Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 84

James Rodríguez and Everton was always a beautiful doomed marriage | Jonathan Liew

The playmaker has gone to Qatar after becoming an expensive spare part at a club both right and wrong to sign him

James Rodríguez has gone to Qatar in search of work, although unlike many others who have made the trip before him he can at least keep his passport and will be allowed to leave whenever he wants. The bewitching Colombian playmaker has signed a contract with Al-Rayyan, bringing down the curtain on his Everton career, and – you suspect – much else besides.

The first thing to be said is that this is probably for the best all round. Ever since the sudden departure of Carlo Ancelotti to Real Madrid Rodríguez had felt like an expensive spare part in a team increasingly based on hard running and well-organised defence. The new manager, Rafael Benítez, had no use for him. Rodríguez is not only 30 and at about £220,000 a week the highest-paid player in the club’s history, but highly injury-prone and last season ran the least of all Everton’s attacking players. There is a sense of inevitability here.

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Kent’s Blast triumph a rare authentic moment in an endless sprawl of cricket | Jonathan Liew

Finals Day is one of the few constants in the domestic game with the sport becoming bewildering and exhausting to follow

The woman in the bird costume can scarcely believe what she’s seeing. The man dressed as a bottle of mustard is mesmerised by the flight of the white ball against the dark night sky. The pair of jockeys leaping in anticipation of a Somerset six now clutch their heads as Jordan Cox of Kent hurls himself skywards, flips the ball back over the boundary rope and into play again. By the time Cox has finally hit the turf, Matt Milnes has grasped the catch off the bowling of Darren Stevens, and Kent are on the way to becoming men’s Twenty20 champions of England for the first time since 2007.

And for all the individual brilliance on display, Kent’s triumph felt very much like a team effort, a fitting reward for a likable bunch of cricketers: the evergreen Joe Denly, the brilliant Qais Ahmad, the grinning Sam Billings, the veteran all-rounder Stevens, a man who looks like he’s just thrown a shoe over a pub and can’t wait to do it again. Above all it felt like a moment of catharsis for Kent’s longsuffering fans, who through global plague and trophy drought have impressively, irrepressibly endured.

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Noble and Moyes share the blame after West Ham throw point away | Jonathan Liew

Hammers went toe to toe with Manchester United and shouldn’t have been relying on a late penalty to earn a draw

Something about it just felt wrong. Brave and heroic and wrong. Suspenseful and theatrical and wrong. This isn’t simply hindsight talking: the introduction of Mark Noble deep into injury time at the London Stadium, for the sole purpose of taking a crucial penalty with West Ham 2-1 down to Manchester United, was greeted by the home fans with the sort of qualified exultation that you might expect at a party when one of the guests turns up with a live goat. Obviously, you know, this is a very cool surprise. Well done on making the effort. We can’t wait to see what happens next. But, um – are you sure you’ve thought this through?

You don’t hear a lot these days about Calum Giles, the former stalwart Great Britain hockey player, and probably not without good reason. But back in the 1990s, Giles was a master of the drag flick who in the wake of the sport’s new rolling substitution rules carved himself out a hugely profitable niche as a specialist penalty-corner taker.

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Manchester United’s latest failure looks less a blip than part of a pattern | Jonathan Liew

United have lost seven Champions League games under Solskjær and it is still not entirely clear what his formula is

With about 10 minutes to go at the Wankdorf Stadion, there was sudden uproar on the Manchester United bench. The referee, François Letexier, had failed to spot a foul on Paul Pogba and on the touchline Ole Gunnar Solskjær was joined by Bruno Fernandes and Cristiano Ronaldo, wildly gesticulating with all the righteous indignation of men who had put their 50p on the edge of the pool table and were now watching somebody else rack up the balls.

If ever there were a fitting motif for United’s surprise 2-1 defeat by Young Boys, perhaps this was it: United’s manager and perhaps their two most celebrated players fuming on the sidelines, unable to influence a thing. Instead, it was Jesse Lingard and Jordan Siebatcheu who would make the decisive contributions, the former with his shocking backpass, the latter with his grateful finish in the fifth minute of injury time.

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Lingard gifts Young Boys late winner against 10-man Manchester United

It was 20 minutes after the final whistle but nobody in yellow and black was going anywhere: not the players, not the staff and certainly not the 30,000 Young Boys fans, who jumped and stamped and rejoiced in a victory that will go down as one of their greatest ever. Meanwhile, in the opposite corner of the stadium, the last small sliver of Manchester United fans was filtering towards the exits, a night of indignities and humiliations finally complete.

A draw would have been fine. Annoying perhaps, especially after scoring early, but certainly manageable in the long term. And for all their bungling and blundering, a draw was what United had secured as the ball rolled towards Jesse Lingard in the fifth minute of injury time. But inexplicably Lingard decided to play the ball straight into the path of Young Boys substitute Jordan Siebatcheu, and in a twinkling United were defeated. They are now – already – in a scrap for qualification.

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Young Boys’ David Wagner: ‘I loved every second in English football’

David Wagner had a stellar spell with Huddersfield but a tougher time at Schalke. Now, his Swiss side face Manchester United in the Champions League

On a bright and glorious morning by the banks of the River Aare, training is over for the day and David Wagner is feeling pretty good about life. “I needed this distance from football,” he says of his decision to take a nine-month break from the game last season. “Because to be totally honest, it was not my football. I like emotions, I like atmosphere. And during the corona period, it was anything but joy to be in a football stadium. I’m very happy that we are nearly back to normal.”

For Wagner, the manager who made miracles happen at Huddersfield, the past couple of years have been a tough lesson in the game’s highs and lows. His subsequent job at Schalke took a sour turn and he was sacked after a miserable run of 18 games without a win. Now he is back, refreshed and reinvigorated, as the manager of Bern’s Young Boys, and looking forward to his first tilt at the Champions League.

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Novak Djokovic lost his bid for history but may have finally won the hearts of fans | Jonathan Liew

Djokovic missed out on the calendar slam at the final hurdle but declared himself ‘the happiest man alive’ after his defeat

Something was wrong. The machine was malfunctioning. The power was blinking on and off. Routine backhands were dropping into the net. Forehands were flying long. On Amazon, which was hosting UK television coverage of the US Open men’s final, users were already beginning to voice their disapproval in the reviews. “Awful quality,” noted one. “Glitches throughout, not good enough service.” “Very disappointing quality coverage.” They weren’t talking about Novak Djokovic, but they might as well have been.

Of course, over the years we have all glimpsed Djokovic in various states of disrepair, and most of the time we think we know how it turns out. The machine reboots, re-initialises, rights itself. Debilitating injuries heal themselves in minutes. A racquet gets wrecked, and the spare he pulls out of his bag turns out to be made of plutonium. Lost sets are avenged with a kind of industrial fury. We have learned that Djokovic’s moments of greatest vulnerability are merely the recoil, the pregnant silence that precedes an orchestral crash.

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Thiago Alcântara’s class shines through as Liverpool coast to victory

Spain midfielder has protection from Fabinho, allowing him to be braver on the ball and leading to one assist against Leeds

As the game ebbed towards its unsatisfying, soft-pedalled conclusion, with their team losing 2-0 and down to 10 men, the Leeds fans decided to make their own entertainment. “Who’s the scouser in the black?” they chanted at the referee Craig Pawson after a litany of decisions had gone against them. When Pawson finally gave them a free-kick in a dangerous position, they cheered for a full 30 seconds. Apropos of very little, Sky TV was disparaged in the most industrial language.

In a way, this was a measure of just how effectively Liverpool had done their jobs here: one of the most hostile home crowds in the country reduced to ironic referee-baiting and complaints about the fixture list. There was a quiet ruthlessness to the way Jürgen Klopp’s side got their goals at the start of each half and then simply coasted their way to a comfortable victory: one admittedly tinged with sadness after the injury to Harvey Elliott.

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Emma Raducanu’s US Open win was a glorious aligning of the fates | Jonathan Liew

Teenager’s victory came out of nowhere so it needs perspective – we cannot expect her to keep doing this in majors

So: that happened. As Emma Raducanu emerged from Arthur Ashe Stadium clutching the US Open trophy to her chest, the blood on her knee still visible from where she had fallen, it was possible to feel a little dazed, a little concussed, to feel the edges of the night dissolving a little. In this new unreality an 18-year-old qualifier from Bromley is tennis’s newest star, a figure of adulation and idolisation well beyond the wet island for whom she has just claimed a first grand slam women’s title in 44 years.

You could lose yourself in the records and the milestones: the first qualifier to win a major title in the Open era, the youngest slam winner since Maria Sharapova, the first woman to win a major at only her second attempt. You could seek out historical context. But comparing Raducanu to the 17-year-old Boris Becker winning Wimbledon in 1985 doesn’t quite work, because Becker was a top-20 player at the time.

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The Ronaldo phenomenon: how one player became a tyranny of numbers | Jonathan Liew

His Manchester United return feels like a statement of power from a man who has cultivated a brand of individualistic devotion

In the aftermath of Cristiano Ronaldo’s shock return to Manchester United last week, there was a good deal of feverish speculation about whether he would reclaim the famous No 7 shirt once worn by United legends such as George Best, Bryan Robson and Eric Cantona, and which now forms a central part of his “CR7” personal brand.

But there was more than iconography and nostalgia involved here. The No 7 shirt already had an occupant: striker Edinson Cavani, and under Premier League rules Cavani was required to retain it for the season. Yet when you are as famous as Ronaldo, it turns out that there is an extent to which you can make up your own rules. When you see something you want, you don’t get too hung up on niceties and boundaries. You take it, as firmly and assuredly as if it had been yours all along.

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