It’s hard not to feel we’ve have seen this all before and know how it plays out. The sense is the endgame has begunAs they prepare for the north London derby on Sunday, who would you rather be: Arsenal or Tottenham? For the past four years, it wasn’t a question that required much consideration. Even in 2015-16, when Arsenal last finished above Spurs, it felt freakish. The trajectories of the two clubs seemed clear: Spurs were rising, replete with gifted young players and blessed with a charismatic manager whose ideas were notably modern, while Arsenal were sinking in the dotage of a managerial great whose best years were behind him but whose departure would inevitably bring turbulence.Arsène Wenger’s retirement in...
United are the most extreme debt-loaded commercial model, predicated on constant growth. What happens when it crashes?What’s your favourite bit of non-football-football so far? In my opinion the best new sub-genre to emerge is pictures of José Mourinho delivering vegetables.You don’t have to go looking for them. They just turn up on your social media feed or on the click-bar beneath a news story. Handsome, crinkly José carrying a box of lettuce across the tenement threshold. José in a surgical mask distributing radishes to elderly war heroes. José off-camera giving a secret briefing against the fucking artichoke guy who isn’t pulling his weight (premium content: subscribers only). Related: Next season's cup competitions may suffer, says United's Woodward Related: Championship makes...
In half a season, José Mourinho has dismantled Tottenham’s style and denounced players – and it will only get worseI n a crisis there is need for extreme measures. In a crisis there is need for a people to have faith in their leader, the only man who can save them. In a crisis the usual norms must be forgotten as the emergency is combated. Tottenham, in case you hadn’t noticed, are facing a crisis. Treacherous agents of the counter‑revolution are targeting their forwards, which is why everybody must be grateful José Mourinho is there to take the hard decisions. And speaking of enemies of the people, have you seen how Tanguy Ndombele’s been playing recently?There are still those, after...
Forget fancy formations and statistics. Tottenham’s win over City proves that the game remains riotously randomThere came a point, some time between Ilkay Gündogan missing an open goal and Oleksandr Zinchenko getting himself sent off and Davinson Sánchez heading the ball against his own crossbar from point-blank range, when you realised that whatever they tried, whatever they did, Manchester City were not going to score. It happens. Some days you just catch a whiff of bad juju at breakfast, can’t shake the feeling on the bus to the stadium, miss a couple of early chances and the entire afternoon simply unravels with a strange and unstoppable momentum. Ferran Soriano, City’s chief executive, once wrote a book called The Ball Doesn’t...
Desperate negativity of his approach to playing Liverpool at home is José Mourinho’s management style in microcosmChampions aren’t flawless. It’s just that you only glimpse their flaws for a fleeting instant – a shadow you think you saw in the mirror – before they are gone.For around half an hour on Saturday evening, Liverpool looked flawed. Roared on by a capacity crowd, Tottenham slung themselves forward in waves: attacking the spaces, pinging crosses across the box, getting shots away. The substitutes Giovani Lo Celso and Érik Lamela grabbed control of the game in the middle third, often by sheer force of will alone. The irrepressible Lucas Moura scrapped and slalomed his way into threatening positions. Big chances came and went....