Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 48

Mauricio Pochettino landing at Chelsea carries an irresistible sense of jeopardy | Jonathan Liew

Coach and club are not natural bedfellows, so Argentinian will need time and must show he now knows how to tame chaos

“Every week I am fired,” complained Mauricio Pochettino last June, a few weeks before Paris Saint-Germain fired him. “I like Manchester City, because they gave Guardiola the opportunity to build. They gave him time. At PSG, you also need that. By giving serenity to this project, we will be close to winning the Champions League.”

Serenity. Yes. Well, good luck with that. One of the fundamentals of coaching is that vacancies rarely turn up at clubs where everything is running smoothly. Yet even allowing for this, Pochettino’s appointment at Chelsea carries its own irresistible quantum of jeopardy. A coach who craves order and control, colliding head-on with an organisation that has spent two decades running on the fumes of chaos. A coach who values a tight-knit environment and close personal relationships, entering a club that has spent the last year trying to sign every professional footballer in the northern hemisphere. For better or worse, something is going to break here.

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Borussia Dortmund hand Bundesliga title to Bayern Munich with Mainz draw

Afterwards, not a single person went home. The Borussia Dortmund players stood in front of the Yellow Wall in silence, and the Borussia Dortmund fans acknowledged them in silence: a ritual that felt funereal, almost religious, in its wrought penitence. We, the players, beg forgiveness for taking a cheese grater to our faces for the last 90 minutes. We, the fans, forgive you for taking a cheese grater to your faces. And in your bloodied cheeks and gross bits of grated face we see, and honour, the measure of your sacrifice. A little more silence. The coach, Edin Terzic, was crying.

Meanwhile, about 60 miles down the A1, Bayern Munich were indulging in a more traditional title celebration. The customary, time-honoured kind. The Bayern kind. But this time, for Dortmund, there would be nobody else to blame. Not Pep Guardiola or Robert Lewandowski or Uli Hoeness. Not the big players who kept leaving for fresher pastures, nor the bigger clubs who lured them there, nor the financial inequities that enabled them.

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Dortmund 90 minutes away from ending decade of Bayern dominance

The club are not only developing bankable young talent but now finally on the verge of delivering on their title ambitions

The title parade is scheduled to begin at exactly 12.09pm on Sunday afternoon, shortly after Borussia Dortmund’s victorious squad have signed the city’s famous Golden Book. The team bus will then circle one and a half times around Borsigplatz, the large roundabout in the north of Dortmund, before winding the four kilometres through the centre of town, where anything from 200,000 to 500,000 fans are expected to line the streets in celebration.

All week, as Dortmund’s players and staff have driven around the city going about their business, they will have noticed the barriers and road signs going up. They have felt their phone glow white-hot with ticket demands. They may even have heard the mayor of Dortmund declare: “We’re assuming the team won’t let it slip on Saturday.” And yet they will also know that all this is still contingent on one thing: the 90 minutes of football that could break the drought, or break them instead.

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Michael Smith: ‘I’m still hot-headed, I just don’t show it any more’

The world champion on his early years in St Helens, coping with fame and how he has made his peace with uncertainty

Michael Smith’s throw is quick, fluid and deadly. He doesn’t hang around, and so nor will we. Let’s begin right at the start: Cherry Tree Drive in St Helens, where the riot vans roamed the streets and there were plenty of distractions for a teenage kid with a set of darts and a distant dream.

“There was fighting, we had a lot of users in the street, so there were lots of drugs raids and stuff,” he remembers. “Of course I had a lot of friends that were users, friends who did stuff. But then I got into darts. So it was either stay in and practise, or go out and do stupid stuff. I left when I was 23, so I’ve not been there for nine years. It wasn’t the greatest of places, but it’s still home.”

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Newcastle in Champions League and Soccer Saturday chat – Football Weekly

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Liew and John Brewin to discuss Newcastle’s return to Europe and more

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

Today: Newcastle’s 0-0 draw with Leicester wasn’t a classic, but the point secured a top-four finish and long-awaited Champions League return for the Magpies. The Foxes didn’t have a shot on target until stoppage time, but a draw was a good (if not great) result. They have to beat West Ham on Sunday and hope for a favour from Bournemouth to stay in the top flight.

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Perhaps one day this whole age of football will require an asterisk | Jonathan Liew

Whatever you think of Manchester City’s wealth or Newcastle’s or PSG’s owners, football’s regulatory framework has never been fit for purpose

In 2008 Speedo introduced the LZR Racer, a body-length swimsuit lined with stiff polyurethane plastic panels that dramatically reduced drag in the water. Essentially it turned the swimmer into a smooth aerodynamic tube, trapping little pockets of air to improve buoyancy. The technology was introduced in time for the Beijing Olympics, where 23 world records were set by swimmers wearing the LZR.

The impact on the sport was cataclysmic. Athletes who enjoyed the benefits of the new “super suit” described the sensation as like flying. Those who had signed deals with other manufacturers were faced with the choice of breaking their contracts or seeing their careers ruined. And, of course, the records continued to tumble. After Michael Phelps – wearing the LZR – was beaten at the 2009 world championships by the unknown Paul Biederman, wearing a successor suit made entirely of polyurethane – his coach Bob Bowman threatened to pull him out of swimming entirely. In the space of 17 months in 2008 and 2009, a total of 140 world records were set using the LZR. Fifteen still stand. As Bowman put it at the time: “We’ve lost all the history of the sport.”

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Manchester City revel in coronation but they cannot control their legacy | Jonathan Liew

Pep Guardiola’s team are dominant now but their success and the wealth that has driven it may be best left to posterity

The fans were warned not to invade the pitch. There was a message on the big screen a few minutes before the end, a reminder on the public address system that entering the playing surface was strictly illegal and would not be tolerated. There was a line of stewards and police officers poised like sprinters by the touchline, ready to secure the turf as soon as the game ended.

And then the game ended and within seconds the grass was engulfed by stampeding boots and pounding steps and one little girl doing cartwheels, which to be fair was very cute. “PLEASE LEAVE THE PITCH,” the announcer pleaded again, as Manchester City’s players and staff dodged a swarm of flying bodies, some fully clothed and some not, each one bearing a smartphone with a little blinking red dot on the screen. They weren’t really celebrating, you see; they were simply taking what they thought was theirs. A few guys decided to carry out a strength test on the goalposts at the south end of the ground: a task probably best left until the summer and to trained maintenance personnel.

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Manchester City’s inexorable hard power crushes Real Madrid | Jonathan Liew

Pep Guardiola’s side have the perfection of a finely executed military campaign, the perfection of wealth and strength

It was at around 70 minutes, shortly after Toni Kroos had followed Luka Modric off the pitch, that the edges of the night began to sharpen a little and this Champions League semi-final took on a perfect clarity. Manchester City were going to win and Real Madrid were going to lose and no tweak or tactic, no switch or substitution, was going to change that fact.

Real seemed to realise it too. Perhaps they were only 2-0 down but they were also bruised and broken, scarred and scared, tired of running into dead ends filled with blue shirts. Vinícius Junior had long since stopped trying to beat Kyle Walker and had instead resorted to dribbling past as many players as possible, like kids do in the playground. The fouls became more deliberate and more desperate. Even the Spanish radio commentators at the back of the press box had given up shouting and exhorting in favour of low, funereal voices and the odd illegible hand gesture.

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‘Anything can happen’: Inter’s Inzaghi urges belief in Champions League final

Manager talks of a ‘dream come true’ after win over MilanItalians will face Manchester City or Real Madrid next month

Simone Inzaghi has admitted that Internazionale will be the underdogs in the Champions League final next month, but he insisted his team should not be written off against Manchester City or Real Madrid in Istanbul.

Inter secured their first final place in 13 years with a 3-0 aggregate victory against their city rivals Milan on Tuesday night, but many observers – including the former Inter defender Christian Panucci – have described City v Real as “the real final”.

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Lautaro Martínez finishes off Milan to put Inter in Champions League final

For Internazionale, the road to Istanbul was paved with bad intentions. The exuberance and colour of their first-leg victory gave way to something darker and grittier here: not so much a semi-final as a turf war, the sort of game that is to be endured rather than enjoyed. Here their great city rivals were snuffed out, dismantled piece by piece, and finally picked off via a goal by Lautaro Martínez. Milan is theirs. But the greatest prize of all remains tantalisingly within reach.

Simone Inzaghi’s side will probably go into the final on 10 June as one of the least fancied Champions League contenders in recent history. And from the English perspective there is perhaps a tendency to gaze upon this wrought and wizened squad, with the 37-year-old Edin Dzeko up front and the 35-year-old Francesco Acerbi in the centre of defence, and wonder just how they got this far. But there is also a kind of deadly honesty to them: men of conviction, men of skill and steel, who over 180 minutes simply stood taller and made the braver decisions.

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