After eight glorious years at the serial Bundesliga champions, the upright striker is at the mercy of his club’s roughshod waysThe big problem for Robert Lewandowski is that he is a professional. He has one year left on his contract at Bayern Munich and he wants to leave, but nobody believes he will down tools and create a fuss if they choose to hang on to him for another year. He likes his job. He likes his colleagues. He has a level of self-respect that means he will carry on diligently even if his bosses are treating him outrageously. He doesn’t want to let anybody down, least of all himself.This, after all, is a forward so dedicated to his trade...
Carlo Ancelotti completed football with Real Madrid, while there was drama at the bottom if not so much at the topIt started in tears. Lionel Messi touched down on the evening of 4 August, flying into El Prat especially. Officially unemployed, he had come to sign the contract that would see him play a 17th season at Barcelona but by the time it began he was gone, like Zinedine Zidane and Sergio Ramos before him. Three of the most significant men in Spanish football over the last decade had departed in a single summer. Yet at his presentation in Paris just two days before it all started at Mestalla, on a day that felt all wrong then and feels a...
Where other teams are built on systems and philosophies, Madrid mix regal self-assuredness with calculating geniusAs the world turned a shade of white close to midnight in Paris, dissolving into a familiar frieze – the same shapes and songs, the Champions League trophy waved about with the same sense of dieu et mon droit – there was also a feeling of something revealing itself, of a question being answered.In the build-up to Real Madrid’s narrow but decisive victory at Stade de France on Saturday night there had been a lot of talk in England about claims on greatness and ultimacy, born out of Liverpool’s own thrillingly sustained attempt to chase the sun right to the seasons’s end. Continue reading...
Jürgen Klopp’s side came close to an extraordinary season but teams, rightly or wrongly, are judged on resultsSo what next? Where do Liverpool go from here? This was a season that came agonisingly close to perfection. One fewer goal for Manchester City or one more goal for Aston Villa on the final day of the season and the league title would have been Liverpool’s. One fewer save from Thibaut Courtois and they would have taken the Champions League final into extra time. The Quadruple has never been so close for any club and yet Liverpool achieved no more than to match the feat of Arsenal in 1992-93 and, with all due respect to Steve Morrow, John Jensen and Andy Linighan,...
A macabre final day in La Liga ended with a Hitchcock-style twist and horror for the most unlikely relegation candidates “Hitchcock could have written this,” Sergio González said when it was all over. Cádiz’s coach was shattered, soaking wet and could hardly walk, T-shirt muddy and back gone, but he’d do it all over again. Even the bit where, liberated at last, he threw himself through the rain and on to the grass at the feet of his players and their fans. Especially that bit: this was a team picture they had desperately wanted to take, the photo of a first division side. It had hurt, the man who hid his fears from those he led struggling to get up...