Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 88

Rohit Sharma reaps reward of India’s smart planning over England’s chaos

Both Indian openers showed grit and talent against a home attack that, Jimmy Anderson aside, looked largely disorientated

Rohit Sharma arrived in Australia a week before Christmas and immediately went into 14 days of hard quarantine. Marooned in his Sydney apartment while his teammates were playing in Melbourne, once he had completed his daily regimen of exercise there was little to be done except to watch television and think. So that was what he did. As his teammates battled hard against the Australian pace attack of Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc, Sharma watched intently, hour upon hour, working out their methods, working out his own.

The Sharma who finally emerged from quarantine was a smarter, more circumspect, more thorough batsman than the one who entered it.

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Published on August 12, 2021 12:26

Australia’s Covid restrictions put integrity of Ashes at stake, warns ECB

Talks ongoing regarding exemptions for players’ families‘These are reasonable requests,’ says ECB’s Tom Harrison

Tom Harrison, the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, has put further pressure on the Australian government to relax its strict quarantine rules in order to allow this winter’s Ashes to go ahead.

Several England players have indicated they may pull out of the tour if their families are forced into hard quarantine after arriving in the country, and Harrison insisted the integrity of the series was at stake unless the Australian authorities softened the nation’s hard-line stance.

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Published on August 12, 2021 06:18

Back in the game: here comes the Premier League again | Jonathan Liew

Flawed, frenetic yet somehow still glorious, the top flight returns and so do the fans. It looks like a four-horse title race and a cast of six will be fighting to avoid the drop

We go again. Thirty-three days after Gianluigi Donnarumma pawed away Bukayo Saka’s penalty at Wembley, exploding not just England’s fragile pretensions to supremacy but our fleeting illusions of national unity, here comes the riposte. The return of the Premier League to our multiple portable devices marks a return to English football not as we would dreamily like it to be, but as it really is: flawed and fierce, fuelled by personality and narrative and billionaires and gambling sponsorships, intensely tribal, consumed by petty arguments and – whisper it – the envy of the world.

This is, perhaps, no longer a fashionable sentiment to express in some quarters. To some, the Premier League – with its 24-hour media saturation, its faint whiff of exceptionalism, its greed, its bombast, its vast unaccountable power and entrenchment of financial inequality – represents everything wrong with the sport. Moreover, there are times – say, while watching Brighton 0 Fulham 0, or yet another feted but fetid early-season stalemate between two title contenders – when the Premier League’s rolling hype machine feels as much curse as blessing.

West Ham's sixth-placed finish may soon feel like a pandemic memory, like queuing outside Lidl or clapping for the NHS

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Published on August 12, 2021 04:00

Messi’s case shows clubs, not elite players, are the real powerhouses of football | Jonathan Liew

Even in his moment of greatest sadness there was no recrimination, only departing tears, which Barcelona then repackaged as content

Fittingly, it began and ended with a napkin. Lionel Messi’s first Barcelona contract was signed hastily on a restaurant serviette. Now, as he sobbed his way through his farewell press conference, his wife, Antonella, stepped forward from the front row to hand him a tissue. “If the rule you followed brought you to this,” asks Anton Chigurh in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men, “of what use was the rule?”

Out in the world beyond, Messi’s choking tears were already being repackaged as content. The live stream on Barcelona’s YouTube channel was accompanied by numerous clickable links inviting viewers to purchase a BarcaTV subscription. The club’s online store was still happily selling Messi-branded leisurewear, fridge magnets, water bottles, baby clothes, even a Messi 2021-22 home kit at the wildly ambitious price of €160 (£135).

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Published on August 10, 2021 00:00

Diver Matty Lee: ‘My mind just went blank. It was like a state of flow’

Lee is now back home after becoming a household name overnight thanks to his Tokyo Olympics diving gold with Tom Daley

“Breathe. Just keep breathing.” It’s the last dive of the Olympic final, and Matty Lee’s mind is racing. He’s thinking: “Oh my god, you could get an Olympic gold medal.” And he’s thinking: “If you mess this up, you might not get anything.” He feels the adrenalin coursing in him, his focus beginning to wander. But he’s also planned for this. He knows what to do.

Lee and Tom Daley are in the gold-medal position, with a minuscule margin of 1.74 points over Cao Yuan and Chen Aisen of China. Daley knows this. Lee does not. During competitions Daley keeps a close eye on the scoreboard, calculates the gaps in his head, knows what is required at all times. Lee, on the other hand, “doesn’t like to mess with that sort of stuff. I can’t handle it”.

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Published on July 30, 2021 10:00

Men’s football is no longer a fit for it to remain in the Olympic Games | Jonathan Liew

Strange mix of development competition and star vehicle leaves public unsure of what it is watching

Nine years ago, I had a front-row seat at the Olympic Stadium in London for what would become known as Super Saturday. The ley lines of that evening are now firmly etched into the sporting lore of the UK: the triumphant last-lap surge of Jess Ennis, Mo Farah being physically roared over the line, that chirpy bloke who won the long jump. And yet my strongest and clearest memory of Super Saturday is none of these things.

It came about half an hour after Farah crossed the line, with the stadium still wreathed in a shimmering glow somewhere between heat and love. At which point, a member of the crowd shouted out to nobody in particular that 150 miles away in Cardiff, Team GB had just lost to South Korea on penalties in the quarter-finals of the men’s football. As the news filtered around, everybody – from the crowd to the press box to the journalist from L’Equipe sitting next to me – spontaneously burst into laughter.

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Published on July 26, 2021 12:00

Alice Capsey announces herself as Oval Invincibles beat London Spirit

Invincibles win by 15 runs; men’s fixture is rained offSixteen-year-old Capsey hits matchwinning 59 off 41 balls

Alice Capsey had plenty of time to contemplate her opening gambit here. She watched the first 10 balls of the Oval Invincibles innings from the non-striker’s end, seeing her opening partner Georgia Adams getting bowled and the No 3 Grace Gibbs hit three boundaries. Then, facing her very first delivery, she danced down the pitch and clouted Naomi Dattani straight over midwicket for four. In her first innings at Lord’s. At the age of 16. You know, as you do.

In turning the sport’s most famous strip of turf into her own personal playpen, Capsey announced herself as one of the brightest new faces in the women’s game. The youngest player in the Hundred, Capsey is so young that her coach Jonathan Batty had to ring her mother to ask permission to call her up. She will receive her GCSE results in the middle of the tournament. In another sense, however, this was her graduation day.

Matt Parkinson took four wickets for just nine runs from 19 balls to seal a first win in The Hundred for Manchester Originals as Birmingham Phoenix were skittled for just 87 at Emirates Old Trafford.

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Published on July 25, 2021 10:11

Jake Lintott reviving English left-arm wrist-spin after half a century | Jonathan Liew

Unorthodox style delayed success, but opportunities from T20 and Hundred mean Lintott’s life is poised to change

Three years ago, England were in a pickle. Wary of the threat of Kuldeep Yadav in the upcoming Test series against India, they wanted to call up a left-arm wrist-spinner from the county game who could replicate Kuldeep’s unusual style in the nets. The problem: there weren’t any. In fact, left-arm wrist-spinners are so rare in English cricket that it has been more than half a century – since the days of Johnny Wardle and Donald Carr – since this country produced one of any repute. That is, until now.

Three years ago, Jake Lintott was being released by Gloucestershire and wondering if his last chance as a professional cricketer had come and gone. Making it as a spinner in county cricket is hard enough, but try being a 25-year-old unorthodox spinner bowling a style not seen in this country since Harold Wilson was in Downing Street. With a steady job coaching cricket at Queen’s College in Taunton, few could have blamed Lintott for giving up on his dream.

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Published on July 23, 2021 11:20

For all the flippancy and deserved snark, the Hundred was actually good fun | Jonathan Liew

Watching the men’s Oval Invincibles beat the Manchester Originals felt familiar despite the new format’s funky packaging

The tension rose as the man in green holding the ball ran towards the man in black holding the long wooden stick. With a serious look on his face, the man in green jumped in the air and hurled the ball at the man with the stick, standing in front of three thinner sticks, and another man in green wearing funny big gloves. The man with the stick tried to hit the ball, but it was a well-directed yorker on fifth stump that he could only dig out to long-on, and …

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Published on July 22, 2021 14:01

From the archive: the life and times of Jonathan Liew – Football Weekly

Max Rushden and Barry Glendenning dig into the Jonathan Liew archive with the man himself, including his stint on Countdown and a famous spat with a certain BBC Cricket Correspondent.

With Euro 2020 in the history books, why not delve into our archive with a classic episode, in which Max and Barry get stuck into the life and times of Guardian sport writer Jonathan Liew. Topics include his young life, his writing process and memorable feuds with Jonathan Agnew and Robbie Savage.

Back on Thursday with another episode from our archive.

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Published on July 13, 2021 04:00