There are plenty of one-sided qualifiers but within them lies a reminder that football does not exist to serve the wealthyIt was the eighth goal that felt most primitive of all. All night long at the Parc des Princes, France had been flaying Kazakhstan with a baying relish that seemed to skirt the boundary between sport and ritual.Three minutes from time, with the score 7-0 and France’s passage to the World Cup long since secured, Kylian Mbappé chased after Moussa Diaby’s through pass with the Kazakh centre-half Nuraly Alip also in pursuit. Continue reading...
The 1998 Uefa Cup final witnessed a goal that was probably the greatest moment of Ronaldo’s greatest gameGrowing up as a football obsessive, by the time I was 17 I thought I’d seen pretty much everything the game had to offer me. You can probably see how I became a sportswriter.Around then, I was also spending most weekday evenings hanging about parks, alleyways and pubs to state-alter in one way or another, often under the guise of watching a game. So in the summer of 1996, my parents – who’d spent a decade resisting my pleas to get Teletext – signed up to Sky, sagely rationalising that beaming industrial quantities of sport into our front room would inspire me to...
Club legend twice rejected offers but finally he is coming back as a defender of the faith and symbol of hope for the futureOn Xavi Hernández’s last night as a Barcelona player, he walked out of the Olimpiastadion in Berlin carrying the European Cup in his right hand. It was the 25th trophy he had won with the club and it was over, but only for a little while. He had arrived aged 12 from Terrassa, where the square he played in now has a sign up banning football, and although he was leaving 23 years on he was already planning his return, eventually made on Friday.At Xavi’s farewell, Andrés Iniesta gave a speech in which he thanked him for...
Right-back’s brilliance against Atlético Madrid helped Anfield move on from the unsettling pre-pandemic fixture of 2020Was this a kind of closure? Not really. But it felt like a marker along the way.This Champions League game will be remembered for two things. First, as a way of putting to bed that unsettling, unloved pre‑pandemic game, Liverpool versus Atlético Madrid, March 2020, the last dance before the shutters came down. And second for a brilliant performance from the local boy, Trent Alexander‑Arnold, who oozed around Anfield reeling off moments of clarity and precision, using that beautifully expressive right foot to sketch in the corners, the details, the shape of the game in a decisive first half. Continue reading...
Ole Gunnar Solskjær’s star player rescued him again but his team looked confused and overrun in a 2-2 draw with AtalantaThe genius of the modern Manchester United is that for all the attention lavished upon them, for all the granular analysis they attract, they remain a largely unknown quantity. When they take the field, you genuinely have no idea what to expect from them. And not just in terms of results, either: tactics, personnel, effort and mood are all equally unforeseeable. They are the hyperactive toddlers of English football, equally capable of moments of startling insight and unfettered joy as they are of throwing valuable household ornaments into the toilet.Naturally, this is a quality greatly prized by Ed Woodward and...