Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 32

Andreas Pereira ends search for belonging in embrace of Fulham and Brazil

Midfielder started in England as a 15-year-old at Manchester United but, five clubs later, he is rewarding Marco Silva’s faith

As a child, Andreas Pereira would finish his football training and wait for his father to pick him up and take him home. The problem: his father, Marcos, was a senior professional at the same club, Lommel United in northern Belgium, and his own training session would often run late. One by one, Andreas’s friends would get picked up and leave. Slowly the car park would empty. Still he waited on his own. “They forgot about me,” he would think to himself.

The impatience and the impotence. The sensation of time passing, of being forgotten or overtaken, of wondering whether he would ever find home. In many ways these are the themes that would come to define Pereira’s career as an adult: a career that has taken in six clubs across a decade, and yet which feels as if it is only now beginning.

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Arsenal pip Porto, plus a night at the Belgrade derby – Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Nick Ames, Nicky Bandini and Jonathan Liew as Arsenal beat Porto on penalties to reach the Champions League quarter-finals for the first time since 2014, where they’re joined by Barça

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On the podcast today: Arsenal are through to the quarter-finals of the Champions League but Porto made it tricky for them. The panel debate how far the Gunners can go and praise Pepe on a brilliant performance in the Porto defence at the age of 41.

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Turning Luke Littler into a celebrity or brand is least interesting thing you can do | Jonathan Liew

The darting sensation’s story crossed over to the mainstream but his stage is on the oche not answering questions on a sofa

Luke Littler is sitting alone in the green room of the Jonathan Ross Show. By this point we have already heard: Liam Gallagher talking about his dog; Raye recounting her 6am trip to McDonald’s after winning six Brit Awards; Millie Bobby Brown from Stranger Things on her future wedding; the comedian Rob Beckett on his new quiz show. Gallagher and John Squire have played their new single. The chat is flowing. Famous people are laughing with polished, performative loudness.

There are about 10 minutes left when Littler is finally summoned to the famous brown sofa. He gets on exactly as you would expect of a 17-year-old with virtually zero experience of the celebrity milieu. Everything here is diffidence and shrugs, short even words delivered in a short even tone, not so much recalcitrance as a basic teenage refusal. He doesn’t hate your question. He doesn’t love your question. He doesn’t really think anything about your question at all. It’s just there, hanging, and he’s learned by now that if he says a few words the question will go away, a car is going to come and take him home and then he’s going to play on his Xbox.

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Ireland lose their grip on grand slam in dignified but familiar fashion | Jonathan Liew

Ireland refused to panic under England pressure but this was a script familiar from the World Cup quarter-final

This time, there would be none of the old comforts or encouragements. No “well played, lads”. No “good processes” or “great effort”. No story they could spin themselves about how this was an evolving team, coming up against far stronger ­opponents, and you know, ultimately it’s performances that matters at this stage. Just another Ireland defeat at Twickenham, and somehow this one seemed to sting just a little harder than most of the others. When you’re going for a second consecutive grand slam, those are just the breaks.

The days leading up to this game had weighed heavy with expectation. And this in itself is still something of a novelty for Ireland teams on English turf. As was the usual hubris from all the usual places. Jamie Heaslip asserting that Ireland would need to go down to 13 players for England to win. Plenty of talk in the Irish media – at least before Scotland’s slip-up earlier in the afternoon – about wrapping up the championship with a four-try bonus point.

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Klopp and Guardiola bring curtain down on an era-defining rivalry | Jonathan Liew

Liverpool and Manchester City managers have brought the best out of one another to usher in golden age of English football

It will, as ever, be a clash of contrasts. The joy machine against the tortured genius. Extrovert versus introvert. Low-slung baseball cap versus designer knitwear, ordered chaos versus chaotic order, 4-3-3 versus who-the-hell-knows, blood red versus cool blue, the hair transplant against the immaculate bald pate. For the past eight years, this is the duel that has painted the skies of English football, took it to new and unfamiliar places.

And now, the end. For all the antagonism Liverpool and Manchester City fans have developed for each other over the years, Jürgen Klopp and Pep Guardiola could never truly bring themselves to hate each other. The mutual admiration and grudging respect simply ran too deep. “The outstanding manager of my lifetime,” as Klopp put it this past week. “The best rival I ever had in my life,” according to Guardiola.

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Euro 2024: fractured Germany in desperate need of a clear strategy

With kick-off 100 days away, the country wants to recreate the unifying joy of 2006 – but problems lurk on and off the pitch

The greatest myth Germany ever sold the world was its own efficiency. Virtually everything here closes on a Sunday. Most small shops only accept cash. Companies still communicate by fax. Even the simplest administrative tasks drown in the weight of their own absurd bureaucracy. When I was finally granted German residency – a process that took almost a year, required four appointments with various government agencies and the services of a notary – I was informed, by post, that I could access my permit online by downloading an app. The instructions for downloading the app arrived several weeks later, also by post. The app did not work.

So it was with a certain grim recognition that I noted the recent comments of the Euro 2024 organisers, publicly criticising the bureaucratic inefficiencies of the host nation.

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Harry Kane double leads Bayern Munich past Lazio and into quarter-finals

The drummers in the Südkurve beat out a tribal rhythm. Out on the pitch the players of Bayern Munich were unleashing wave after wave of feral attack, the crowd at the Allianz Arena swaying and baying along with them. And if you closed your eyes and tried not to think too hard, it was possible to imagine that these were other times, better times. That everything was going to be all right in the end.

They’re not, of course. Bayer Lever­kusen are running away with the Bundesliga, coach Thomas Tuchel is off in the summer, and there’s a sound case for swilling out around a third of his underperforming squad with him. But still, the ­stolen glance at a truncated dream that dares to return their gaze. Bayern are still in the Champions League. They still have unfinished business and a front four you would wade through thick snow to watch. And they still have Harry Kane.

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To everyone’s surprise, F1’s schlocky personal soap opera has become reality | Jonathan Liew

Christian Horner lived by the scripted entertainment product, and his tenure may die by the scripted entertainment product

Sad times. Maybe even end times. The vultures are circling. The barbarians are at the gate and everything that was once sacred is being made profane. Mohammed ben Sulayem, the president of the FIA, believes recent controversies are beginning to damage the sport. Toto Wolff, the team principal of Mercedes, identifies “a problem for the whole of Formula One”. The global head of Ford Performance Motorsport has reminded Red Bull of the “very high standards of behaviour and integrity” that will be expected of their future engine partner. Who else, in this moment of turmoil and tumult, will stand up for the impeccable good name and sound values of the sport Christian Horner described only last year as “the Kardashians on wheels”?

Certainly it has been vaguely amusing over the last few weeks to behold some of the moral squeamishness and knotted indignation generated within the paddock by the Horner affair. The apparent surprise that a product packaged and sold as a schlocky personal soap opera has somehow degenerated into a schlocky personal soap opera. The sheer disbelief that a sport owned and run by rich, unaccountable men and held in some of the world’s most repressive dictatorships might occasionally be lacking in transparency. The belated discovery that there might actually be such a thing as bad publicity, negative publicity, the kind of publicity that does not emerge fully formed from the editing suite, complete with pumping soundtrack and pre-written storylines.

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Erling Haaland’s attack on history points to new way for Manchester City | Jonathan Liew

Striker’s awesome show of goalscoring was part of a clearly more direct approach from Pep Guardiola’s treble winners

Erling Haaland scored his fifth goal in the 58th minute. Not that you would have known it from his celebration, really more of a non-celebration: a desultory jog, a little curl of the lip and a raise of the eyebrow, not so much the expression of a man who has just written his name into the annals of Manchester City history as the look of somebody who has just found a partly melted Freddo in his pocket.

Of course everyone expected Haaland to come off at that point: the game won, Luton’s brief squall of defiance extinguished, passage to the sixth round secure. But he didn’t. The clock ticked past 60 minutes, then 65, then 70. Still not a twitch from Pep Guardiola. You’re 5-2 up. Hang on, Mateo Kovacic has just scored, make that 6-2. You’ve got the derby against Manchester United at the weekend. It’s an open game, tackles and shoves flying in all over the place. Haaland has only recently come back from injury. You have four subs left. So, Pep. What’s the thinking here?

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Harry Kane is not cursed, he is a winning footballer having a brilliant season | Jonathan Liew

Liverpool’s teenagers have more medals than Kane but even if Bayern end the season empty-handed the joke won’t be on him

There was another Harry Kane moment at the weekend: those moments when the air feels thin and the pulse races just a little faster and the margins have sharpened to a fine point. Kane has spent most of the last decade of his career being the most watched, the most scrutinised and the most outnumbered player on the pitch. The percentages in this job are staggeringly low. Still he checks and feints and shuffles and drifts, looking and longing for that elusive yard of space.

It finally arrives in the 91st minute against RB Leipzig, the game level at 1-1, Bayern Munich’s title challenge crumbling right here on the Allianz turf. Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting brings down a long ball and flicks it over the head of the defender. The touch is heavy. Choupo-Moting was trying to keep the ball for himself. But now it sits up unexpectedly for Kane, and all that is required now is a left-footed volley from 14 yards, on the turn and through two blocking defenders.

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