Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 41

Come with me, behind the ropes for a front-row seat in sport’s theatre of history | Jonathan Liew

Being within touching distance of the Ryder Cup action is a rare and precious experience – one unlikely to last much longer

You get a fluorescent green bib from the front desk, and it makes you look a bit like you’re about to do community service, but you don’t really mind, because what you’ve just been given is actually a golden key. One of the most precious items in the whole of sportswriting – right up there with your thesaurus, your dog-eared envelope full of expense receipts, and Wikipedia. You’re about to enter a magical portal into a sunlit universe of big swings and perfumed shoulders, cigar smoke and mild swearing.

There are times in this job when you feel the need to explain to people that actually, it’s not as opulent and idyllic as it all seems. That there are deadlines and demands, brutally early starts and late nights, interminable hours spent in windowless rooms waiting for a man in a tracksuit to shower you in banalities, long train journeys with Jonathan Wilson. Then, of course, there are the moments that just need to be savoured and shared. Lean into the smugness. Come with me. We’re going behind the ropes at the Ryder Cup.

Continue reading...

Rory McIlroy becomes perfect Ryder Cup animal and turns anger into energy | Jonathan Liew

World No 2 calmed himself down with some philosophy after his Saturday night spat and then won his singles

Rory McIlroy went to bed on Saturday night in one hell of a strop. He’d lost his fourball match that afternoon, but that wasn’t the real issue. The Americans had celebrated by exuberantly waving their caps in solidarity with Patrick Cantlay, but that wasn’t the problem either.

What had really enraged him was the antics of Cantlay’s caddie Joe LaCava, getting in McIlroy’s face and whipping up the crowd just as he was about to line up a match‑saving putt. McIlroy left that 18th green angrier than he had ever been on a golf course and he was still in a blind rage when he returned to his chauffeured transport a little while later.

Continue reading...

MacIntyre turns the Ryder Cup tables on Spieth to burst the US bubble | Jonathan Liew

Out-of-sorts American star was far from his best and came unstuck against Europe’s least heralded player

The ball splashes out of the bunker and flies towards the green. Jordan Spieth raises a hand, commanding it to stop. The ball stops. Spieth gives a small nod of contentment, accepts his putter from the caddy Michael Greller and begins to compose himself ahead of the four-foot putt that will halve the 9th hole.

It is at times like these that you realise that Spieth is not like other golfers. Most players bark at their ball in flight, exhorting it to “sit down” or “get up” as if it were an errant dog. Spieth, by contrast, whispers to it under his breath, cajoles and encourages it, as if to say: “Come on, buddy, you can do this.” And in his most sublime moments, it can feel as if Spieth and the ball are almost like dance partners, master and pupil, one leading and the other loyally following.

Continue reading...

Froth and hysteria add to myth of the dreaded opening shot at Ryder Cup | Jonathan Liew

The circus of the 1st tee on the first morning offers great theatre but modern players are capable of taking it all in their stride

Just a game of golf. One shot, just like any other. The same tee, the same swing, the caddie you know and the club you chose and the ball you like. A pale blue sunrise and a vast green pasture. Is this really the hardest shot in golf, or does it just feel that way when everybody is watching?

A little before half past seven on a crisp Roman morning, Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton enter the 1st hole to a bestial roar. But this is merely the climactic act of a tableau set in motion some time earlier. Long before the opening shots, long before the Icelandic hand claps, long before the gates opened and thousands of fans came bounding across the grass like wildebeest in a David Attenborough documentary. The 1st tee is one of the Ryder Cup’s founding mythologies, and like all mythologies it seems to have gathered new layers and details with every retelling.

Continue reading...

Welcome to the Ryder Cup: pumping music and incoherent speeches

Spectators started singing Sweet Caroline but there was no place for spontaneity at the cliche-ridden opening ceremony

From the deckchairs and beanbags of the spectator village, through parched and fraying voices, came the strains of a song. They had come from all over Europe, taken holiday leave and emptied bank accounts, to join the party. And as they waited patiently in the baking Roman heat, they struck up – organically and quite unbidden – a chorus of Sweet Caroline. It was quite nice. Still, it was nothing that couldn’t be drowned out by an industrial-strength sound system, some synthetic drum beats downloaded straight off Uppbeat and a woman spewing banal platitudes for an hour. Little people of the 44th Ryder Cup: shush. We will decide how you will be entertained.

And so from the eternal city came the eternal opening ceremony: an inexorable treadmill of pumping music and glossy video montages and speeches so incoherent they verged on crimes against language.

Continue reading...

Ryder Cup diary: Hovland hits hole in one to match gala’s coconut dessert

Elsewhere, Europe’s youngsters claim first blood on the course while Italy’s transport unions are dealt a blow off it

The official gala dinner on Wednesday night was a prime opportunity to engage in some of the Ryder Cup’s more stubbornly enduring traditions: golf-themed desserts (this time a lavish coconut cream effort called “Hole In One”), bad music (the singer-songwriter Phillip Phillips, who I’m sure played in the singles at Celtic Manor in 2010) and of course putting women in expensive dresses and making them stand silently while other people photograph them. As the European players and their wives descended the famous Spanish Steps, two of their number were conspicuously unaccompanied: Viktor Hovland and the vice-captain José María Olazábal. And so, in an arrestingly tender gesture, Olazábal and Hovland decided to couple up, posing hand-in-hand as they entered the Piazza di Spagna. A powerful stand against the heteronormativity and innate conservatism of professional golf? Or a piece of quite cringey banter? Probably depends how the rest of the evening panned out, to be honest.

Continue reading...

Walking riddle Brooks Koepka brings much-needed edge to Ryder Cup | Jonathan Liew

While far from universally loved, the American is a guaranteed attention-grabber in a sport which finds itself in turmoil

Brooks Koepka doesn’t like you. Perhaps Brooks Koepka doesn’t strictly know you yet, but for a man of Koepka’s unbendable principles this point would be a mere formality. Perhaps at this early stage of your enmity it is more correct to say he disapproves of you. You are the autograph hunter hassling him after practice. You are the person who left the irritating comment on Instagram. You are the driver who cut him up on I-95. Maybe not you specifically, but someone like you. And let’s be real, it probably will be you one day. Best give him a wide berth just to be safe.

You don’t even need to interact directly with Koepka to get on his wrong side. Earlier this year he was at a Florida Panthers ice hockey game when he became exasperated at one of the home team’s defenders. “Ekblad, you suck!” Koepka shouted from the stands in a video that was lighting up the internet within minutes. “Fucking traffic cone!”

Continue reading...

India’s Ashwin dilemma is a parable for modern cricket and all its quirks | Jonathan Liew

The spinner has endured, albeit not without the odd bump in the road. But will he be selected for a home World Cup?

Let’s talk about the David Warner ball first, and then zoom out from there, because if you’re going to try to get your head around the disorienting, shapeshifting puzzle that is Ravichandran Ashwin then you need to realise there are layers and mirrors to this thing. Some of the walls move and some do not. Watch the ball and you’ll miss the hand. Watch the hand and you’ll miss the ball. Watch both and you may just miss the whole plot.

It’s the second one-day international between India and Australia in Indore. India are going to win. That’s not the important part. For Ashwin this doomed run-chase has become a deeply personal mission: a chance to convince India’s selectors that, after more than 18 months out of the side, he is worth a place in the World Cup squad. Everything is pointed at this. He’s been putting in marathon shifts at the national academy. He’s been turning out in local games in Tamil Nadu. He’s been staying out under the lights for extra batting practice. A bowler with more than 700 international wickets is still convinced that there is room for growth.

Continue reading...

Pastor Postecoglou shows importance of journey even if you never reach heaven | Jonathan Liew

Tottenham’s prospects of winning a trophy remain slim but the Australian’s approach is giving supporters reason to smile

A few years ago, around the same time people started getting extremely animated by things such as net spends and expected goals, there came a school of emerging thought that challenged the traditional narrative of footballing performance, arguing – in effect – that the influence of a manager was vastly overstated. Matches are won by the best players, so the hypothesis went, and the best players cost money, and thus a club’s wage bill was a far more reliable predictor of success than whichever bloke happened to be sitting on a padded car seat in the dugout.

In this reading, the era of the all-powerful manager – the patriarchal visionary who oversaw everything from tactics to contract negotiations to the temperature of the away showers – was gone, if it ever really existed. Football’s centre of gravity had shifted away from the manager’s office towards the sporting director, the medical department, the boardroom and the fund markets. And so the game’s enduring fixation on managers – talking about them, listening to them, hiring and sacking them – was an outdated affectation, a fundamental misunderstanding of how the game itself functioned. Austere and exhaustive academic articles were commissioned on the subject. Long, boring data-heavy books were written and occasionally even purchased.

Continue reading...

England really answered only one question: can they kick it? Oh God, yes | Jonathan Liew

After the euphoria of the win over Argentina, this was a reminder of how far Steve Borthwick’s side have to go

“The entire effort of the future will be to invent silence, slowness and solitude,” the French surrealist painter Marcel Duchamp once said. Alas, Duchamp died in 1968 and was unable to witness Steve Borthwick’s England rendering his vision in perfect flesh. At the end of a game that seemed to last for about four months, it was England who were left still standing, still unbeaten, still playing the sort of rugby not even its mother could love.

At least it all ended in a minor blaze of fun. As England put a little butter and marmalade on the scoreline in the final 15 minutes, as Marcus Smith made his belated entrance and began to run riot against a tiring Japan team who had finally discovered their outer limits, it was possible to see how England would ultimately rationalise this performance in their own minds. Smart people will opine that this is how smart teams play smart rugby: setting the game up, taking it deep, wearing sides down.

Continue reading...