Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 81
December 4, 2021
Graham Potter: ‘My friends don’t care about the Premier League – about this nonsense’
Brighton’s manager discusses fans booing, the dehumanisation of coaches and how he has learned to deal with self-doubt
A friend of mine supports Brighton, and when he found out I was going to interview Graham Potter, he texted back with a question. Well, not so much a question as a plea. “Ask him about the morons that booed on Saturday night,” he says. “Does he realise that all sensible Brighton fans think he’s doing an incredible job and are very fond of him indeed?”
Last Saturday, Brighton played Leeds at the Amex Stadium. It was a 0-0 draw, and although Brighton were by far the better side there was still a smattering of boos at full-time. They are ninth in the Premier League playing bold passing football, despite a wage bill that should put them comfortably in the bottom six. Until 2011, they were playing in League One at Withdean, an athletics track where the away fans had to watch the game through a discus cage. It felt scarcely believable back then that Brighton would be getting booed off despite being a top-half Premier League side. But here we are.
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December 2, 2021
Working class hero Jude Bellingham gets real love from Dortmund | Jonathan Liew
The 18-year-old Englishman has taken the Bundesliga by storm and may already be the most complete midfielder in the world
The slogan of Borussia Dortmund is “Echte Liebe”, which means “real love”. These days, however, it conjures up mixed emotions among Dortmund fans. For many it is a nostalgic throwback to the club’s heyday under Jürgen Klopp, when the phrase first became popularised. For others it is little more than an empty marketing jingle, a hashtag, a symbol of how a club built on working-class passion has begun to take on an increasingly corporate character.
At the human heart of this divide lies the club’s approach to young players. Over the last decade, Dortmund have made little secret of their business model: sign the world’s most promising teenagers, offer them meaningful game time in an elite environment, then look to move them on at a profit. For supporters, this poses an insoluble dilemma: under this policy, Dortmund have fielded some of the most thrilling attacking sides in Europe, playing rapid football with young hungry players. But by the same token, is it entirely possible to attach real love to someone who may well leave in a couple of years?
Continue reading...December 1, 2021
We needed Vaughan to talk about racism years ago, not when he is in the crosshairs | Jonathan Liew
Every day of silence on Azeem Rafiq’s experience was a missed chance to tackle a problem that has blighted English cricket
On Saturday morning the BBC broadcast an interview with the former England captain Michael Vaughan about accusations of racism, that he has repeatedly denied, made against him by his former teammate Azeem Rafiq. If it was a deeply uncomfortable experience for Vaughan, who has been dropped from the Test Match Special team covering the forthcoming Ashes, then he was at least optimistic. “How we move on from this situation is the key,” Vaughan argued with regards to the Yorkshire scandal exposed by Rafiq. “I firmly believe that it’s education, honest conversations, people admitting that things may have been said and sticking their hands up.”
On the most serious accusation against him – that he told four Asian players including Rafiq in 2009 that there were “too many of you lot” – Vaughan was not sticking his hand up. Rafiq’s version of events has been supported by two of the other players, Adil Rashid and Rana Naved-ul-Hasan; Ajmal Shahzad says he did not hear it and praised the backing he had from senior Yorkshire players at the time. Vaughan reiterated that he had no memory of making the comment. He rejected Rafiq’s suggestion that he may have forgotten he said it because he did not fully grasp its overtones. Still, he told interviewer Dan Walker, he wanted to apologise to Rafiq. “I’m sorry for the hurt that he’s gone through.”
Continue reading...November 28, 2021
Monty Panesar: ‘My message to British Asian players is focus on your cricket’
Ex-England spinner on the Azeem Rafiq racism scandal, the highs and lows of being a cult figure and his own mental health battles
“I liked your article on Azeem Rafiq,” Monty Panesar tells me with a glint in his eye before we have even sat down. “But I want to challenge it.” Always nice to meet a reader. Albeit, these days Panesar has something of a vocational interest. He is still best remembered as one of England’s greatest modern spinners, with 167 Test wickets and a broad popular appeal based not just on his talent but his sheer enthusiasm for the game.
The fall was sharp, and often painful, and though he maintains he is still good enough to play county cricket, he has begun to map out the next chapter of his life, taking the first steps towards a career in journalism.
Continue reading...November 27, 2021
Cobham calling: Chelsea’s academy is colonising the Premier League | Jonathan Liew
Frank Lampard and now Thomas Tuchel have helped create perfect conditions for homegrown players to flourish
There was Josh McEachran and Ola Aina. There was Dominic Solanke and Gaël Kakuta. There was the season under Maurizio Sarri when he did not give a single debut to an academy player. There was the Chelsea manager who argued in a presentation to the technical director, Michael Emenalo, that the club should scrap or scale down its academy as it was costing too much and producing no tangible benefit to the first team.
For all of them, and all of this, Chelsea’s third goal against Juventus on Tuesday night was an ornate kind of closure: Reece James peeling away towards the back post with his customary menace, Ruben Loftus-Cheek twisting and shuffling in the area, Callum Hudson-Odoi applying the finish. A goal made in Chelsea, conceived at Cobham: perhaps the fullest vindication to date of Roman Abramovich’s frequently ridiculed, frequently wasteful vision of a Chelsea first team brimming with academy talent.
Continue reading...Neal Maupay’s spectacular misses cost Brighton in stalemate with Leeds
Football at this level is an exceptionally intricate game in which the world’s best coaches plot out their strategies in stunning detail, compute its thousands of moving parts, make contingencies upon contingencies. It feels hopelessly simplistic to boil down the issues with Graham Potter’s complex and delicately balanced Brighton team to “just sign a striker”. But, you know. Sometimes you really do just have to sign a striker.
Twenty shots, plenty of ambitious attacking football, their highest expected goals total of the season, and ultimately a familiar refrain. The wind blew in off the English Channel and the Amex howled and roared to keep out the cold, and yet still the ball refused to drop. There were numerous areas of encouragement: the marauding wing-backs Tariq Lamptey and Marc Cucurella, the sharp passing and movement in midfield.
Continue reading...November 23, 2021
Manchester United’s future can be bright if they build around Sancho | Jonathan Liew
Youngster’s goal sealed Manchester United’s Champions League victory in Villarreal and he can thrive under a top coach
Shortly after half-time the Villarreal fans broke into their customary rendition of Yellow Submarine, the song from which the club takes its nickname. Naturally, being English people abroad, the Manchester United fans at the north end of the ground decided to drown them out with their own version. “Number one is Georgie Best,” they sang. “Number two is Georgie Best.”
How many other fanbases sing about a player who has not played for them in almost 50 years? It’s easy to ridicule United’s veneration of its past, the interminable appeals to nostalgia, the decision to appoint an episode of Premier League Years 97-98 as its full-time manager. But there’s something really rather touching about it, too: the sense of a lineage, an unbroken thread, roots and origins. Singing about George Best in 2021 says: “We don’t really know where we’re going. We don’t really know who we are. But we know who we were.”
Continue reading...Conte and Gerrard pour fuel on ketchup wars in tasty cultural divide within football | Jonathan Liew
The sauce is a source of enduring obsession and furious debate in football – and speaks to our confusion as a nation
As with most wars, nobody can really trace the origins of English football’s enduring obsession with ketchup. Perhaps, like many things, it only really began to mean something when someone threatened to take it away. Battle lines were drawn. Sides were taken. Occasionally hostilities would subside, perhaps for years, before roaring back into life. And yet even seasoned observers of the ketchup wars can scarcely remember a week as bitterly contested as the last.
It all began with Antonio Conte’s appointment at Tottenham, when reports began to emerge that the new manager had immediately banned ketchup from the club canteen. “To be professional means you have to take care of your body,” Conte explained. “The training and the game is only the final part of your work. You have to prepare your body, your mind and also your heart.” Within a matter of days, the new Aston Villa manager Steven Gerrard had followed him on to the frontline. “The players have to have the right mentality,” he said. “Go above and beyond. They need to strive to be elite.”
Continue reading...November 21, 2021
Gerwyn Price crushes Peter Wright to regain Grand Slam of Darts title
What a statement of intent this was by Gerwyn Price, the world champion and world No 1 regaining his Grand Slam of Darts title with an imperious 16-8 victory over Peter Wright.
In truth the world No 2 was never really in the contest, and an average of 91.5 was a fair reflection of both a desperately disappointing performance on his part and a mildly disappointing spectacle lasting barely an hour.
Continue reading...Mark Cavendish: ‘I knew I could be top again’
Mark Cavendish has just been out on his bike. He went out on his bike this morning, he’ll be back out on his bike tomorrow morning, he went out on his bike this afternoon, and when training was over and he needed to get back to his hotel in order to do this interview, there was really only one method of transport that fitted the bill. The point – and admittedly, it’s not a particularly earth-shattering one – is that he loves riding his bike. Anytime, anywhere, anyhow. It’s his sanctuary, his freedom, his reason for being.
And so, while most of us conceive of professional cycling in terms of suffering – lung-busting sprints, brutal training rides, the tortuous mountain ascents of the Tour de France – Cavendish sees things differently. For all the sweat and pain he endures in the saddle, he knows from bitter experience that the real agony is not being able to ride at all.
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