Jonathan Liew's Blog, page 90

Flexible England win battle for the centre ground in collective triumph | Jonathan Liew

Sterling and Kane got the headlines but the victory on Tuesday was rooted in England – at last – mastering the midfield

Inevitably, it would be the attackers who grabbed the headlines. Amid the uncorked pandemonium of England’s 2-0 win against Germany on Tuesday, perhaps it was only natural that the defining motifs would be of England’s two goalscorers. The gnarled, gritted features of Harry Kane, staring out from Wednesday morning’s front pages like a king restored to his throne. The stern thousand-yard stare of Raheem Sterling adorning a thousand memes and highlights reels, daring you to doubt him ever again.

But perhaps the most interesting element of England’s night of jubilee at Wembley was that on first glance it didn’t appear to have an obvious architect. Above all, England’s win was a very collegiate sort of triumph, studded with fine performances and nervelessly mapped out by Gareth Southgate. Yet to single out individuals is really to miss the essence of what made England so effective.

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Published on June 30, 2021 11:00

England fans enjoy delirious Wembley party as Germany are swept aside | Jonathan Liew

Southgate’s men delivered a result to match the euphoric atmosphere of fans experiencing a rare taste of freedom

The fifth rendition of Vindaloo winds to a close. A can of lager is thrown into the air. By the time it lands with a spume of spray in among the thousands of fans congregating in Arena Square, another can has been launched skywards, and then another, and another, and another. Two hours before England play Germany, and Wembley Way is a monsoon of beer, sweat, rain, beer, songs, beer and hope.

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Published on June 29, 2021 13:00

Sport’s abhorrence of pitch invaders is about fan control not player safety | Jonathan Liew

From Edgbaston to Euro 2020, modern supporters can participate: so long as it is in corporately pre-approved fashion

For the second time in two years, Fortress Edgbaston was breached. This time, however, it was not Steve Smith and Nathan Lyon but a few hundred inebriated hedonists from Warwick University.

“The behaviour of a small number of students after the match finished was disgraceful,” the Warwickshire chief executive, Stuart Cain, said following Birmingham Bears’ T20 Blast game last week. Cain confirmed to ESPNcricinfo that lifetime bans are being meted out for the monstrous crime of walking on to a cricket field upon which no match was taking place and milling around for upwards of five minutes.

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Published on June 29, 2021 00:00

Germany’s reputation precedes them – but this team are the ersatz version | Jonathan Liew

Grit, hunger, nerves of steel … none of it is evident in a side that lurched through its group. England must ignore the mythology

Let’s try a quick thought exercise. Team A, ranked No 4 in the world, comfortably topped its group and is on a run of nine games without defeat, with a defence that has conceded just five goals in its last 17 matches. Team B, ranked No 12, scraped through its group with four points and wildly inconsistent performances, hasn’t kept a clean sheet in six games and lost 6-0 as recently as November. Team A is playing at home. Who do you think should start as favourites?

Treat this game as a blind taste test, with the labels and the history and the emotional baggage stripped away, and England v Germany feels like a simple enough proposition. It’s by no means a foregone conclusion, but all things being equal England should probably win, especially with home advantage. But of course tournament football, especially at international level, is not played in a vacuum. Mythologies and mentalities matter. Imponderables impinge. History – well, you can embrace it or you can ignore it, but you can’t erase it. It’s there, staring you down, whether you want to look at it or not.

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Published on June 27, 2021 11:00

Federico Chiesa’s extra-time missile makes Italy believe in miracles again

Juventus winger on as a substitute pierces dense fog of attrition with a goal to bring the Azzurri’s Euros back to life

There was no sense of inevitability as the ball landed at Federico Chiesa’s feet. No real feeling of grace. An agonising, attritional 95 minutes of football had seen to all that. Like tired boxers in a 13th round, Italy and Austria were simply circling each other, waiting to see whose legs gave way first. The awkward high bounce, forcing Chiesa to control the ball with his head to prevent it from going out of play, simply reinforced the notion of a game in which nothing had worked and nothing would work.

And then in a shuffle and a swing of the left boot the ball was burying itself in the Austria net, and Chiesa was being buried in a flurry of blue shirts, and in a fleeting instant Italy’s Euros were alive again.

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Published on June 26, 2021 15:27

Can Belgium’s world-beaters win a major trophy? It may be now or never | Jonathan Liew

For all their excellence, the legacy of the ageing world No 1 team boils down to the next two weeks, starting against Portugal

There is a moment towards the end of the recent BBC documentary Whistle to Whistle in which, after an hour of fixating on the details and minutiae of his job as Belgium coach, Roberto Martínez finally allows himself to take a broader view. “I just feel that this generation deserves silverware,” he says. “They deserve something that will be talked about for the next 50, 60, 70 years. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

In those few sentences, Martínez expresses the fundamental paradox of his job, in many ways the fundamental paradox of international football. Since taking over from France in October 2018, Belgium have now been top of the Fifa world rankings for almost three years. They have, by most statistical and qualitative measures, been the world’s best team. The problem, when you get to the sharp end of an international tournament, is that you only get 90 minutes to prove it.

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Published on June 26, 2021 02:37

Bukayo Saka’s versatility has Czechs flailing as England enjoy themselves | Jonathan Liew

The Arsenal youngster was everywhere as Gareth Southgate’s side produced a performance that was actually fun to watch

A curious thing happened on Tuesday night. England played a European Championship game at Wembley and it was – and I had to look this word up, so apologies if the meaning isn’t quite right – enjoyable. People sang and cheered. The national stadium, so often a theatre of irritations, felt contented and boisterous. England shuffled diffidently – and not without a few grumbles – into the last 16. And on a night when Jordan Henderson and Harry Maguire made their return, England’s leader on the field was a 19‑year‑old from west London with five caps to his name.

Electrifying teenage attacker dances his way through a major tournament defence. We all think we’ve seen this film before, and if you listen closely you can probably already hear the weepy BBC montage at its end. But amid the complications and the paradoxes of England’s performance here, the uncertain fates and futures, one fact at least felt clear enough. As “It’s Coming Home” rained down from the stands, the stage belonged to a man born just a 92 bus ride from Wembley. Welcome – belatedly – to the summer of Bukayo Saka.

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Published on June 22, 2021 14:19

Lionel Messi remains Argentina’s best hope of glory even in his twilight | Jonathan Liew

The Barcelona maestro has been in top form in the Copa América, but his country’s pool of young talent is drying up

The ball comes to Lionel Messi in midfield. He returns it with a disdainful flick of the foot that says: I can’t do anything with this. I don’t want it. Take it back. And then he sighs and walks off in the opposite direction. Surprised, and a little abashed, Guido Rodríguez gathers the ball and looks around for somebody else to pass it to.

Perhaps it’s because Messi gives so few interviews – and tends to say so little in the interviews he gives – that over time you start to delude yourself, in a weird anthropomorphic way, that you can glimpse some sort of profound human insight in his football. That on some level, his actions on a pitch are his way of talking to us. That misplaced pass was actually a form of oblique protest towards the Barcelona board over his continuing contract stand-off. That fist-pump celebration was actually an act of solidarity with striking Rosario dock workers. That attempted through ball is his way of telling us that life is precious but hope is fragile. And so on.

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Published on June 21, 2021 10:28

Joachim Löw’s Germany recast as Euro 2020’s popular entertainers | Jonathan Liew

The current side have shed their long-held reputation for sober reliability to become the fun team of the tournament

“The tournament can begin,” as Toni Kroos drily observed. And certainly after the disappointment against France on Tuesday night it was impossible to watch Germany’s breezy, brassy win against Portugal on Saturday without wondering whether it might just be the start of something: a stirring, an awakening, a team and a system and perhaps even an idea twitching belatedly to life.

As the goals piled up, as Germany’s flying wing-backs sliced and shredded the defending champions – Rúben Dias, Pepe and all – on their way to a 4-2 triumph, the temptation was to declare that this was a film we had all seen before. Right on cue, and with perfect timing, The Germans (and for some reason it always is The Germans, never just Germany) have finally turned up. The Germans are coming. Never, ever write off The Germans.

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Published on June 20, 2021 13:00

‘Strauss and Collingwood were very open’: the man who helped cricket embrace data | Jonathan Liew

Nathan Leamon has been an England analyst for more than a decade and has seen a culture shift in attitudes towards data

Nathan Leamon laughs as he remembers the time he once got Andrew Strauss out in an Ashes Test. It was the Adelaide Test of 2010-11, and ahead of the game the Australians had recalled the left-armer Doug Bollinger to their attack. Not having faced Bollinger in a while, Strauss asked Leamon – still relatively new in his job as the team’s analyst – to put together some clips.

“But the last time Bollinger had played was actually at Headingley against Pakistan,” Leamon recalls. “So Straussy watches 20 balls of Bollinger hooping the ball away from the bat, and walks out. First ball went absolutely gun-barrel straight. He left it. And it took his off-bail. He walked back in, took his pads off, sat down next to me. Eventually I worked up the nerve to say: ‘Sorry, think I might have got you out there, skip’. He said: ‘I wouldn’t disagree.’”

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Published on June 20, 2021 08:31