Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 33

Liverpool’s fearless youngsters are Jürgen Klopp’s greatest legacy | Jonathan Liew

Manager offers contrast to many coaches who set their academy graduates up to fail with cheap, low-intensity minutes

Nobody looks overawed. Nobody looks out of place. Nobody looks as if they have school in the morning or are wearing a shirt two sizes too big for them. Conor Bradley walks over towards the Liverpool fans, arms aloft, Virgil van Dijk and Cody Gakpo either side of him, and this doesn’t feel like a dream or a Photoshop job or an artfully shot credit-card advert. James McConnell gets his turn with the trophy, and it doesn’t feel awkward or hefty in his hands. This is Liverpool, this is Wembley, and once you slip on the red shirt – no matter how high the number on the back of it – you know exactly what is expected of you, and what to expect in return.

And so even amid their injuries, their relative inexperience, the pummelling of Caoimhín Kelleher’s goal, it felt like the most natural thing in the world that Liverpool should win this final. Chelsea had the better of the chances and the more expensively assembled side, and yet did we ever really doubt the team built from candy floss, Melwood undergraduates and veterans of the Papa John’s Trophy? Perhaps, as Jürgen Klopp begins the long turn for home, this is the real measure of his work: a machine where winning is so ingrained that the parts themselves are largely interchangeable, even when the parts replacing them were recently children.

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Wembley braced for battle between Chelsea’s chaos and Liverpool’s calm

Contrasting fortunes of Argentinian midfielders speaks to two clubs with different ideologies but equally eager for silverware

So begins the long goodbye. A chance for fans to express their appreciation for a man who everyone knows will not be in the job for very much longer; a chance to reward a celebrated coach with a valedictory trophy and a clutch of sacred memories. Yes: it’s a huge afternoon for Mauricio Pochettino, for whom Sunday’s Carabao Cup final represents his best route to salvaging Chelsea’s season, and perhaps even his own ailing project.

Naturally, history is against him. It’s more than a decade since the final served up a genuine surprise. Every winner since 2013 has also gone on to qualify for the Champions League, which Chelsea almost certainly will not. For eight of the last 10 winners, the League Cup was not the only trophy they lifted that season. If this competition was once a chance for upstarts and underdogs to upset the established order of English football – think Oxford, Leicester, Birmingham, Swansea – these days it tends to uphold that same order, confirm what we already knew, reward the serial winners.

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Is Dan Ashworth a marquee signing that Dan Ashworth would recommend? | Jonathan Liew

The lines of credit and responsibility in football are unclear, so how can Manchester United put a value on a sporting director?

Newcastle United are demanding around £20m from Manchester United for their sporting director, Dan Ashworth. That’s a lot of money, and I wanted to know whether he could possibly be worth it, but it was hard to tell for sure.

I went on the popular search website Google and there were lots of articles saying that he definitely was, that Dan Ashworth is a genius who buys footballers for tiny amounts and sells them for hundreds of millions. And lots of articles saying that Newcastle wouldn’t miss him at all, that football is played on a pitch by actual players, and so in an ideal world you probably want to be spending your £20m on them, instead.

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Gareth Taylor hails landmark win after Manchester City end Chelsea run

City level with hosts on top of WSL after Shaw scores winner‘It’s a big step for us. I knew the margins were going to be tight’

Gareth Taylor has spent a good deal of his coaching career trying to cling to the coattails of Emma Hayes. Perhaps this was why Manchester City’s 1-0 defeat of Chelsea, erasing the champions’ three-point lead in the Women’s Super League, felt like such a watershed. “It’s a big step for us,” Taylor said. “In the past we’ve been a bit soft defensively in these moments. I knew the margins were going to be tight. But confidence was high.”

Khadija Shaw’s early goal proved the decisive strike, but Taylor reserved his richest praise for a defence that has still conceded only eight goals all season and held off Chelsea in a stirring second-half rearguard. “We’ve added a bit of steeliness to our defending, we’ve worked on our set pieces a lot, and the spirit in the club is very good,” Taylor said. “Sometimes it’s hard for players to play the game and not the occasion.”

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Manchester City sink Chelsea to join hosts on top and open up race for WSL

From a little pocket of travelling fans in the corner of Kingsmeadow came a cascade of roars and screams, the sound of a title race coming alive. For Manchester City, a statement result to match a statement performance. The queens of Kingsmeadow have been dethroned, Chelsea beaten at home in the Women’s Super League for the first time in more than three years, their lead cut down to nothing: zero points, zero goal difference.

Khadija Shaw got the only goal of the game, her first against Chelsea in the league in five attempts, but really this was a tale of resolve and defensive backbone in the face of almost unimaginable pressure. Not just the increasingly desperate waves of Chelsea attack but the burden of history, the weight of what this would all mean.

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Why have rightwingers made even parkrun a battleground for trans people? | Jonathan Liew

When non-competitive, mass-participation jogging is annexed by the culture warriors, it’s clear there are other agendas at play

Last week a 16-year-old school basketball player in Utah was targeted by threats and online abuse, and had to be given police protection. A member of the state’s board of education had posted a photo on Instagram casting doubt on her gender, and these days, on the smoking tyre‑fire of the internet, that’s all you really need to destroy somebody.

“She cuts her hair short because that’s how she feels comfortable,” the girl’s parents told local news. “She wears clothes that are a little baggy. She goes to the gym all the time so she’s got muscles. It just broke our hearts that we needed to have this conversation with our daughter. Worst-case scenario, she could have ended her own life.”

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Brahim Díaz’s sumptuous solo strike gives Real Madrid edge over RB Leipzig

Well, were you really expecting two perfect Real Madrid performances in a row? This is simply not how Madrid do things. They harness their energies, take as much pride in the ugly as the beautiful, do the next thing that is required of them. So after the evisceration of Girona came the last stand against RB Leipzig: a gruff, ­grizzled win in which they were forced to spend long periods ­defending, despite not really having many defenders to speak of.

Carlo Ancelotti called it a “collective job”, albeit one elevated by a single moment of grace. Brahim Díaz started this game as a ­replacement for the injured Jude Bellingham and ended it on the sidelines after sustaining an injury of his own. In between he produced the game’s only goal three minutes into the second half, a brilliant effort, and one that has given Madrid a decisive advantage going into the second leg at the Bernabéu.

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Stanisic and Grimaldo stun Bayern to extend Leverkusen’s Bundesliga lead

Through the peaks and troughs of Bayern Munich’s season, the sniping and the setbacks and the scintillating form of Bayer Leverkusen, one basic principle has remained largely unchallenged.

That once Thomas Tuchel’s side got a whiff of their 12th consecutive Bundesliga title, the old muscle memory would kick in. That they would eventually show their true selves when it mattered most, in games like this. And they did; just not remotely in the way anyone expected.

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Leverkusen have a golden chance to strip Bayern’s costume of champions | Jonathan Liew

The top two in the Bundesliga go head-to-head with Xabi Alonso’s table-toppers bidding to shed their Vizekusen tag

It’s carnival weekend in the Rhineland: a time of chaos and celebration, a world of masks and costumes, a time for expressing who you are and discovering who you can be. Certainly there will be plenty of fancy dress on display at the BayArena on Saturday when Bayer Leverkusen take on Bayern Munich in the biggest game of this Bundesliga season: first versus second, the challengers against the champions, the coming force against the establishment. Who are the real contenders? And who is simply wearing the costume?

For Xabi Alonso and his Leverkusen side, this entire campaign has, in a way, been a brilliant exercise in self-deception. It was around the turn of the century when they lost a Champions League final and finished Bundesliga runners-up four seasons in six, that the “Vizekusen” tag (Vize meaning “vice” or “second”) began to stick. They have never won the title. And yet here they are: top of the table, the last unbeaten club in Europe’s big five leagues, able to go five points clear if they can beat Thomas Tuchel’s Bayern.

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Luke Littler lights up Premier League but Van Gerwen wins epic final

Teenager beats Humphries and Cross before narrow defeatDutchman wins Berlin title after thrilling deciding leg

The coronation will have to wait. Michael van Gerwen claimed the spoils on night two of the Premier League, beating Luke Littler in a deciding leg that felt like a self-contained epic all in itself. Both men began with visits of 57. Both came back with 180s. Both men missed darts for the match. Littler, on 80, let slip two darts at his favourite double-10, and ultimately those were the margins.

Perhaps it would simply have been too neat for Littler to win his first Premier League event in the city that gave the world the doner kebab. But here again was evidence that the emergence of the precocious 17-year-old is pushing everybody to new levels of quality and nerve. Van Gerwen averaged 107 in his semi-final win over Michael Smith without – and this is a very Van Gerwen trait these days – ever quite looking that good. And on a night when every single match of the night finished 6-4 or 6-5, van Gerwen owed his triumph as much to good fortune and the tenacity to endure.

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