Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 79

Radical change is needed to stop the Ashes ending up a fading museum piece

Shorter series and the introduction of a multi-format contest would help prevent the increasing frequency of dead rubbers between mismatched sides which tarnish cricket’s showpiece

Even with the Ashes gone, the inquests under way and his future under the spotlight, Joe Root was talking a good game ahead of the Sydney Test. “For us it’s a must-win game,” he said. “I know the series isn’t winnable, but it’s a good opportunity.” On the Australian side, meanwhile, Steve Smith was urging his team to turn the screw by making it 4-0. “We’ve wrapped up the series which is great, and we want to continue winning,” he said. “That’s important.”

So far so routine, although in the spirit of transparency it seems fair to point out that the above quotes were taken not from the current series, but from the corresponding mismatch in January 2018, four years ago to the day. Well, they do say one of the best things about Test cricket is its timelessness.

Continue reading...

Arsenal floored but Saka and co left wearing a little halo of hope | Jonathan Liew

For all their flaws and unsolved problems, this team have renewed the air of optimism at the Emirates

A strange and unfamiliar noise swirled around the Emirates Stadium at full-time. Strewn across the turf in red and white was the human rubble of a crushing injury-time defeat. Takehiro Tomiyasu and Ben White were out cold. Thomas Partey, hand outstretched, helped them up. And as Arsenal’s exhausted players slowly winched themselves to their feet, the four sides of the ground rose to applaud them: a gesture of approval, pride, perhaps even defiance.

Yes, Arsenal had lost to Manchester City again. Yes, it had been largely self-inflicted again. But somehow this did not feel like the other times.

Continue reading...

English cricket must aspire to more than Giles’s brand of middle management | Jonathan Liew

The England setup seems to be lacking the innovation, imagination and variety of voices that moves a team forward

With an impeccable sense of timing, Ashley Giles flies into Sydney next week to join up with the England squad ahead of the fourth Ashes Test. I know what you’re all thinking: if only he’d arrived earlier. How differently things might have panned out had the “Managing Director, England Men’s Cricket” been able to effect his unique brand of managerial direction earlier in the series? Perhaps, like Glenn McGrath in 2005 or John Snow in 1974-75, the Giles Effect (Conjecture) seems fated to remain an arresting counterfactual in the footnotes of Ashes history.

Instead, Giles arrives with the Ashes gone and English cricket in varying states of disarray. The captain, Joe Root, is said to be quietly seething at the manner of this defeat and the entirely foreseeable missteps that have led to it. Chris Silverwood, the man whom Giles decided to make the most powerful England coach of the 21st century, will probably end up leaving his job. However Tom Harrison, Giles’s boss and the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, still gets his share of a £2m bonus pot. So let’s charitably call it a mixed picture.

Continue reading...

After awful Ashes defeat, will England ever be good at Test cricket again? | Jonathan Liew

Joe Root and Chris Silverwood will probably pay for the debacle in Australia with their jobs, but what then?

It’s vaguely amusing to recall now that for much of the year, the very existence of this Ashes series was the subject of fraught, board-level speculation. Tense negotiations were conducted between Cricket Australia and their counterparts in England. State governments, federal government, public health experts and players all had to bestow their approval. Would the 2021-22 Ashes happen at all?

Well, as it turned out, not really. Around 850 overs separated the dismissal of Rory Burns on the first morning in Brisbane and the dismissal of Jimmy Anderson on the third morning in Melbourne: the series decided in a little over nine days of cricket. And so as the victorious Australians celebrated wildly on the MCG outfield, it was possible to wonder whether they were overdoing things a touch. Was there any real satisfaction to be taken in despatching an opponent this easily? Did it not all feel a little hollow? A little comfortable? A little embarrassing?

Continue reading...

Late-career Jimmy Anderson chasing lost causes in failing England team | Jonathan Liew

The 39-year-old bowler is steadily getting better despite the battle scars with the team going in the opposite direction

Jimmy Anderson walked into the indoor nets at the Melbourne Cricket Ground and slumped into the first available chair. His eyes were weary. His boots were scuffed. His trousers were soaked in blood, a fielding injury from Adelaide two Tests earlier which had never been allowed to heal. The fourth Ashes Test of 2017-18 had just ended in an excruciating draw, Anderson had just bowled 59 thankless overs and only a lunatic would have entertained the notion that he would be back at this very ground in four years’ time for more of the same.

A lunatic such as Jimmy Anderson, in other words. For in the last week of 2021, here he was: a fresh set of whites, a fresh set of stumps, a fresh set of edges, a fresh haul of victims. And even if England’s latest batting collapse extinguished any faint hope that his four for 33 might prove an Ashes-saving effort, then in many ways this is to capture the very essence of late-career Anderson: a bowler steadily getting better and better, even as his team gets worse and worse.

Continue reading...

England cricket capitulations have gone from car-crash to commonplace | Jonathan Liew

Latest Ashes collapse is overly familiar and a backdrop to the beginning of the end for Stokes-Bairstow-Buttler middle order

Typical: Christmas evening, you turn on the television and it’s another bloody repeat. Although in fairness to England, pick through the dental records of their latest Ashes capitulation and you might just be able to identify a few distinguishing features. And above all the defining quality of their Boxing Day fiasco in Melbourne was the sense of hopelessness and predestination: of a team and a generation whose narrative arc has finally run dry.

There was a time when England collapses had a kind of fascinating car-crash quality. These days, by contrast, they feel strangely banal: tedious, overfamiliar, predictable, like a recurring anxiety dream. The openers disappear early. Joe Root does something pointless and defiant. All of a sudden you’re back at your old school. Someone in the middle order plays a stupid shot. You turn over the exam paper, but there’s nothing on it.

Continue reading...

2021 was the year when football’s silent majority finally found its voice | Jonathan Liew

European Super League protests showed us that when fans and players are on the same page, no one in the game can stop them

Remarkably, the website is still live. Eight months after the European Super League disintegrated in an embarrassing fireball, you might think its founders would be minded to erase all trace of their hubris and humiliation. But perhaps that would be to credit them with too much competence. And so there it remains to this day: “The Super League is a new European competition between 20 top clubs comprised of 15 founders and five annual qualifiers.” Well, good luck with that.

There is, of course, an alternative theory. After all, the Super League is still not quite dead in a legislative sense; certainly not if you believe the loud and persistent avowals of Andrea Agnelli at Juventus, Joan Laporta at Barcelona and Florentino Pérez at Real Madrid, the three remaining hoarse men of the apocalypse. Meanwhile the impulses that generated the Super League – greed, inequality, shifting financial models, Covid – have not disappeared. Perhaps on reflection, that the Super League website is still up is not an oversight, but a warning.

Continue reading...

Glen Durrant: ‘You begin to overthink, like a golfer having the yips. I was in panic mode’

This time last year the former BDO world champion had just won the darts Premier League at the first attempt, but he already knew something was starting to go wrong

There are the times when Glen Durrant wakes up and tells himself that this is going to be the day. The day it all clicks. The day he feels like a triple world champion again. The day he feels something again. There are the times when he is watching old clips of himself and spots something and leaps upstairs to his practice room, convinced he’s identified the one tweak that will make everything all right again.

Then there were the darker times. During the Premier League earlier this year, he would lie in his Milton Keynes hotel room with the lights out and his clothes on, wondering where it had all gone wrong. There was the time he went back to his old pub, the Cargo Fleet Club in Middlesbrough, to throw a few arrows with friends. But he was recognised instantly and a crowd began to gather and suddenly all the old frailties and tensions returned to the point where he could barely let go of the dart.

Continue reading...

Welcome to Covid Britain, where football clubs make decisions on public health | Jonathan Liew

We are told the safety of players and supporters is paramount but that is demonstrably untrue in the Premier League

Two cases. In the beginning that was all it took. First Mikel Arteta at Arsenal. Then Callum Hudson-Odoi at Chelsea. And, although a few other clubs had seen some cough-like symptoms and were beginning to fear the worst, it feels vaguely surreal now to recall that back in March 2020, the entire professional footballing apparatus in England and Scotland was brought to a halt on the basis of two positive tests.

Over time, just like the rest of us, football moved on. It hardened and desensitised. Our concept of suffering and loss began to fracture and diffuse; it stopped being something happening to us in the compound and became something that happened to us as individuals. The days when we all fixated on national mortality rates and watched severe news reports from intensive care units are gone. Big numbers stopped meaning anything to us.

Continue reading...

Another day of panic and bad improv has England shambling into the abyss | Jonathan Liew

Pyrrhic victories and pointless triumphs were all the tourists had to hold on to on a sometimes comical day four in Adelaide

For England, a day of pyrrhic victories and pointless triumphs. It was their first good bowling day of the series: unfortunately, it began with Australia almost 300 runs ahead in their second innings. Jos Buttler restored his fragile confidence with two fine sprawling catches, either side of the regulation chance he dropped off Steve Smith’s first ball.

Rory Burns finally showed some fight at the top of the order, his 34 knocking off a little over 7% of England’s 468-run target. And the captain, Joe Root, courageously batted on despite receiving two painful blows to what was euphemistically described as the “abdomen”, only to perish to the last ball of the day and leave England on the brink of defeat.

Continue reading...