Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 76

England finally answer call to arms against Wales on difficult day | Jonathan Liew

Thoughts may have been elsewhere but after a slow start Eddie Jones’s men produced something to remember to see off Wales

There is no official smoking area at Twickenham. The organisers are very clear on this point. Smoking and vaping is strictly prohibited in all areas of the ground, enforced by hundreds of stern-looking signs with a handy reminder on the back of your ticket. Unofficially, of course, everyone knows that the smokers congregate near Gates D and F by the green perimeter fence, and no lackey in an orange bib is going to offer a word of demurral. And so it is that at half-time in this taut, gripping game the corners of the ground are thick with the fug of cigarettes, as hundreds of fans merrily puff themselves a little closer to death.

But then, Twickenham is that sort of place: a world governed by tacit conventions and innumerable contradictions. A place built by old money and yet in thrall to the new. A place that likes to think of itself as the home of rugby but which in reality represents a single narrow sliver of it. A place where sport is the draw but socialising is the real heart of its appeal. An 82,000-capacity arena with the feel of a little English village.

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Lampard cannot pass buck as possession-shy Everton flirt with relegation places | Jonathan Liew

Mixed early results for the new manager have done little to convince that he can arrest the blip that became a cultural shift

“Every new coach wants to be high press, high energy, win the ball back, play quickly, all that stuff, there’s nothing new in that,” Frank Lampard scoffed to Gary Neville last year, in one of the many media interviews he gave during his extended break from management. And he was right, of course. Pretty much every young manager who emerges off the Uefa Pro Licence course seems to have the same few stock phrases to hand: a broad-brush managerial philosophy that is so vague as to be essentially meaningless.

Late last month Lampard finally made his return to management at Everton, and in his first press conference outlined the way he wanted his new team to play. “When I think of Everton, it’s a team that loves to see crosses and pressure and second balls, shots and combinations and things done at speed, a team that wants to run and a team that wants to press high up the pitch,” he said. “Those things absolutely align with my philosophy.” A textbook sales pitch. Of course, as Lampard well knows, the devil of coaching is not in the theory but in the practice, and thus far it’s fair to say the practice has been mixed: two convincing home wins and two convincing away defeats. By the time Everton play on Saturday evening, they could be in the Premier League relegation zone for the first time since Marco Silva was sacked more than two years ago. Their opponents? Manchester City.

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First the IOC, now Nato: how Putin’s Russia refuses to play by the rules | Jonathan Liew

The scandal surrounding Kamila Valieva raises fears the regime may end the teenager’s career before it has a chance to begin

The offensive, we are told, will take many forms. The first sign may well be a cyber-attack knocking out the power grid and internet, jamming mobile phone networks. Well-funded paramilitaries within Ukraine’s borders will be encouraged to create as much disorder as possible. There will be a blitz of propaganda, misinformation and false-flag operations. And then – finally – the blood sacrifice: the trained young men and women prepared to lay down their bodies for greater Russia.

Perhaps we all got a taste of how this might play out on a much smaller scale on Thursday night. As a distraught Kamila Valieva left the ice after a disastrous skate that would cost her a medal in the Olympic women’s competition, the first person to greet her was her coach, Eteri Tutberidze. “Why did you let it go?” she screeched at Valieva in disbelief. “Explain it to me. Why? Why did you stop fighting?”

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Mercurial Kane wears his different masks to stun Manchester City | Jonathan Liew

Striker burgled a spectacular winning goal but helped his team as a pressing midfielder, playmaker and false forward

About an hour before kick-off at the Etihad Stadium a member of staff walks around handing out puzzles. At most grounds they are more popularly known as “team sheets”, but ever since Pep Guardiola arrived at Manchester City the exercise of deciphering his starting XI has become almost as absorbing as watching it. Brows are furrowed. Heads are scratched. Is that Bernardo Silva as a false 9? João Cancelo in midfield? That can’t be an 8, or a 7, and the 5 goes there, so … Ederson at centre-half?

The real trick, of course, is realising that at Guardiola’s City, formations and starting points are largely an irrelevance. Roles switch every 10 minutes. Positions switch every 10 seconds. What matters is the situation, of which no two are ever the same. City’s equalising goal came from a Raheem Sterling cross, attacked by Kevin De Bruyne at the near post, bundled home by Ilkay Gündogan. But you could swap any of those three names around and still picture exactly what happened.

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Marcelo Bielsa in test of faith with Leeds entering unknown territory | Jonathan Liew

Leeds are looking down rather than up and with the squad creaking, what if the manager’s well of miracles has run dry?

Marcelo Bielsa would have made an awful politician. One of his more refreshingly idiosyncratic traits is his habit of never pointing the finger of blame at somebody else when he can point it at himself. There are times when this appetite for self-criticism takes on an almost monastic hue: a live Zoom flagellation, a reminder that no external judgment on Bielsa could ever be as scathing or searching as his own.

Injuries, individual errors, referees, fixture pile-ups, financial disparities: in the world of Bielsa none of this really seems to register. “The position of [Mateusz] Klich was an error on my part,” he said after last Saturday’s 3-0 crushing at Everton, after an appalling performance by the Pole in midfield.

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Klopp flexes Liverpool’s strength in depth to devour ageing Inter | Jonathan Liew

The manager utilised his talent-packed bench to snuff out a rampant Inter and the Champions League tie in eight minutes

Jürgen Klopp had seen enough. With almost an hour played at San Siro, Internazionale cutting his team to ribbons and the home crowd buoyant, the Liverpool manager retreated to his bench in dim spirits. There were a few seconds of discussion with his coaches. Training tops were peeled off, tactical instructions issued, last-minute warm-ups executed. And then, the flourish: a triple substitution in the 59th minute.

Off came Sadio Mané, Fabinho and Harvey Elliott. Diogo Jota had already gone off injured at half‑time. It was Klopp’s inimitable way of telling his players that he wasn’t angry, just disappointed.

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Ruthless Manchester City toy with Sporting to ruin home side’s big night | Jonathan Liew

The Portuguese champions were outclassed in their first Champions League knockout match since 2009

José Alvalade, the man who established Sporting Clube de Portugal in the early 1900s, originally intended to study medicine, only to drop out of his Harvard degree because he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. After spending two years as president of the club, he stormed out in a dispute with his fellow directors, tragically dying of Spanish flu at the age of 33. And perhaps the nicest thing one could say about Sporting’s performance against Manchester City on Tuesday night was that it was a more than fitting tribute to his legacy.

Squeamish, rancorous and over far too soon: Sporting’s big night out, their first Champions League knockout game since 2009, imploded in a bouquet of boos and a haze of basic incoherence. City did not just put the tie to bed: they embalmed it, sealed it in a lead coffin, wreathed it in chains and dropped it somewhere off the north Atlantic coast.

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End of Broad and Anderson made sadder by them being last of their kind | Jonathan Liew

In an era of white-ball proliferation, England may well never produce another pair of specialist red-ball bowlers to match the record-breaking partners

There was a lovely and rather poignant moment during Mollie King’s Instagram Live feed on Sunday morning. The radio presenter and former pop star was filming a video from her house, chatting gaily away about wellness and vitamin supplements, when all of a sudden her fiance pops up in the comments, apologising for the noise he’s making in the next room.

“That must be him calling the front door,” Mollie laughs. “Stuart? I’ve shut the door so he don’t distract me. He’s sat outside. Come in, babe!” And then, right on cue, in walks Instagram husband: Stuart Broad, all 6ft 6in and 537 Test wickets of him, smiling sheepishly in an MCC training top. Another woman on the call, an Australian nutritionist, remembers that Broad has just been playing in the Ashes, and asks him when he’ll next be back.

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Miedema pulls strings from midfield before Chelsea pull out the scissors | Jonathan Liew

Arsenal star’s playmaking role looked a good idea on paper, but she was unable to take the game by the scruff of the neck

In fairness, they did warn us. Perhaps, on reflection, we should have listened to Jonas Eidevall and Emma Hayes when they urged us not to treat this game as a title decider. It was many things: taut, tense, turbulent, controversial, stressful in the extreme, particularly in the closing minutes when it felt as if the entire game could pivot on a single lucky bounce.

In the end, though, nothing was decided and nothing was settled. Chelsea maintained their seven-match unbeaten run, their fate still in their own hands. Arsenal retained their two-point lead at the top of the Women’s Super League, and the knowledge that the hardest games of their season – Chelsea home and away, Manchester United home and away, Manchester City home and away, Tottenham away – are now behind them. The most open WSL in years still feels as if it will go down to the wire.

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Buoyant Napoli face ultimate test in title push that dare not speak its name | Jonathan Liew

Perennial runners-up face leaders Inter on Saturday as quest to win Serie A for the first time without Maradona gathers pace

Last Sunday, amid jubilant scenes at the Pier Luigi Penzo Stadium, Napoli scored a 100th-minute goal to seal a 2-0 win over Venezia, cutting Internazionale’s lead in Serie A to a single point. The following morning, tickets for their next game – a potential title showdown at home to Inter – went on general sale.

Almost immediately, Napoli’s ticket website began to gasp under the sheer volume of traffic. Disgruntled fans complained to the club after spending hours refreshing and rebooting the page, sitting in virtual queues of about 15,000. The stadium box office was a similar story, as restive queues stretched out of the club shop – although, this being Naples, the word “queue” demands a certain imaginative latitude on the reader’s part – and on to the street. The head of Napoli’s official ticket platform fiercely rejected suggestions of a technical problem, instead blaming fans for attempting to purchase tickets despite not possessing the required documentation.

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