Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 30

Vinícius Júnior gives Real Madrid edge in semi-final after Kane rouses Bayern

These are Real Madrid’s principles, and if you don’t like them … well, they have others. Here Bayern Munich forced Carlo Ancelotti’s side to play not one game but several: an early defensive rearguard, a gradual arm-wrestle for control, a chaotic period at the start of the second half and finally a late quickening as they chased down the lead wrought so spectacularly by Leroy Sané and Harry Kane.

That they are still standing, ­perhaps even marginal favourites in this semi-final, is a testament to the speed and agility with which they manage to find solutions, to sense the little fissures and shifts in energy before they even happen, to smell the goal before it has even been ­conceived. And of course it helps when you have a forward of the relentless, remorseless, red-blooded quality of Vinícius Júnior, who added a cool late penalty to his sumptuous first-half goal.

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IPL’s age of carnage may relent but cricket’s future can be seen amid the content | Jonathan Liew

The tournament has turned into an arcade-style hitting competition because that is what the market wanted

I’ve been kind of watching the Indian Premier League for the last five weeks. And there is, I would proffer, no sporting event better suited to kind of watching than the IPL, a tournament that just moulds itself beautifully around your existing life: something to kind of watch while you make breakfast, something to kind of have in the background while you reply to emails, an indiscriminate white noise of various men with airport-lounge accents squealing things like “fetch that!” and “carnage!”

You go to the shops, come back, and it’s still there. You go on holiday for a fortnight, and it’s still there. Ruturaj Gaikwad is still batting. Axar Patel is still standing at mid-wicket, hands on hips, looking deeply unimpressed. You’ve missed about 8,000 runs and several hundred sixes. But in an important sense, you’ve missed nothing at all.

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Kane and Bellingham take different paths to Champions League duel | Jonathan Liew

While Harry Kane has navigated his career like he always has another season, his England teammate plays like this is his last

There were a few tourists from Madrid taking selfies outside the Allianz Arena on Monday lunchtime and, as footballing pilgrimages go, this is one you really have to want. Wedged between two major road junctions and approached either through a concrete jungle of slip roads or a 40-minute schlep on the train followed by a long trudge past a sewage treatment plant, perhaps the nicest thing you can say about the location of Bayern Munich’s stadium is that it at least offers easy access to everywhere else.

How many times will Harry Kane have to peer at this stadium through blacked-out windows before it begins to feel like home? The language will take years to master, if he ever manages it. The Allianz does not feel like a part of Munich in the way that the Estadio Bernabéu looms above Madrid or the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium dominates the High Road. And, of course, his name has already been made at the boyhood club that still has a buy-back clause for him. However long he stays at Bayern, on some level home will always be somewhere else.

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‘You’re absolutely trapped’: welcome to the loneliest seat in sport

As the World Snooker Championship heats up, there is nothing that quite mirrors the torture and solitude of The Chair

Ding Junhui throws back his head and allows his eyes to droop closed for a few seconds. Opens them. Closes them. Finally, with a kind of resignation, opens them again. Ruffles the hair at his temples with both hands, as if trying to shake himself awake. Meanwhile, oblivious to any of this, his opponent Jack Lisowski continues to pot balls and rack up points: just a few feet away and yet in an entirely different world.

Welcome to the loneliest seat in sport. For the next minutes, perhaps even hours, this is your whole world and its horizons are extremely limited. You get a couple of bottles of water and a small table. You can’t leave. You can’t make a sound. No teammates or coach for solace. No way of knowing when you can get up again. Your opponent is busily clearing the table, playing you out of the frame. And – the worst part – it’s usually your own fault that you’re sitting there.

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Have Everton dashed Liverpool’s title dreams? – Football Weekly Extra

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Liew and Robyn Cowen as Liverpool lose the Merseyside derby … and maybe more

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: Everton sink Liverpool in a Merseyside derby that could be the end of the Reds’ title hopes, and which may well be enough to secure the Toffees’ Premier League status.

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For Sheffield United and co the Premier League brings a unique brew of misery | Jonathan Liew

For the teams at the bottom of the food chain, England’s top flight has come to resemble an abusive relationship

And you may ask yourself: how do I work this?

And you may ask yourself: what happened to that three-man midfield?

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Victor Torp’s torment: the greatest ever FA Cup moment that wasn’t

Coventry fans now young will grow old still remembering those 90 seconds of unimaginable bliss at the end of extra time

Afterwards, and in perhaps their first act of restraint all afternoon, Manchester United had the judgment and basic dignity not to celebrate too vigorously. Rasmus Højlund offered a few fist pumps after his winning penalty and Antony cupped an arrogant ear towards the Coventry fans, but for the most part United’s players headed for their beaten opponents in the centre circle, clasped hands and slapped shoulders, consoled and commiserated. Respectful of the gulf between them, these two footballing worlds collided, briefly dissolving into each other, and eventually going their separate ways.

How unevenly football’s joy is parcelled out. The United end was empty within seconds of the final kick, their fans already heading back to the tube station in anticipation of a fifth trip to Wembley in the space of 15 months. For Coventry’s fans, meanwhile, the memories of this game, and this day, and this comeback, will sustain them for decades. Fans who are now young will grow old still remembering those 90 seconds of unimaginable bliss at the end of extra time, those golden moments after Victor Torp’s winning goal hit the net and before it had been ruled out for offside. No wonder their end of the stadium was still packed 15 minutes after full time, trying to eke out every last moment, gulp in every last breath. Who knows when they will feel this way again?

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Nicolas Jackson’s promise hindered by tyranny of expectations at Chelsea | Jonathan Liew

Forward, who faces Manchester City in the FA Cup on Saturday, has managed a debut season goal tally up there with big names

The pure poacher’s instinct. The understanding of timing and angles, the striker’s sixth sense for exactly where the ball is going to be, and exactly what he’s going to do with it. The ball is loose in the penalty area, and as Nicolas Jackson swoops in with the late run his eyes are fixed firmly on the target. Which, alas, is wedged under the arm of his teammate Cole Palmer.

“Next time they’re all out,” Mauricio Pochettino fumed after the penalty fracas on Monday night that somehow managed – in true Chelsea fashion – to snatch a PR disaster from the jaws of a thumping 6-0 victory. As for Jackson, the incident with Palmer and Noni Madueke hardened the views of many Chelsea fans against him, which is some considerable achievement in a game where you have also managed a goal and an assist.

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Henry Winter’s surprise exit a sign of the fracturing evolution of the football media | Jonathan Liew

Times writer probably closest thing football journalism had to a celebrity but the game, and how we consume it, has changed

For more than three decades, English football media was a Winter wonderland. An eternal Winter. Winter extending an icy grip over the landscape. But even Winter, it seems, can end up being frozen out. Given the cold shoulder. It’s time to wrap up for Winter, now this particular Winter’s tale has reached its final chapter.

That, with apologies, was the opening paragraph to a column about Henry Winter’s dismissal by the Times, written in the style of Henry Winter for the Times. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible you haven’t the faintest idea what, or who, I’m talking about. Which to an oblique and probably self-defeating extent is actually the point.

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Borussia Dortmund’s Sabitzer sinks Atlético Madrid in seesaw thriller

Another raw and savage night of Champions League football at the Westfalen: the colours vivid, the sounds ear-shattering, the defences in utter disarray. And yet even as an elated Borussia Dortmund toasted this remarkable victory with the Yellow Wall, there remained the eternal question of whether they are ever going to allow us to take them seriously. Whether they will ever escape this riotously entertaining cycle of boom and bust. What kind of resistance they can offer against a Paris Saint-Germain side who have flaws of their own, to be sure, but do not struggle to punish porous, fidgety defences.

It was a flawed and chaotic tie, a tie that felt like a whole psychodrama in its own right, a tie Dortmund effectively lost twice and then won twice. Late goals from Niclas Füllkrug and Marcel Sabitzer secured a first semi-final since 2013, and while Atlético admirably fought back early in the second half, in hindsight it felt like the last stand of a stumbling and broken team, a fibreglass facsimile of the battleships Diego Simeone used to produce.

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