Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 55

Football and the climate crisis: does the game really want to tackle it?

Green Football Weekend raises awkward questions about the game’s readiness to start taking genuinely ambitious action

About three years ago, in the thick of a League Two promotion campaign, Michael Doughty began to notice something. An unusually wet winter had flooded Swindon Town’s training pitches, forcing them to trek up and down the country in search of a usable facility. The postponements were piling up. “It would be unseasonably warm, then super-cold, which made performance more difficult,” the midfielder remembers. “The effect was really tangible. And I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a discussion.”

For Doughty it was a realisation that would set off an unusual chain of events. After retiring from the game he set up a sustainable sportswear brand, but soon realised that he wanted to work in football again. And so, aged just 30, he has returned to his old club, not as a coach or a scout or an ambassador, but as their chief sustainability officer: the first former player to take such a position at an English league club.

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Premier League’s spending bubble offers only cheap thrills in winter of disconnect | Jonathan Liew

Like the City of London, the top flight is now an unregulated plaything with little relevance to the real world beyond it

So, how was your January? Perhaps like many people you engaged in a little belt-tightening, foreswore alcohol, began a new fitness regime, creatively restructured a few festive debts. Or perhaps you simply grimaced and shivered your way through a month of rising prices and falling temperatures, waited patiently in the bus queue or on the picket line, simply trying to make it to the next place.

At which point enter the Premier League, with its £815m of January spending, its doctrine of schlock and awe, its unshakeable fixation on persuading men in shirts to wear other shirts before a clock runs out. And on one level the dissonance here is hard to ignore, the temptation to juxtapose Chelsea’s bottomless balance sheet with the efficiencies and strictures being demanded of those who watch them every week. Just imagine how many nurses’ salaries Todd Boehly could have funded with the purchase of one Enzo Fernández. But of course he won’t, will he?

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A rancid melody has been directed at Azeem Rafiq but he's not the only target | Jonathan Liew

There are plenty of potential whistleblowers with their own stories, seeing what happens when you dare to speak out

On the evening of 5 October last year, a man approached a house in Barnsley with a mobile phone in one hand and some toilet rolls in the other. According to written testimony submitted to a parliamentary inquiry, the man circled the house for several minutes talking into his phone, before walking into the garden and taking a dump.

Then there was the bloke who stalked the house late at night carrying what looked like a length of chain. People shouting abuse through shop windows and car windows. Guys sliding into his messages to call him a “lying little scum”, a “fucking piece of shit”, a “Paki rat”, threatening to destroy his family business. The many times he has walked down the streets of his home town and wondered whether this is the day someone finally makes good on their promise of violence.

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Hertha and Union Berlin meet as two clubs on seemingly opposite paths

Hertha have long been considered the biggest club in the city but their struggles have coincided with Union’s surprise surge from the lower leagues to second place in the Bundesliga

There was a time, of course, when this was not really a rivalry at all. For most of the last century Hertha Berlin and Union Berlin existed in separate worlds: divided by geography and history, by the 23 kilometres from the Olympiastadion in Charlottenburg to the Alte Försterei in Köpenick, by several league divisions and – famously – a large wall. To this day there are Union fans who say their biggest adversaries are not Hertha but their east Berlin neighbours Dynamo, and heartily continue to sing anti-Dynamo songs on their way to games.

Indeed, during the cold war a curious solidarity existed between the two clubs. Hertha fans from the west would cross into east Berlin to watch Union games. Union fans would make trips to Prague and Plovdiv to watch Hertha in European competition. In January 1990, a couple of months after the fall of the Wall, the clubs played an emotional friendly in front of 50,000 fans at the Olympiastadion. There were tears in the stands and embraces on the pitch. Briefly, Hertha and Union seemed to capture the indomitable spirit of the reunified city.

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Celebrity boxing is a satire, but the punchline is an unexpected one | Jonathan Liew

The bout between KSI and FaZe Temperrr underlines the phenomenon’s growing popularity and poses questions for the sport itself

The fighters circle each other uncertainly, a little skittishly, pawing at fresh air, loosening their limbs, feeling the spring and thud of the canvas under their boots. It takes them around 15 seconds to get bored of that and start swinging at each other.

KSI flings a straight right that looks uncannily like a man falling into a bus. FaZe Temperrr, a little off-balance, responds with a check-hook that brings to mind a guy trying to pick up a cat in one arm. Approximately half a minute in they start trading, although again this description seems somehow inadequate. What really happens is that KSI runs at Temperrr wildly flailing his arms, and so Temperrr also starts wildly flailing his arms – you know, the way any of us would in a similar situation – before finally entangling themselves around each other like a pair of discarded Christmas trees on a Sidcup pavement.

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Arsenal strut past Manchester United with unmistakable aura of champions | Jonathan Liew

Expectation and reality seem to have aligned in north London, giving Mikel Arteta’s side a sense of unstoppable momentum

Sunday in London and all you can see is fumes: hot breath on cold air and vape smoke and dope smoke and steam rising from sweaty heads and a hype they can finally believe in. Of course Eddie Nketiah is delighted and of course Oleksandr Zinchenko is delighted, but have you ever in your life seen such happy unused substitutes? Sunday in London and it doesn’t matter whether you’re in the back row pressed against the stained glass, or so close you can grasp the hem of the preacher’s garment. Everyone in this congregation gets saved in the end.

The post-Christmas Emirates is a different place to what it was pre-Christmas. There’s a swagger and an arrogance here now, the sweet spot where old certainties meet new stirrings. And they no longer ask, they demand. Even the sticky periods are waited out with measured impatience rather than dull dread. OK, Marcus Rashford. Nice header, Lisandro Martínez. But what time do we actually win?

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Arteta and Ten Hag take inspiration from Cruyff in their full-back fluidity

Arsenal and Manchester United managers have boldly redeployed their defensive players in adapted roles

It was in the heat of summer that Mikel Arteta finally decided to press the button on a strategy he had been brewing for almost a year. For much of the previous season he had become convinced that Ben White was a right-back in the making: quick, calm on the ball and blessed with sound positional sense and a high level of tactical intelligence. The problem was everyone else. None of the squad, he decided, was capable of replacing White in the centre of defence.

For some time Arteta had been searching for full-backs who could play his way: stepping up into a narrower role when Arsenal had the ball, effectively mutating into central midfielders. Over his three seasons at the club he had tried and discarded Ainsley Maitland-Niles and Héctor Bellerín on the right, Nuno Tavares and even Bukayo Saka on the left.

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Staring into the abyss against Spurs jolts Manchester City back into life | Jonathan Liew

At half-time Pep Guardiola’s side were sliding out of the title race, but now they seem to have found their edge again

The concourses at the Etihad Stadium are already swelling by the time Tottenham score their first. The bleak news quickly filters through to the urinals and the pie queue. Shakes of disbelief and muttered curses through pastry-flecked lips. Then another noise, somehow both hollower and more urgent than the first. This noise is harder to decipher. There can’t possibly be the time for a second Spurs goal. Also, the very idea of a second Spurs goal. But what else could this noise be?

Manchester City are 2-0 down and Arsenal are going to be eight points clear at the top of the Premier League. With a game in hand. Nothing about this team, this squad, this stadium, in this moment, suggests an impending title win. It feels ridiculous at this club, in this era, to declare a league championship gone in January with more than half the season still to play. But what else could this noise be?

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Everton protests are not about money, they are about hope and connection | Jonathan Liew

Fans have vented their frustration with banners and asked the players to show passion, but what will their efforts achieve?

I’ve been particularly enjoying the protest banners. Everton is a furious club right now, its fans and its ownership in open warfare, a mixture of rage and desperation and powerlessness. And yet for some reason all this anger seems to express itself in perfect, playful rhyming couplets. “Everton were magic, Kenwright is tragic.” “A football giant owned by a clown, all you’ll achieve is taking us down.” “A chairman who won’t let go, an under-qualified CEO.”

Only Everton fans, you feel, can capture an existential cry for help with the levity of a child’s nursery rhyme. I don’t propose to analyse the metre and scansion of the Everton banners in too much detail, but on some level I wonder whether the jauntiness of the medium is a subconscious counterpoint to the opacity and obfuscation of the Everton board, with their woolly “Official Statements”, their anonymous briefings to favoured journalists, the intentionally imprecise messaging. You put out your press releases. We bring poetry.

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Spurs’ – and Conte’s – lack of fervour thrown into stark relief by Arsenal | Jonathan Liew

Led by a manager who is treading water, Tottenham are going nowhere, while their derby rivals kick on with commitment

After the final whistle, after the booing and brawling had subsided, as Arsenal’s giddy players jigged and danced their way over to their supporters in the corner, Yves Bissouma stood alone in the Tottenham half watching them. Watching with longing, and envy, and perhaps even a certain curiosity. Joy? Pleasure? Celebration? What are these strange new things?

By that stage, of course, Bissouma’s teammates had long since retired to the warmth of the dressing room. They did not want to be there any longer, and nor did the Tottenham fans who were already slogging down the High Road in search of liquid consolation. Antonio Conte, as he never tires of telling us, does still want to be here. Ideally. Providing several important conditions are met. It can hardly be his fault, after all, that the club keeps disappointing him like this.

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