Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 52

Bayern Munich’s Georgia Stanway: ‘We need to be nastier. I tell the girls that a lot’

The England midfielder on her move to Germany, winning Euro 2022 and facing Arsenal in the Champions League

‘Guten Tag. Wie geht’s?” “Sehr gut, und dir?” At which point, Georgia Stanway and I have pretty much exhausted our meagre supply of German. It’s not entirely our fault: as any Brit living in Germany will tell you, it is virtually impossible to learn the local language when everyone is intent on chattering away at you in English. Since moving to Bayern Munich last summer Stanway has been taking weekly lessons, but admits she’s “still waiting for that click”. The coach, Alexander Straus, conducts his team meetings in English. The training ground instructions are in English. The WhatsApp group is in English. Mercifully, so is the rest of this interview.

Still, for a Barrow girl there are times when Munich feels a long way from home. Beans on toast is one example: you can buy baked beans in Germany, but somehow they don’t taste the same to her. The 24-year-old misses her family and friends, even though they do their best to visit.

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Sheffield United into FA Cup semi-finals as Doyle’s late stunner sinks Blackburn

A hymn of limbs and lungs, a game of pure vibes and pure desire, this was an FA Cup quarter-final epic to stand the test of time. And at its very climax a swing of a leg, a ripple of the Bramall Lane net and a noise that will power Sheffield United all the way to Wembley and a semi-final against Manchester City. It was Tommy Doyle’s 25-yard goal in the first minute of injury time that proved the difference against a daring but distraught Blackburn Rovers, a club who were 10 minutes away from their own blessed moment of triumph.

The bare contours of this game offer just a fraction of the story. United started brightly. Blackburn went ahead against the run of play. United equalised fortuitously. Blackburn again went ahead against the run of play. United equalised through Oli McBurnie with 10 minutes remaining. But the common thread running throughout was a full-blooded commitment, a four‑sided assault on the senses, Yorkshire against Lancashire, a spectacle as gripping as a good film and as loud as a war.

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Vincent Kompany faces pressure test in landmark return to Manchester City

Having learned so much under Pep Guardiola, the Burnley manager has the chance to measure his progress in FA Cup tie

It all began, in a roundabout sort of way, with a groin injury. A few minutes into the second leg of Manchester City’s Champions League semi-final against Real Madrid, Vincent Kompany lunged awkwardly, felt a pop near the top of his right leg and knew what it meant. He would miss the rest of the season. He would miss Belgium’s Euro 2016 campaign. Most worryingly of all, he would be injured for the arrival of a man he was keen to impress: City’s new manager Pep Guardiola.

In a sense, the qualities that helped Kompany navigate a two- decade career were the same qualities that made him such a peerless defender: a razor-sharp instinct for danger, the ability to intuit threats and convert them into opportunities.

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Napoli break new ground and Liverpool are bundled out – Football Weekly Extra

Max Rushden, Mark Langdon, Nicky Bandini, Jonathan Fadugba and Jonathan Liew discuss Wednesday’s Champions League and Premier League action

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Today: the panel discuss the last two Champions League round of 16 games as Liverpool slump at the feet of Real Madrid and Napoli trounce Eintracht Frankfurt to reach their first European Cup quarter-final. The result was overshadowed, however, by violence on the streets of Naples before the game.

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Lifeless Liverpool offer throwback to Hodgson era with tame European exit | Jonathan Liew

It is not clear if Jürgen Klopp knows his best team right now and that has resulted in a late-Wenger inefficiency

With around 12 minutes remaining in this runny, undercooked omelette of a game, Eduardo Camavinga received the ball in Real Madrid’s half with enough time to look up and pick a pass. Truth be told, he probably had time for plenty else besides: crack his knuckles, adjust his socks, clean up his camera roll, check his internet bank balance. But he contented himself with just the pass, rolled into the feet of Karim Benzema.

At which point the farce began in earnest. Benzema, who had been pretty poor all night, collided painfully with Virgil van Dijk. The loose ball ran to Vinícius Júnior, who swung lustily at thin air. The ball was flicked back over to Benzema, who finished into an empty net with Alisson nowhere to be seen. A grimacing Benzema, still limping from the earlier challenge, hobbled over to the corner flag to accept his plaudits.

And as a souvenir of the night, perhaps even the tie as a whole, you could do a lot worse. An event that began with such promise eventually dissolved into a carousel of errors and mishaps, and yet still ended in a decisive, unassailable outcome. There were fleeting moments when this game still felt alive, still felt like a last-16 second leg between two of the giants of world football. But they lasted no longer than a few minutes, sometimes just a few seconds: a mirage of competitiveness thrown into cold relief by Benzema’s late goal.

Liverpool acquitted themselves respectably enough here. There would be no comeback, but there would be no collapse either. And when the moment comes to debrief this tie, they will probably reflect that it was won and lost in that pivotal passage at Anfield when they let in five goals. This is a sport of such fine margins, and ultimately those five goals in 46 minutes really are going to cost you at this level.

Even so, there was something important missing here: the energy and vigour and focus and basic sporting pride that Jürgen Klopp’s side have come to regard as a bare minimum. Some of the passing felt like a throwback to the Roy Hodgson era. The off-the-ball movement was entirely predictable, entirely one-dimensional, all boring straight lines with barely an angle to work with. Trent Alexander-Arnold is currently in the stage of acute bafflement that an elite athlete undergoes when their body is simply no longer doing what they tell it to do.

On the touchline Klopp waved his arms, pointed and gestured, a man pushing all the buttons at his disposal but with a dwindling trust that any of them were still working. He had picked a bold and expansive line-up here, four forwards with four contrasting threats, the sort of team you pick when you still smell the faint possibility of an ambush. He made early substitutions and late substitutions. The midfield was hollowed out and then gradually repopulated. Klopp can be accused of many things but an absence of ideas is not one of them. And yet in a game that demanded an attacking blitz, Liverpool did not generate a single shot between the 37th and 83rd minutes.

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Gary Lineker’s treatment exposes fact that image of warm, fuzzy BBC was always a lie | Jonathan Liew

For the right, the BBC has always been a safe space. Now this space is being contested – and it scares the life out of them

For almost 50 years MI5 had agents embedded at the BBC, vetting job candidates with the specific aim of weeding out prospective left-leaning employees. It was known as the “Christmas Tree” process, after the discreet symbol on a personnel file that would advise executives that a particular individual was to be blacklisted. The practice continued well into the 80s, and until a 1985 Observer exposé was denied at all levels.

Perhaps this jars a little with the warm and fuzzy image of the BBC that has been bequeathed to us over the generations. This lovable national treasure, informed by the sacred mission of its founder Lord Reith, a humming hive of family entertainment and artistic monuments and the Sports Report theme tune and David Attenborough cuddling gorillas, a place that expresses the best of us and represents all of us. And it strikes me that many of the strong feelings generated by the treatment of Gary Lineker over the past week originate in this ideal: a honeyed, romanticised BBC that has only ever really existed in the imagination.

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Is De Zerbi shifting football’s tactics with possession tightrope at Brighton? | Jonathan Liew

Italian is challenging established conventions with audacious play in his team’s danger zone that can turn high-pressing doctrine in on itself

“I was a pain in the ass as a footballer,” Roberto De Zerbi once said. And, in a way, he was a player hopelessly out of his time: a pure No 10 coming through at the turn of the century, just as they were disappearing from the game.

A maverick and a thrill-seeker in a sport tending increasingly towards regimentation. Good enough to be at Milan without ever being good enough to play for them. Even when he dropped down to third-division Lecco on loan, he fell out with manager Roberto Donadoni. His ability with a ball was never in doubt; his ability to adapt always was. “I am a dreamer,” he would later tell La Gazzetta dello Sport. “Very ambitious, honest but unstable, impatient and fiercely volcanic.” For De Zerbi, football had to be played his way if it was worth doing at all. Fortunately, there was a career that would allow him to do just that.

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Choupo-Moting and Gnabry secure Bayern’s progress as PSG fall short again

They will, of course, keep trying. Another few signings in the summer, perhaps a new coach, a few tweaks to the project. Certainly Ligue 1 defences can expect a whole new world of punishment next season. And in a sense, this is simply the mantra of the modern Paris Saint-Germain. Ever bought? Ever failed? No matter. Buy again. Fail again. Fail better. Fail with the two greatest forwards in the world at your disposal. Fail by giving it away in your own penalty area and letting Eric Maxim Choupo-Moting tap the ball into an empty net. Fail by not scoring a single goal in 180 minutes of football.

Meanwhile, this was one more chance gone for Lionel Messi, for Kylian Mbappé, for Neymar, injured here and who knows, perhaps watching on television. It will be of little solace to them, or coach Christophe Galtier, or indeed the club’s Qatari backers, that they competed pretty well for the last half-hour in Paris and the first hour here. For all the leaders and organisers in this team, it remains a source of bafflement that a club with every resource at its disposal seems so lacking in basic maturity, that a club that has won 29 trophies in the past decade still looks so ill-equipped to win. Somehow, the great chokers always find a way.

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Tottenham should be wary of being burned by the allure of an old flame | Jonathan Liew

Spurs have stagnated since the departure of Mauricio Pochettino but must resist the temptation to reappoint him

Fill the bowl of lemons. Dust off the old purple tracksuit. Someone drive down to Big Yellow and get Danny Rose out of storage. Lay palm leaves across Hotspur Way, let the bells ring out across Enfield, make a small summer transfer budget available and prepare for the return of the chosen.

Perhaps it really will be that simple. The great travel writer Bill Bryson once observed that there were three things you can’t do in life. You can’t beat the phone company. You can’t get a waiter to see you until he’s ready to see you. And you can’t go home again. For the past few months – and very possibly the next few as well – Tottenham fans have been vocally challenging the wisdom of number three.

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For City and Newcastle fans, 90 blessed minutes is beyond the circus | Jonathan Liew

As both clubs continue to face questions over their ownership, supporters and players just want to get on with the football

With the utmost diligence and care, the Newcastle fan pulls a neatly folded green Saudi Arabia flag from a holdall, pulls it taut at the corners, drapes it over his shoulders and walks on.

Across the road, by the big Asda, with equal diligence and equal care, some Manchester City fans are collecting and cataloguing non-perishable donations for the local food bank. Behind them the giant steel beams of the Etihad Stadium glisten in the watery morning light, like candles on the world’s largest birthday cake.

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