Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 39

Julian Brandt seals win as Dortmund deal harsh lesson to Newcastle

One day, and sooner than you think, this Newcastle side will be a frightening force in Europe. Once they can add a little craft to their graft, a little depth to a squad still stretched thin by a relentless schedule. Once they work out how to break down teams who do not simply let themselves be bullied. In short, once they work out how to win games like this.

Borussia Dortmund have now beaten them twice in a fortnight, and while Newcastle can still qualify for the last 16 it will probably need a win in Paris and a favour or two. Put this down as a learning experience: a lesson in how to blend physicality with creativity, how to change the angles of attack, how to get your forwards into the game and how to make sure your productive spells get rewarded.

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Football is now too big and toxic for decisions to be accepted in good faith | Jonathan Liew

Anger at technology and refereeing decisions is overblown but comes from the right place – a mistrust in the authorities

Anyway, we gave it a good run. It probably had to be tried. But now it’s time to admit that the best course of action may just be to scrap the whole thing. Bin it entirely. Too much controversy, too much pointless squabbling, too much bad blood and bad faith. And above all the overwhelming sensation that, in the pursuit of endless minuscule improvements, we lost something vital and elemental, the little spark of joy that brought us all here in the first place.

I refer of course to “football”, one of the world’s oldest and best-loved sports, but which for all its original good intentions is surely no longer fit for purpose. I know it feels like a backward step, given all the time and money invested in it. But even the most one-eyed advocates of “football” must agree that its introduction has been a colossal failure.

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‘No one is perfect’: Ten Hag backs Fernandes after latest United winner

Coach says captain sets example for Manchester United to follow‘He takes responsibility all the time and for important goals’

Bruno Fernandes stood up for Erik ten Hag on the pitch, and so it was no surprise that Ten Hag stood up for Fernandes afterwards. Another turbulent week at Old Trafford had ended with Fernandes scoring the only goal at Fulham in added time and Ten Hag launched a vigorous defence of his mercurial playmaker.

It was Fernandes’s third late winner of the season and a response of sorts to his critics. “I don’t understand why,” said Ten Hag of the criticism Fernandes has received, with former players in the media suggesting he should be stripped of the captaincy. “Everyone has their mistakes, no one is perfect. But always when he plays he gives energy.

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Fernandes’s late strike gives Manchester United timely win at Fulham

Even a clown car sometimes runs in a straight line. Fulham were marginally the better side here, had more of the shots and more of the creativity in the final third, won more of the big challenges, played with more confidence and courage. All of which they contrived to undo in about 15 seconds of pure catastrophe in the final minute of the game, a routine clearing of the lines that they somehow managed to turn into a kind of anarchic performance art.

And through it all, lurking on the edge of things, waiting for his moment, was Bruno Fernandes. Through the years of pain and punishment, the indignities and the disgraces, the aimless days and the listless nights, Bruno has always been there. Bruno, with his outrageous talent and his talent for outrage. Bruno, the lightning rod of rage and the heart of dysfunction, the storm and the man who can calm the storm. And admittedly, the man who can occasionally jog around for 90 minutes pretending the storm is none of his business.

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Harry Kane ready for Dortmund test but Bayern’s invincibility feels fragile | Jonathan Liew

England striker has been prolific in Germany but his club is in a rare state of disarray before Bundesliga’s biggest match

Harry Kane didn’t play against Saarbrücken on Wednesday, but it didn’t stop him becoming the butt of the joke. As his Bayern Munich side went down 2-1 in the second round of the DFB Cup against their unfancied third-tier opponents, Kane remained on the bench, watching another trophy slipping out of his grasp. His first game at Bayern had ended in defeat in the Supercup. Meanwhile, the Spurs team he left in the summer are top of the league. Sometimes, the random scrawl of footballing fate can read suspiciously like poetry.

Still, one of the advantages of playing for Bayern is that salvation is always close at hand. In a way the defeat in midweek, with Eric-Maxim Choupo-Moting flailing away up front, proved exactly why Kane was signed: the touch of class, the cutting edge, the point of difference. This season has already produced 14 goals in 13 games, two hat-tricks, and an outlandish lob from his own half against Darmstadt last weekend. Yet to a large extent all this feels like mere preamble to his first big test on Saturday evening. In the words of Sebastian Kehl, the Borussia Dortmund sporting director: “It’s that time again.”

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Manchester United and Arsenal crash out of Carabao Cup – Football Weekly Extra

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Liew and John Brewin to ask if time is running out for Erik ten Hag

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Liew and John Brewin as Manchester United’s poor start to the season continues.

Rate, review, share on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast and Stitcher, and join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter and email.

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The Genius Fallacy: why English cricket has never produced a proper dynasty | Jonathan Liew

In trying to recreate the World Cup triumph of 2019, England have become a tired pastiche of the team they once were

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of England’s World Cup campaign has been its gradual but unmistakeable effect on Eoin Morgan’s face. This is a man, remember, who was captaining the side barely a year ago and who, during his frictionless transition into broadcasting, has made a decent stab at building a commentary career without actually passing comment on anything at all. Simplicity, gravitas, equivocation, inscrutable eyes. Something about India being wonderful hosts. Play it cool, and you could be a decade down the line before anyone asks you for a genuine opinion.

And it was all going so well, until this. Happy now, England? Daddy is sad. Look at Daddy. This is how Daddy looks when he is contractually obliged to stick the boot into his mates on television. Well, this is going to hurt him a lot more than it hurts you. “I’ve never come across a sports team that has underperformed like this,” Morgan spat on Sky Sports last week, and this is a guy who played for London Spirit.

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Rugby World Cup awards: the best player, the best match – our verdicts

From that monumental quarter-final weekend to Kurt-Lee Arendse’s wonder try and the emergence of Portugal, the Guardian’s rugby experts hand out their awards

RK Richie Mo’unga. It did not quite happen for him in the final but he was wonderfully sharp in parts. His All Black colleagues Ardie Savea and Aaron Smith make my team of the tournament, as do Ireland’s Bundee Aki and South Africa’s Ox Nché.

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Du Toit overcomes major medical scare to join South Africa’s greats | Jonathan Liew

Springbok forward could have lost a leg in 2020 due to a rare condition but has battled back to win another World Cup

At first, there was no great cause for alarm. Pieter‑Steph du Toit felt a blow to his left thigh, hobbled from the field and watched the rest of the game from the bench. Even as the injury began to swell towards full time, he thought little of it. He had experienced a similar injury as a high school player a decade earlier, and that had turned out fine. It was only about 15 minutes after the game, when Du Toit informed his Stormers team doctor Jason Suter that he no longer had any feeling in his left leg, that the full scale of an unfolding medical emergency began to emerge.

Du Toit had a haematoma that developed into an extremely rare condition called acute compartment syndrome. Which basically means that the tissue in his injured muscle had swollen to the point where it was blocking the blood supply to the rest of the limb. At that point, only 43 previous cases had been recorded in medical literature. Almost half had ended in an amputation. And without the prompt action of Suter in sending him straight to hospital, that would also have been the fate of Du Toit: a former World Cup winner, a future World Cup winner and a player who must now enter the discussion as one of the greatest Springboks of all time.

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Siya Kolisi inspires South Africa to keep finding point of difference | Jonathan Liew

Narrow victories in all three knockout games show Springboks are masters of ending on the right side of small margins

Siya Kolisi is singing the national anthem. But of course, anybody who has ever seen Kolisi belt out the South African national anthem will know that this is a pitiably meagre way of describing it. The head rocks back, the chin jags out, and as his mouth opens you can see every tooth in it, the tongue and the tonsils and the remains of the energy gel he polished off during the warm-up. For South Africa’s captain, this can never simply be a perfunctory discharge of pre-match formalities. It’s an opportunity, a decisive moment, a chance to gain an edge. And when you play rugby for South Africa, you quickly learn that there is no edge too small to be worth the effort.

What does this look like in practice? Perhaps you see it in the 76th minute of a bruising and scarified World Cup final, when Jordie Barrett is racing through clean air with two runners outside him, and you, Pieter‑Steph du Toit, you know that if you don’t wrap him up in the next couple of seconds – and properly wrap him up, arms and wriggling hips and all – then New Zealand will probably eat up half the field. Yes, the lungs are screaming. Yes, this is your 26th tackle of the night. But it needs to happen, and it needs to be you, and it needs to be now, and it needs to be perfect.

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