Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 40

England exit Rugby World Cup with pride but need more than grit to woo public | Jonathan Liew

What is the wider purpose for Borthwick’s semi-finalists when so many supporters feel the team is still not speaking to them?

Brave lads. What lads. Bring them home in garlands and rosettes, these English heroes on a foreign field. All is forgiven, Steve Borthwick. One in the eye for the critics and the doubters. Sport is cruel, fine margins, and all that. This weekend England will depart the World Cup with its pride intact, with its dignity salvaged, with its future restored and with its public engrossed. With everything, in fact, except the thing they came for.

But as England began to process their stirring 16-15 defeat by South Africa in Saturday’s semi-final, this last point felt like the most minor of inconveniences. Owen Farrell declared he was “proud to be English”. “Fantastic,” scrum-half Alex Mitchell replied when he was asked how he thought England’s campaign had gone. “Before the World Cup people said we wouldn’t do very well and struggle to get out of the group.” Maybe the real World Cup, on reflection, was the haters they managed to annoy along the way.

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Dominant England played the game of their lives. And South Africa still won | Jonathan Liew

Steve Borthwick’s side were superior in the Rugby World Cup semi-final, but that counted for little on a night of twisted logic

There’s about an hour on the clock at the Stade de France, and the World Cup semi-final has gone missing. I mean this quite literally. The World Cup semi-final between England and South Africa is, simply put, not there. What the 80,000 people in the stadium are staring at in the meantime through the sheeting rain is not immediately clear. A mass of amorphous wet shapes. Lots of big men scrabbling around on the ground and then very slowly standing up again. Medics and support staff trotting on to the pitch and then trotting off. Lots of talking. Lots of substitutions.

The ball itself hasn’t been seen since about the 35th minute. This is sport as a kind of dark matter, an anti-spectacle, a curious ontological experiment into whether a game of rugby can exist if no actual rugby is being played.

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Everyone has a buzzword except the Boks, who just keep doing their thing

The All Blacks have mythology and France oozed romance but South Africa are cast in Rassie Erasmus’s image of ruthlessness

“We’ve got fucking 58 murders a day,” Rassie Erasmus told his South Africa players in the Tokyo dressing room in 2019. “Women get raped every day. These guys have got 120 million people and they’re one of the richest countries in the world. It’s pissing me off that they think this gives them the right. These guys do it because they want to grow the game of rugby. We want to do it because we want to save our fucking country.”

Really, you have to marvel at the kind of oratorical flourish that manages to cast Japan – perhaps the most adored team to take the field in a Rugby World Cup – as the villains in their home tournament. But then this has always been one of the curious gifts of Erasmus, the coach who led the Springboks to glory four years ago and who now, as director of rugby, remains the power behind Jacques Nienaber’s throne.

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João Cancelo commits cardinal sin in age of smartphone and transactional fandom | Jonathan Liew

As sport increasingly treats fans as commodities, the inevitable result is that fans have started to see athletes the same way

“You’re so annoying, my God,” João Cancelo complains, leaning out of his open car window with the indignation of a man at a drive-through who has just been handed the Smarties McFlurry when he specifically ordered the Oreo. “You’re here every day. Do I have to stop my car every day?

“Quickly, quickly,” he scolds them, as the procession of teenagers persists, posing for photos and handing him various objects to sign. Eventually, after an encounter lasting less than a couple of minutes, Cancelo drives away from the Barcelona training ground, leaving in his wake a pall of awkwardness, as well as some of the most reluctant selfies ever committed to a memory chip.

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Scotland reach Euro 2024 and Wales edge closer – Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Philippe Auclair, Lucy Ward, Jonathan Liew, and Ewan Murray to talk about the latest Euro 2024 qualifiers

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: the panel discusses the weekend’s international football, as Elis James gushes over Wales edging one step closer to qualifying for Euro 2024 with a win over Croatia. Plus Ewan Murray joins to talk about Scotland’s qualification following Spain’s win over Norway. The panel also looks into why fans were booing Jordan Henderson during England’s friendly win over Australia.

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Dupont produces his best on biggest stage but South Africa deliver the pain | Jonathan Liew

France’s scrum-half barely put a foot wrong despite a fractured cheek but he was up against a stronger team in Paris

Off comes the scrum cap. The Stade de France is slowly emptying: of people, of noise, of hope. Antoine Dupont trudges across the turf, dazed and directionless, hands clasped to his head. This is a place he knows and a feeling he does not. He drags his blue jersey up over his face, but the tears do not come yet, and so he pulls it down again. For perhaps the first time on a rugby field, Dupont has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing.

They broke his face, and then they broke his heart. It will be of little use to him to know that he has played a starring role in perhaps the greatest game ever played. It matters not that over the last few weeks he has won over more converts to this team and this sport than any man since Jonah Lomu. The 73 passes he made – almost four times as many as any of his teammates – will feel like they were for nothing.

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If not now, when? Questions will haunt Ireland after heartbreaking loss | Jonathan Liew

The world’s No 1 side have done virtually everything right but in this quarter-final’s intangible moments, New Zealand prevailed

But if not now, when? Rivers of green trickle out of the stadium, back to the Paris RER and the metro, the night stiff and chilly, the air thick with questions that will never be answered. There is anger, but only a little, and there is sadness, but only a little. Rather, the overwhelming sensation in these earliest twitches of aftermath is a kind of bewilderment, the yawning void where a World Cup semi-final was supposed to be. As if it all feels too abrupt. As if somewhere, on some plane, a sacred pact has been reneged on.

If not now, when? Perhaps this is the question that will consume Caelan Doris in his quieter moments, as he sees the high ball going up with 72 minutes on the clock, a catch he could make in his sleep that will now keep him awake. Perhaps this is the question that Johnny Sexton will ponder when he revisits the penalty kick that he pulled wide of the posts in the second half. Perhaps Conor Murray will see the blur of Jordie Barrett out of the corner of his eye, feel the ghost of an interfering arm extending outwards from his shoulder, and try desperately and forlornly to withdraw it.

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Galthié searches for deeper meaning to inspire France as South Africa loom

Inspired by the Springboks’ home triumph in 1995, the France coach aims to spark a sense of World Cup destiny in his players

This week a small flotilla of police boats made its way up the Seine, each one carrying about a dozen players and staff from the French rugby team. The boats moored outside the cathedral of Notre Dame, its occupants put on protective suits and boots, and for the next hour they toured a building that has been closed to the public since the devastating fire that almost destroyed it in 2019. Afterwards, the auxiliary bishop of Paris presented the coach, Fabien Galthié, with the jersey of the Vatican rugby club signed by Pope Francis.

What, do we reckon, was the meaning behind this pilgrimage and the meticulously choreographed ritual accompanying it? A simple photo opportunity? A spot of light tourism on a day off? Almost certainly not. A coach as fixated on messaging and small details as Galthié does not stage these things on a whim. After a planned visit was cancelled in August, he “insisted on” rescheduling it, according to Max Guazzini, the former president of Stade Français who organised the visit.

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Jude Bellingham’s artistry can take Gareth Southgate’s sad song and make it better | Jonathan Liew

The Real Madrid midfielder is lighting up La Liga but must be given the freedom to inject some life into the national team

First you need the vision. “Around the pitch I want to be an artist,” Jude Bellingham says, which is the sort of quote that makes you double-take, because what footballer even talks about making art these days? Well Geoff, at the end of the day it’s all about engaging in a search for deeper meaning, washing away from the soul the dust of everyday life, creating a new kind of sense where none previously existed. Fortunately, on this occasion, the big man’s got his head on it.

And perhaps the most thrilling thing about watching Bellingham at the moment is not the goals (11 in all competitions) or the assists (four) or the celebrations (broad, open-armed, inviting us to embrace him), but that little gap between the moment of creation and the moment of realisation. When he’s trapped by the touchline and plotting his escape route. Or the shuffle that shifts the ball out of his feet and opens up whole new dimensions of possibility. You don’t know how this ends, because nor does he.

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Ireland are on a different wavelength and loving the big stage at last | Jonathan Liew

Commanding World Cup win over Scotland is one of those occasions where you can feel memories imprinted in real time

It’s not in their heads. Not any more. It was in the bar rooms and front rooms of Cork and Clontarf, Dublin and Dundalk. It was in the lanes and boulevards of Paris, where optimism and hope flowed like the waters of the Seine. It was in the stands at the Stade de France, where every tackle brought the house down and the Mexican waves were being rolled out long before the end. And most importantly it was out there on the field, where the 23 men of Ireland strode into the quarter-finals of the World Cup as if it were the most natural instinct in the world.

They came not just to praise the new Ireland, but to bury the old one. An Ireland that always seemed to spasm in games like this. An Ireland that felt the pressure. For all the respectful words lavished on the Scots this week, once the game began it was clear that these two teams were on entirely different wavelengths. As Ireland worked their mesmerising patterns Scotland swarmed and chased and regrouped, unaware that they were already two phases behind the game, that they were facing opponents who were moving through a different gravity, playing to a different tempo. In their heads, they were still fighting. But the contest they were trying to win had already disappeared.

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