Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 45

England win again, Walsh’s pain and Nigeria joy – Women’s Football Weekly

Faye Carruthers is joined by Suzanne Wrack, Jonathan Liew and Marva Kreel on a day of mixed emotions for the Lionesses

On today’s pod: the good news – England are on the brink of qualification for the last 16. The bad news - at what cost?!

Another 1-0 win, this time against Denmark, but the sight of Keira Walsh being stretchered off in tears in the first half had us all with our heads in our hands. There was penalty chaos in Adelaide as China are reduced to 10 but find a way to win – meaning all four Group D sides could still qualify or go home on the final match day.

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Kylian Mbappé to Saudi talks show football is now poker for world’s richest

Al-Hilal’s £259m offer is just diplomacy between states disguised as transfer gossip. No wonder he’s not keen ...

At the time of writing, officials from Al-Hilal are in Paris negotiating the transfer of Kylian Mbappé, who will be expected to replace some of the 26 goals provided last season by Odion Ighalo. With forward Luciano Vietto also leaving in the summer, the Blue Waves have joined the list of clubs in the Saudi Pro League looking for a proven goalscorer who can also play out wide. Although you also wonder how Mbappé’s arrival will impact the club’s current left winger and star of the recent World Cup, the veteran Salem al-Dawsari. What a way to treat a club legend.

Perhaps on reflection this is the only respect in which the signing of Mbappé from Paris Saint-Germain makes any kind of sense: as a footballing solution to a footballing problem, the missing piece of the Al-Hilal jigsaw. Will defenders be wary of fouling Mbappé on the edge of the penalty area, given the presence of Rúben Neves on free-kick duty? Will Neves even be allowed to take the free-kicks? How will Mbappé adapt to the pace and intensity of the Pro League? Will he gel with Moussa Marega? And if not, who will be the one to make way? The new coach, Jorge Jesus, may end up with a dilemma on his hands.

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Stokes and McCullum want to save Test cricket but what about beyond Big Three? | Jonathan Liew

Guaranteed matches and equitable revenue distribution is how you rescue the game rather than just focusing on top nations

Cancel the open-topped bus parade. Stash the MBEs back in the drawer. Slap a half-price sticker on the basket of bucket hats. Manchester woke on Monday morning to pale sunshine, a clearing mist, the fog of war lifting from the battlefield.

There will be a fifth Ashes Test at the Oval this week, and it will be big. These things always are. But it will unfold in front of a traditional audience of the pre-enlisted. The hostilities continue. But English cricket’s evangelical summer is over. “It is a massive game for us,” Ben Stokes insisted. But no longer, really, for anybody else.

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One of the greatest modern Ashes series ends in a splash of puddles | Jonathan Liew

The Manchester rain denying us a possible electrifying fifth Test decider should be a matter of sadness, not condemnation

Open the curtains. The circles on the surface of the canal give the game away immediately. Little compact discs of doom. There’s a group of lads outside the hotel, one of them ordering an Uber, one of them checking a weather app, one of them refreshing the BBC live blog. Eleven o’clock inspection, says one. Might clear up by 12, says another. Ahmed’s coming in four minutes, says another.

By the time they reach the ground they will know that the 11am inspection has been delayed, and so begins the slow fade. The person operating the big screen starts having a little fun. “Please stay hydrated.” “Water fountains are located around the concourse.” “Join The Cloud wifi network.” A game of plastic cricket breaks out by the burrito stand. A kneeling Brendon McCullum gives slip catching practice, trying for all the world not to look like a man getting his trousers soaked.

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Harry Brook burns bright to light up Ashes by batting with no baggage | Jonathan Liew

Composure on his way to 61 for England gives impression that cricket will not eat him in the way it eats so many of its young

“Just another game,” Harry Brook declared in an interview with Wisden Cricket Monthly ahead of this Ashes series. “The same ball coming down at me. Just another human bowling a little round leather thing at another human. And I’ve got to hit it with a bit of wood. That’s it, really.”

We can assume that Nasser Hussain’s job at Sky Sports is probably safe for the time being. But in another sense it was a quote that cut to the heart of what has made Brook one of the world’s most devastating players. Playing for England has always come with a certain quantum of baggage attached: historical, cultural, judgmental. But more than any of his current teammates, Brook has the ability to strip away context, to bat without prejudice, to boil the game down its simplest chemical form. That’s not Mitchell Starc; it’s a moving meat spindle covered in white cloth and sun cream. That’s not a scoreboard; it’s a random array of coloured electronic shapes. And this isn’t the most eagerly anticipated Ashes series since 2005, because in 2005 you were six years old and probably sitting on a swing.

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Zakball comes home as Crawley rewards England’s indulgence in style | Jonathan Liew

Opener’s 189 was a reflection of the risk-free privilege of his upbringing but it was one of England’s greatest Ashes innings

The ball comes out perfectly. Wrist cocked and straight, fingers behind the seam. The length is perfect: full enough to hit the stumps, not full enough to drive. The line is perfect: off, maybe off-and-middle. A little away movement and the edge is in play, the same edge that Mitchell Marsh found twice at Headingley. Or it thuds the pads and gets him leg-before for the 44th time in a largely underwhelming red-ball career.

In short, it is exactly the ball you bowl if you want to get Zak Crawley out. The ball the analyst would tell you to bowl. The ball every fast bowler strives to master. What you do not expect is for the batter to stand up in his crease and clout the ball into the crowd with all the scornful insouciance of a man plonking a seven-iron on to the 16th green at Augusta.

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Green could learn from Marsh with understudy exerting Ashes influence | Jonathan Liew

Contrast between them was stark with young all-rounder Oppenheimer compared to freedom of teammate’s Barbie

If you see a fork in the road, take it. And so it is that a little after 4pm on a pale summer’s day in Manchester, Cameron Green walks out of the pavilion to join Mitchell Marsh in the middle. Their gazes meet, and for a fleeting moment we are reminded of that famous internet meme with the two Spider-Man characters pointing at each other. Hang on. I thought I was the tall, big-hitting 85mph seam-bowling all-rounder in this team. So who are you exactly?

They share a few quick words, although given the noise around the place it’s arguable whether any actual information was communicated. Australia are 189 for five, having lost two wickets for six runs either side of tea. Stuart Broad has a nefarious glint in his eye and a little sliver of tongue poking out of the side of his mouth, the way he looks when he can taste blood. Marsh is on two. Green is on nought. The Ashes are afoot, England are rampant and the only thing standing in their way is just under four metres of prime Perth flesh.

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Ons Jabeur has shown how to live with defeat – like it’s the end of the world | Jonathan Liew

The art of losing isn’t hard to master, but the Tunisian took it to a spellbinding new level and won Wimbledon hearts

Play to win, obviously. But if you must lose, then try to lose like Ons Jabeur. Lose like you mean it. Lose and be devoured by great, greedy sobs. Lose and weep on the shoulder of Kate Middleton and try not to laugh at the irony of being counselled on the virtues of hard work and perseverance by a literal princess.

Lose a Wimbledon final by hitting twice as many winners as your opponent and making twice as many unforced errors. Lose and bring the house down with a joke about how ugly you’re going to look crying on camera. Lose like you live, with all your heart and soul. Lose so charmingly that nobody really remembers who won.

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Noa-Lynn van Leuven: ‘I think darts is helping me to be the best of myself’

Dutch darts player will become first trans woman to play in a televised PDC tournament after long road back to a sport she loves

Before everything that happened, before the desolation and the despair, before life changed for ever, there was a set of darts. Her parents gave them to her at the age of eight, and when she picked them up she felt a rare and powerful contentment. She threw and she threw. She threw her way into the Netherlands youth team. She devoured Raymond van Barneveld games on television. She dreamed of playing professionally, travelling the world, her name on the big screen. She was Noa-Lynn van Leuven, even if nobody called her that yet.

“I just had a feeling with the game,” she says from her home in Heemskerk, just outside Amsterdam. “I like the whole fight around it. I love watching darts, I love playing darts, and even if I wasn’t on the level I am now, I would still love it. I work long days in a kitchen as a chef de partie, and try to practise for an hour every day, so I don’t do much else. I work, I play darts and I sleep.”

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Spiralling costs undermine idea of sport as a communal force for good | Jonathan Liew

As tickets become increasingly unaffordable, the experience of attending sport now seems to be reserved for a select few

Hold your nerve. Stick to the plan. We’re all in this together. Your rent is going through the roof and your bills are turning red, and your local supermarket has started putting security tags on the cheese, but the sunlit uplands are at hand. Desperate parents are stealing baby formula and corporate profit margins are fattening and there seem to be a lot more mattresses on the street these days, but trust the process. And in the meantime, try to avoid asking for a pay rise, buying branded goods or watching live sport.

Full disclosure: I’m probably not the best person to be writing about the rising cost of attending sport in this country. I get to do it for free. It’s the most pathetic excuse for a job yet invented. Likewise, among the sports media as a whole, ticket prices have always been something of a blind spot: a war we so rarely have to fight, a huge segment of the sporting experience to which, with a cheery wave of a lanyard, we remain largely oblivious. But really it’s time somebody started kicking up a fuss, because it’s getting ridiculous out there.

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