Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 83

Aaron Ramsdale excels as Arsenal beat Leicester to extend unbeaten streak

The King Power Stadium was rapidly emptying by the time Arsenal’s players strode over towards their fans in the far corner of the ground. One by one they took their curtain call. Gabriel, the scorer of the first goal, hurled his shirt gleefully into the crowd. Aaron Ramsdale, whose first-half save from James Maddison’s free-kick had to be seen to be believed, was given the biggest cheer of all.

The mind drifted back to a press conference Mikel Arteta gave in late August, after Arsenal had lost their first three games of the season in calamitous circumstances. In it, he railed at the negativity surrounding the club, insisting that certain people were out to “bury us”. At the time it felt like a doomed and transparent attempt to instil some sort of siege mentality at a club that was rapidly drifting into irrelevance. But you know, maybe he was on to something. Arsenal are a happier and more cohesive club than it has been for a long time.

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Manchester United must finally dump Fergusonism and make a clean break | Jonathan Liew

Club remain weirdly in thrall to a 79-year-old man who has not coached in almost a decade when a cultural reset is needed

It was a few months into David Moyes’s ill-fated reign at Manchester United, and with results in freefall and the dressing room in mutiny, Patrice Evra decided to go to see the only man he knew who could fix things.

“Boss, you have to help David,” he pleaded with Sir Alex Ferguson on a visit to his home in Cheshire. Ferguson refused. “I’ve given him the biggest chance of his life,” he said. “I think it’s fair that I keep a distance and let him do his job.”

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Influence of the unknowable may be only lesson from Moyes’s success at West Ham | Jonathan Liew

Moyes’s second spell at the London Stadium is confounding popular sentiment at the time of his appointment and possibly his own expectations, but wider lessons are hard to come by

“The game has changed immeasurably in the two decades since Moyes first started,” an idiot wrote in these pages two years ago. “And so in he shuffles, a man who neither improves teams nor greatly degrades them but will simply be there, right until he isn’t. He won’t take you in the wrong direction because he doesn’t take you in any direction.”

As West Ham United sit fourth in the Premier League after a stirring cultural revolution that has transformed the club’s psyche and taken them into Europe, it turns out that one of us had been elevated to a position for which he was grotesquely and demonstrably unqualified, but it wasn’t David Moyes.

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Michail Antonio pounces to give West Ham gritty victory over Spurs

In his quieter and more personal moments, you suspect these are the sorts of wins that give David Moyes a warm tingling feeling: 1-0, at home, against your local rivals, from a set piece. A plan soundly executed. A proper, noses-in-the-dirt defensive rearguard at the end. And for West Ham, who now take Tottenham’s place in the Premier League top four, further proof that Moyesball is good against all oppositions, in all conditions.

Michail Antonio reacted quickest to punt home Aaron Cresswell’s corner 18 minutes from time, a poacher’s finish against his favourite opponents. In truth Antonio had had a quiet game to that point and this was not a flawless team performance by any stretch. But there was a real stomach and maturity to the way they managed this game, seeing out the tough periods before gradually raising the volume in the second half. Declan Rice deserves a special mention here: again, immense.

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Solskjær the perfect frontman for United's era of endless new dawns | Jonathan Liew

Liverpool clash is being billed as make-or-break but that is typical of club where everything happens but nothing changes

The Super League breakaway. The resignation of Ed Woodward. The Old Trafford protests. The Europa League final. The signings of Jadon Sancho and Raphaël Varane. Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s new contract. The return of Cristiano Ronaldo. Ronaldo’s two-goal debut against Newcastle. The injury-time defeat to Young Boys. The injury-time victory over Villarreal. Losing 4-2 to Leicester. And most recently coming back from 2-0 down to win 3-2 against Atalanta, a result so eminently predictable it almost counts as plagiarism.

That’s just the past six months. Six months of wins, losses, triumph, heartbreak, scandal, rumour, greed and excess at the world’s most meme-able football club. It’s tempting to see the modern Manchester United as essentially a directionless vehicle, a model of flailing incompetence that provides plenty of entertainment but whose wider purpose is unclear. But what if this is the wider purpose? What if we’re not watching the painstaking construction of a long and glorious project, but its realisation?

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Manchester United fight back again and Bruce bows out – Football Weekly Extra

Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Nicky Bandini and Jonathan Liew to review the latest Champions League games

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Manchester United come back from two goals down to beat Atalanta, and Ronaldo scored a trademark towering header to seal the win. What does it all mean? And are any of the panel prepared to either praise or criticise Ole Gunnar Solskjær?

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Lionel Messi’s Panenka wins it for PSG after RB Leipzig threaten upset

It might sound strange, but despite scoring two goals and winning the game for Paris Saint-Germain with an outrageous Panenka, Lionel Messi did not really have a very good game. Still, nobody at a festive Parc des Princes seemed to mind too much. After looking wooden and curiously passive for an hour, Paris came to life in the last 25 minutes, beating an impressive Leipzig side despite having little cohesion and not much in the way of a tactical plan, but two of the most irresistible attackers on the planet.

With three defeats out of three, Leipzig are now virtually eliminated, and for all their spirit and running, the spotlight will now fall on their new coach Jesse Marsch.

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Will T20 cricket mutate or stagnate? Either way it should be fun finding out | Jonathan Liew

As the shorter format globalises ever further there are two competing visions of what cricket’s future might look like

Not long after the second world war, in an attempt to discover more humane and peaceable functions for the frightening new toy of atomic power, the US government adopted a policy of deliberately radiating fruit. At the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Rhode Island, scientists built something called a “gamma garden”, where various fruits and other plants were arranged in concentric circles and zapped with radioactive cobalt-60. The hope was that the new mutant food might be bigger, tastier, more resilient, perhaps even eradicate world hunger and prevent another war.

As it turned out, the results were mixed. The crops closest to the radiation simply died. Others were riddled with tumours. But many of the genetic mutants thrived and were useful enough to survive to this day. The Rio Red grapefruit, bred for extra redness, is one of the most popular varieties in America. Most of the mint in toothpaste and chewing gum derives from a mutated Brookhaven peppermint plant. Irradiated durum and barley can be found in pasta, bread and whisky. Out of the chaos, this great disruption of nature, something emerged that was vital, beneficial and totally new.

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Newcastle take emotional ride on day of unspeakable strangeness | Jonathan Liew

A welcoming party for an affiliate of thuggish autocracy, a medical emergency and a defeat made for a surreal afternoon

On a cool, still afternoon Tottenham Hotspur moved up to fifth in the table with a 3-2 win against Newcastle United. Harry Kane broke his Premier League goal drought. Jonjo Shelvey was sent off. Before the game the new Newcastle chairman, Yasir al-Rumayyan of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, received an ecstatic reception from supporters following the £300m purchase of the club from the previous owner Mike Ashley. Outside the stadium, a van circled St James’ Park bearing the words “Jamal Khashoggi: Murdered 2.10.18”. Shortly before half-time the game was stopped so medical staff could administer emergency treatment to a fan who had collapsed in the stands.

To what extent, if any, do these events relate to each other? Watching football is about bold, primary-colour emotions: the pursuit of joy and the endurance of pain. It gives you wins and losses and a league table to tell you how you did, a songbook to tell you what to sing, an established liturgy to tell you how to feel. Talking and writing about football is about telling stories, prioritising and editorialising, finding out what matters and filtering out what doesn’t. But what mattered here, and in what order? How do you even begin to process a day of such sad and unspeakable strangeness, a day with no maps, no anchors and no real precedent?

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Chelsea: a defensive team, or simply a team that is excellent at defending?

A curious debate is swirling around the success of Thomas Tuchel’s remarkably miserly but often thrilling side

A couple of weeks ago the Netherlands coach, Louis van Gaal, got into an argument with a scornful Dutch journalist about Thomas Tuchel’s Chelsea. “The one that applauds defensive football is you,” the journalist said. “You want to play the same way as Chelsea and Liverpool.” At this provocation, Van Gaal shifted himself a fraction of an inch higher in his seat, like a praying mantis preparing to snap the head off a snake.

“Is that defensive football in your opinion?”

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