave and harried expression of someone constantly fretting that they’ve left the front door unlocked.

Perhaps this is simply the heptathlete’s condition. There are never enough training hours in the day. There is always something that needs fixing, some injury niggle that won’t go away. The heptathlete cannot strut their way around the arena, strike a pose for the cameras, ease down towards the end of their heat. Every second, every fraction of that second, every last joule of energy in their body, needs to be directed towards those seven gruelling events, and the margins that decide them.

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