Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 65

Chelsea must ‘toughen up’, says Thomas Tuchel after Southampton hit back

As the second half leaked away and Chelsea haplessly chased a late equalising goal, Thomas Tuchel started pulling the levers. On came Christian Pulisic, then Armando Broja. Raheem Sterling continued to plug away on the left, Hakim Ziyech on the right, Mason Mount in the centre. Kai Havertz and Ruben Loftus-Cheek had already made way. Still there are those in the Chelsea hierarchy who reckon that somehow the solution to their current incontinence is a lack of attackers.

There were plenty of excuses for Chelsea to grasp at. There always are, if you want to find them. The absences of Reece James and N’Golo Kanté. The poor quality of the pitch. The chances created in the first half and the unrepeatable brilliance of Roméo Lavia’s game-changing equaliser. But the fact remains that this is still a brittle and skittish side, short on rhythm and inspiration, and one that appears to have completely mislaid the defensive stubbornness of the early Tuchel era.

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Dele Alli’s Besiktas move does not signal a failed or squandered career | Jonathan Liew

Can a man who rose from a Milton Keynes council estate to a World Cup and a Champions League final be deemed a failure?

Dele Alli has moved to Besiktas on loan, where he remains in a critical condition. The Everton midfielder was airlifted to Istanbul on Wednesday night, where he is expected to play in the Turkish Super Lig, a disease widely believed to be incurable. Naturally, everyone at the Guardian sends their best wishes to Dele at this difficult time.

OK, but seriously for a minute. How should we think about this? Perhaps the most natural reaction has been to conceive of Alli’s career in terms of loss. On one hand there is a wistful sadness for the player we all assume he could have been: the wonder goals not scored, the trophies not won, the cheeky nutmegs not executed. “Now he’s gone to Turkish football,” the Sky pundit Paul Merson lamented, “we’re never going to see him ever again.”

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Nottingham Forest’s Steve Cooper hits out at Richarlison’s ball-juggling antics

‘I wouldn’t want my players to do that', says Forest managerAntonio Conte unhappy as his side face three games in six days

Steve Cooper was deeply unimpressed by Richarlison’s juggling antics during Nottingham Forest’s defeat by Tottenham on Sunday evening. With Spurs 2-0 up late in the game, Richarlison began to taunt the Forest defenders by juggling the ball on the left wing, to howls of derision from the home crowd.

“I wouldn’t want my players to do that, what Richarlison did,” the Nottingham Forest manager said. “If that is accepted at Spurs that is nothing to do with me, but it wouldn’t be accepted here.”

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Harry Kane guides Tottenham past Nottingham Forest despite penalty miss

There are really three ways of interpreting Tottenham’s start to the season. One is that a team playing this modestly, with such an overreliance on the counterattack, is due a reversion to the mean before long. Another is that their results are an impressive indication of resilience and confidence, and once performances catch up and new signings gel, they will be a formidable presence.

But of course there is a third theory: that when you have one of the world’s greatest strikers, under the tutelage of one of its greatest strategists, the conventional laws of footballing gravity do not necessarily apply. Antonio Conte’s teams have always prided themselves on taking the shortest and most expedient route from goal to goal. And if that means simply giving the ball to Harry Kane, then it will certainly do for now.

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Klopp’s Liverpool: is time catching up with this magnificent red machine?

The club has been operating at the outer limit of its capabilities to keep pace with far richer opponents – it is starting to tell

When it was all getting a little too much for Jürgen Klopp at Mainz, when the defeats began to accumulate and the negative thoughts began to spiral, he would clear the schedule, jump in the car and take his squad on an adventure holiday. Long walks in the Hunsrück. Mountain biking in the Black Forest. Two or three days spent knocking back beers, sleeping in tiny huts, having the sort of honest conversations you couldn’t really have in an office. This was Klopp’s terrain, the land where he grew up, and in times of crisis it also became his sanctuary.

For Klopp’s players, the occasional jolting change of scenery became not simply invigorating but desperately necessary. The training drills would frequently change, but the rasping cigarette-hardened voice delivering them never did. The limbs and the lungs would be worked to exhaustion from July until May. With every passing year you could feel yourself getting stronger, fitter, harder, tighter. The football was thrilling and relentless. The camaraderie was bracing and intense. Everything worked and worked and worked, right up until the moment it stopped working.

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Battle for cricket’s future has already been won but Tests can still retain their shine | Jonathan Liew

The IPL’s £5.2bn deal shows where the game is headed but less international cricket might actually make it feel more special

So what did you do during the great English Cricket Culture Wars? Did you set up a burner Twitter account and start spamming George Dobell? Did you start a furious argument about state schools and free-to-air television with a man who lists his interests as “Wife – Manchester Originals – UFC – but not necessarily in that order!!!!”? Did you share a video of Alice Capsey just doing Alice Capsey things?

Alternatively it is entirely possible that you have no idea what any of the last paragraph was about, in which case you enjoy not simply my admiration but my deepest envy. English cricket is, after all, a much bigger and less tribal place than it occasionally appears from the cesspits and panic rooms of the internet, where two people with an existing grudge and a migraine can propel an issue to the top of the agenda simply by screaming at each other for a few hours.

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Harry Kane scores landmark 185th goal to guide Tottenham past snappy Wolves

We got a game here, finally, of sorts. For that we probably had Antonio Conte to thank and a half-time team talk one suspects was thick on invective and thin on instruction. Tottenham remain undefeated and underwhelming but Harry Kane’s second-half goal gave them all three points and a win that in tone and toughness felt like a comeback.

The pieces are not quite fitting yet. Son Heung-min looks undercooked and a little short of form; the midfield is still vulnerable to being outnumbered; the team as a whole still looks a little more comfortable counterattacking than genuinely controlling games. But there is spirit and resilience, as well as the quality and depth to make it count. Eric Dier and Ivan Perisic were excellent. Richarlison looked sharp and spangly as a late substitute.

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Marcus Rashford has drifted from young striking sensation to huffing workhorse | Jonathan Liew

As Manchester United managers have come and gone, his chance to join the elite will have to happen somewhere else

“You’re running too much,” Louis van Gaal told Marcus Rashford. It was half-time in Manchester United’s Europa League game against Midtjylland, and one of the world’s most celebrated coaches was trying to impart a few words of wisdom to the 18-year-old striker making his first-team debut.

“Stay between the width of the six-yard box,” he assured Rashford, “and you’ll score.” In the second half, Rashford took Van Gaal’s advice on board. He was rewarded with two close-range goals, United won 5-1 and Van Gaal had seen enough to hand Rashford a Premier League debut against Arsenal that weekend. Rashford would finish the season with eight goals, a place in Roy Hodgson’s Euro 2016 squad, but above all the impression that this teenage sensation could be anything he wanted.

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Will the Glazers sell? And a Premier League preview – Football Weekly Extra

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Robyn Cowen, Jonathan Liew and Ben Fisher to preview the Premier League games this weekend and look over the latest action from the EFL

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

Today: the Manchester United situation gets more ridiculous as they are linked with Asmir Begovic, João Félix and Jim Ratcliffe. Where does it all end?

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Ready, set, stop: the Premier League season of two halves is here | Jonathan Liew

The domestic English campaign will be the first ever to be rudely interrupted by a winter World Cup

The bible quickly arrives in the post as soon as promotion is secured. This season’s Premier League Handbook runs to 666 pages, and for new inductees to the faith its every word may as well be gospel. For example, there are 15 separate rules on floodlights (which must provide an average illuminance of at least 1000 lux, measured from 96 precise locations on the field). The press box must seat at least 50 journalists (up from 40 in the Championship). Television commentary positions must be at least three metres wide and one metre deep. Kit suppliers must be informed in writing about the Premier League’s ban on minimum pricing. And on and on it goes, a bureaucratic epic that if nothing else demonstrates the extent to which this product is curated, delimited, plotted out to the tiniest degree.

Order out of chaos: this is the very essence of the Premier League, in many ways the very essence of football. You plan and you scheme and you train in the distant hope that after nine months, a little truth finally emerges from the melee. But it never quite turns out that way. There is always some eventuality or circumstance that has not been anticipated in advance, some untameable force that only becomes apparent in retrospect. Given a long enough timeline, chaos always wins.

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