Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 28

Dortmund try to outrun reality before sipping from cup of sadness again | Jonathan Liew

Runners-up find out that playing well is often not enough against Madrid after spurning chances and gifting goals away

The medal ceremony may be the most painful bit. Borussia Dortmund do not want to receive them, and judging by the impatience of his manner, Uefa’s Aleksander Ceferin has very little interest in handing them out. And so the medals are not so much draped around Dortmund necks as shoved on them, with a certain peremptory curtness, and without the faintest pretence that Ceferin knows or cares who most of the recipients are.

Jadon Sancho, to be fair, gets a faint flicker of recognition, a microscopic straightening of the lips only detectable by VAR. Karim Adeyemi, the man who missed those two big chances in the first half, receives a “well, what can you do” shrug. None of the rest, even the departing Marco Reus, are granted so much as eye contact by the Uefa president. Julian Ryerson rips his medal off at the first opportunity. Edin Terzic, the coach, is moist in the eyes. Meanwhile there are Dortmund fans in the stands with crumpled faces, broken and vengeful. Angry at whoever dared allow them to hope.

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Dortmund plot Champions League final shock after adapting to thrive

Wembley underdogs have shed their youth-oriented, profit-hungry model to reach new heights with a tougher team

All week, and by small degrees, London has been turning yellow and black. Stickers on Tube escalators. Scarves tied to lampposts. A BVB-emblazoned padlock on the banks of the Thames at Westminster. Wide-eyed fans milling through the pubs of Soho, wincing at the beer prices. Trying to soak up every last available morsel of enjoyment from the experience before – you know – the actual football starts.

It’s a largely moot point whether Borussia Dortmund are the biggest final outsiders in the modern history of the Champions League. Perhaps Internazionale last season, perhaps Liverpool in 2005. Either way, given the opposition, their fifth-placed finish in the Bundesliga and the charmed passage they have enjoyed to the final, few give them a hope at Wembley on Saturday night.

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Olympiakos make history, while Wembley awaits for Dortmund and Real Madrid: Football Weekly Extra – podcast

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Liew, Mark Langdon and Stephen Kountourou as Olympiakos win their first major European trophy

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: Olympiakos are the first Greek team to win a major European trophy, and while the final itself wasn’t a classic, success for teams like them is surely why the Conference League was created. What a night for manager José Luis Mendilibar and heartache for Fiorentina, who lose in the final again.

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Olympiakos make history, while Wembley awaits for Dortmund and Real Madrid: Football Weekly Extra - podcast

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Liew, Mark Langdon and Stephen Kountourou as Olympiakos win their first major European trophy

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: Olympiakos are the first Greek team to win a major European trophy, and while the final itself wasn’t a classic, success for teams like them is surely why the Conference League was created. What a night for manager José Luis Mendilibar and heartache for Fiorentina, who lose in the final again.

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Wembley has lost that loving feeling, a corporate nirvana missing its soul | Jonathan Liew

Wembley is everywhere, and everywhere is Wembley. But the more bases it tries to cover, the less special it becomes

The Wembley Stadium lasagne had one major design flaw, and it’s not the one you think. You may remember – right at the start of the pandemic – the Football Association being forced to deny a viral WhatsApp story that the stadium was being used to bake a giant lasagne to feed a hungry nation. And no, if you gave it even a moment’s consideration, the undersoil pitch heating probably wouldn’t have been strong enough to recreate oven conditions. That’s before you even get to the issue of the roof not being fully retractable.

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that we could surmount these technical obstacles and get the thing cooked. Let’s imagine our national stadium is now a delicious, bubbling mess of layered pasta sheets, ragu, bechamel and melted cheese. Now to divide the thing up and get it to those who need it most. And this – hypothetically speaking – is where the problems begin.

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Manchester United rediscover their identity in Red Devil redemption | Jonathan Liew

Erik ten Hag may be heading for the exit, but United’s FA Cup final display was the blueprint for how they should be playing

They were still out there an hour later, catching the last few rays of evening sunshine, wringing out this moment for every last drop of joy in it. Everyone wanted a go with the trophy. Some simply hoisted it like a kettlebell. Some hugged it close like a child. There was a time when Manchester United would win these finals, pose for photos and disappear back up the M6. Not now. Everyone knows how precious these moments are, how rarely they can come along, how closely they need to be treasured.

And at the end of this Red Devil redemption, Erik ten Hag sought out the two men responsible. In fact many men had authored this triumph, from the brutal Bruno Fernandes to the indomitable Lisandro Martínez to the inspired André Onana. But Ten Hag wanted a few moments alone with Alejandro Garnacho and Kobbie Mainoo. Ballers; cup final scorers; Wembley heroes; teenagers. Ten Hag clasped them around the ears, ruffled their hair, beamed at them like a proud dad about to go off to war.

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Luke Littler powers to Premier League Darts title with nine-dart delight

Littler overwhelms world champion Humphries 11-7 in finalSeventeen-year-old celebrates triumph with tear in the eye

We are now through the ­looking glass. We’re over the frontier. We’re not in Kansas any more, Toto. For a 17-year-old kid is now a major darts champion, and it feels totally inevitable, and it still makes ­absolutely no sense. Whatever Luke Littler goes on to achieve in this sport, somehow nothing will ever quite match the sheer tidal wave of shock and wonder he has inspired in his first six months as a professional, an ­explosion of ­talent and coolness and colour and attitude and ­showmanship that is, quite frankly, beyond comprehension.

Littler beat Luke Humphries 11-7 to claim the Premier League title, clinching victory courtesy of a ­stunning and irresistible surge after the interval that left the world champion and world No 1 gasping. Along the way Littler hit a nine-dart finish – 180, 180, 141 – that brought a crowd of 14,000 to the very brink of rapture. For a player of his tender years, he already instinctively grasps the first rule of big-time darts: give the people what they want.

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Forget your morals, enjoy the fight: big-time boxing’s evil genius strikes again | Jonathan Liew

Oleksandr Usyk’s scrap with Tyson Fury in Saudi Arabia upheld the sport’s time-honoured tradition of sportswashing

I bought the fight. Obviously I bought the fight. It cost £24.95, money that was previously sitting in my “ethical” bank account until I decided to exchange it for the privilege of watching two men hit each other in the face live from Saudi Arabia. I tell you this so you can be assured that what follows comes from no place of sanctimony or moral purity or even intellectual coherence. Cuff me. Haul me in. What is the charge? Enjoying a fight? A succulent heavyweight boxing fight?

This is the evil genius of big-time boxing: it speaks to the darkest recesses of your soul, strips away the layers of equivocation and apologia, forces you to stare at the ugly thing until you can lie to yourself no longer. As Mike Tyson almost said, everyone has a principle until they want to watch someone get punched in the face. Terrible men throughout history have known this as fact, and perhaps the nicest thing we can say about the rulers of Saudi Arabia is that they are at least following a time-honoured tradition.

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The Guardiola supremacy: how City became too good for their own good | Jonathan Liew

A seventh title in 10 years is proof of how incredible wealth has eroded any sense of competitive balance in the Premier League

Once more, without feeling. The sun rose on Sunday morning, the Earth completed one full rotation around its axis, and Manchester City won the Premier League title, just as they did in 2012 and 2014, and 2018 and 2019, and 2021 and 2022 and 2023. One more trophy in the glass case, one more silhouette to add to the mural. The greatest saga in English football has been recast as church liturgy, its rhythms hardened into routine, and here Arsenal were simply the latest team to succumb to the myth that there was ever a race to be won.

For City there is of course a glorious familiarity to these rituals now, a muscle memory in those trophy‑bearing limbs, the arms that lift it and the legs that earn it. Of course there is the full‑scale invasion at full-time, which proceeds in contempt of the multiple big-screen warnings forbidding it, because by now it has become a sort of tradition. There are City fans in the lower North Stand who can boast more appearances on the Etihad Stadium pitch than Kalvin Phillips.

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Rodri redefines role of holding midfielder to become City’s fulcrum | Jonathan Liew

Spaniard has added individual flourish to collective duty in an evolution that is key to Manchester City’s success

Rodri was pretty young when he realised that he saw football in a different way to others. It wasn’t just his ability to pick a pass on the field, but the way he conceived the game off it. When he watched, he instinctively saw spaces and movement and only later realised that everyone else was simply following the ball. Football became not so much a pastime as a puzzle: a mechanism to be decrypted and understood.

As a child, making his way through the youth teams of Atlético Madrid, his father would urge him to get forward more, to score goals and make assists, to be more selfish. But Rodri always demurred. It was not that he was entirely selfless or free of ego. He understood freedom and fun, responsibility and reciprocity in a different way to most other players. Watching him today, seeing the trajectory his career has taken, allows us to do the same.

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