Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 49

Leicestershire offer parable for English cricket: teams should serve, not just sell | Jonathan Liew

The perpetual strugglers have a mission beyond simply shaking people down and offer a reminder of what sport can be

The fourth morning at Grace Road dawns brightly and the game is moving at a frightening pace. Leicestershire, following on, are 16 without loss. The Sussex fielders are bounding and skipping across the turf in short, jerky movements. The seamer Brad Currie walks back to his mark in a droll, Charlie Chaplin-style double-step. The commentators are talking in weird electronic blips. At this point you realise the live stream is not working.

Which is obviously something that could happen to anybody. Certainly it would be premature to draw any link between Leicestershire’s apparent inability to operate a simple two-camera feed and the fact that the club have finished bottom of the County Championship in eight of the past 14 seasons, and failed to win a single red-ball game in 2022. Eventually the technical gremlins are sorted, in which time the home team have lost one of their openers and are sliding towards a meek defeat.

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Sam Kerr waits and masters the moment as Chelsea’s striker supreme | Jonathan Liew

Forward goes up against the outstanding Maya Le Tissier but the Manchester United defender is left licking her wounds

Sam Kerr waits. Maya Le Tissier waits. There is a throw-in to be taken and a Chelsea player down injured on the turf and everyone else is just sort of milling about trying to look busy. Le Tissier puts a hand on Kerr’s shoulder to let her know she’s there. Kerr shuffles her feet and feints both ways to let Le Tissier know she could disappear at any moment. But mostly, they wait.

And when you think about it, waiting is perhaps the defining sensation of this job. Waiting on the back row of the bus before it leaves. Waiting for the team meeting to begin. Waiting in hotel rooms and dressing rooms and airport departure lounges and passport control. Kerr is 29 years old, and has been around this sport long enough to know that the vast majority of the moments that make up her day do not matter. So she waits, priming and preparing herself for the handful of seconds that will define her.

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Women’s FA Cup: sold-out Wembley establishes final as national ritual

The record crowd expected for Chelsea v Manchester United is the latest signifier of stunning rise of the women’s game

Wembley played in the Women’s FA Cup final long before the Women’s FA Cup final was ever played at Wembley. In 1997 the amateur club from north-west London – later absorbed into Barnet and now known as London Bees – went on a fairytale run, beating Doncaster Belles and Arsenal on the way to the final at Upton Park. There they lost 1-0 to a goal from Millwall’s Louise Waller in front of 3,015 people. “Of course it would have been nice to play at Wembley Stadium,” their manager, John Jones, said at the time. “But we have to be realistic. The place would be half-empty.”

Two decades earlier, in 1977, Queens Park Rangers beat Southampton 1-0 in the final at Champion Hill, the home of Dulwich Hamlet. For the first few years of the competition’s existence it was still battling the overt hostility of the men’s football establishment, and no Football League ground would agree to host it. As the winning goalscorer Carrie Staley celebrated with the trophy, a male newspaper photographer asked if she would put some lipstick on and kiss the Cup for him. (Staley refused).

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Dzeko and Mkhitaryan punish Milan’s slow start to put fearless Inter in charge

After the silence, the explosion. In the hours and the days before this game Milan was an anxious, curiously sullen city: a city on the verge of something, a city waiting for its time. Perhaps on some level Milan has been waiting two decades for a night like this, the game and the occasion that would restore it to the centre of the footballing universe. And as the teams finally emerged for this Champions League semi-final it felt as if all that bottled tension was being released in a single overwhelming moment: an atmosphere that shook that senses, fireworks that rattled the ribs, banners that reached to the sky.

That noise. What must it be like to play football in that kind of noise? With that weight of longing, with all the ghosts of Milans and Inters past, with the awareness that this is your time and it may not come again? San Siro on this crisp Wednesday night was a godly thing: a distinctly Italian song of pure hunger, a screaming and a pleading, the sort of din that forces coaches to talk in sign language. And if there was a certain restraint to the emotions at full time, it was only the knowledge that next week promises more of the same agony.

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Football fans, the national anthem and a battle for who controls the public space | Jonathan Liew

Why would the Premier League ‘strongly suggest’ clubs mark the coronation? It’s all part of the eternal struggle for power

“We’ve fought wars,” pleads Peter Shilton, his voice breaking with emotion. “People have died to protect our national anthem. Every country has its national anthem, and they’re very proud of it. And, you know, we’re one of the top ones. It’s sad that a small minority feel they have to do this.”

Alas, I was abroad over the weekend and thus missed out on most of the piping hot coronation discourse that many of you will have enjoyed. As it happened I was in Germany: in many ways the royal family’s spiritual home, even if – in Shilton’s reading of history – it did launch an unsuccessful attempt to invade the national anthem in 1939.

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Milan face Inter in Champions League showdown to stir the senses | Jonathan Liew

This is no normal derby: a semi-final, two legs over six days that will subsume an entire city in red-on-blue psychodrama

A bright red scooter skids by and the evening fireflies take flight. Springtime has spread itself across Milan like an open palm, and by some trick of the light San Siro is bathed in a magical purple glow from every direction. Climb one of the epic spiral walkways at just the right moment and your reward is one of the great sensory overloads in European football, a place that feels closer to heaven than Earth.

In the distance, the Milan skyline blinking and twinkling in the setting sun. In the foreground, the swell of noise and the smell of narcotics and the billow of flags: black and blue, black and red, delete as appropriate. Another night singing hymns. Another night chasing dreams.

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Record-breaking Haaland is the perfection of Manchester City’s vision | Jonathan Liew

As the elvish Norse phenomenon surpasses Alan Shearer and Andy Cole, this is the culmination of perhaps the most audacious and complex project undertaken in English football

The most notable thing, watching them all back, is how simple it looks. Elementary tap-ins at the far post. Slotted finishes into an empty net with the goalkeeper sprawled several yards away like a battlefield casualty. Two-yard headers levered from the shoulders of punier, more beta males. Penalties dispatched with all the certainty of a bow and arrow. These are the goals that gild the legend: the ballast, the meat and potatoes, the dull matter of which Premier League record goal hauls are made.

And when we say simple, we should not labour under any delusions that what Erling Haaland does is easy. On the contrary: this is the culmination of perhaps the most audacious and complex project undertaken in English football. A club purchased and refitted with the sole aim of assembling and training a team whose sole aim is to deliver the ball into dangerous attacking areas, again and again and again and again.

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Sordid saga of Manchester United’s sale looks like a kind of football endgame | Jonathan Liew

In a saner world it would be possible to decry the hawking of this institution as if it were a piece of knock-off jewellery

The final deadline for bids to buy Manchester United passed on Friday night. Although in fairness, it feels barely more final than the first two deadlines that passed in February and March. Given the looseness with which the Glazers appear to regard deadlines, (“mufc bid proposal FINAL FINAL USE THIS.docx”) it is possible that when they finally take their leave of the club a lucrative career in column-writing awaits them.

And so to the latest and hopefully the last round of a protracted charade that has come to resemble a reality television show in which viewers are sadly unable to vote off any of the protagonists. Indeed for a club so keen to recast itself as a global media brand you only wonder whether a little television jeopardy might have enlivened the process. Sheikh Jassim, mysterious son of the former prime minister of Qatar, your fellow contestants have voted you into the Hideaway for the night. Oh, you’re already there. As you were, then.

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The full-time mood: bleak. The future for women’s football: dazzling | Jonathan Liew

A record crowd at the Emirates Stadium watched this encounter for the ages. Wolfsburg won, Arsenal shone. Behold, this was poetry in motion

The public bins: full to overflowing.
Holloway Road underground station: so crowded as to be essentially impassable.
The pubs: spilling out on to the pavements.
The pavements: spilling out on to the streets.

Leah Williamson: for some reason, and to the general rapture of social media, pulling pints behind the bar at The Tollington.
The programme queues: sizeable.
The Emirates: sold out.
The Arsenal men’s team: not playing tonight.

The attendance the last time Arsenal played a Champions League semi-final at home, 16 years ago: 1,293.
What the Champions League was called back then: the Uefa Women’s Cup.
The record crowd for a game of women’s club football in the UK until tonight: 49,094.
The record now: 60,063.
The most frequent refrain you hear about women’s football: nobody cares.

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Against all odds, Son Heung-min gives chaotic Spurs a flicker of hope | Jonathan Liew

Club still a shambles with no manager nor sense of direction, but a battling draw with United restored some pride

And perhaps this, too, was the history of Tottenham. As Son Heung-min stole in at the far post to tap in Harry Kane’s cross and complete the unlikeliest of comebacks, it was possible to sense the collective exhalation, not so much a euphoria as a relief. Perhaps, despite all outward appearances, this cause is not quite as unsalvageable as it seems. Perhaps, despite everything, there remains something here worth saving.

It was somehow fitting, too, that it should be Son to provide Tottenham with their life raft. More than anyone it is Son who has managed to encapsulate the sheer dolour of being Spurs this season: their mood ring, their doleful minor-key soundtrack. When Son is sad, it feels inconceivable that anybody else could possibly be happy. And so in his fitful return to form in recent weeks – six goals in nine games for club and country – there is perhaps an augury of better times ahead.

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