Against Chelsea, the Brazilian, Bruno Fernandes and Christian Eriksen looked like a slick, modern and fully functional unitAnd you can sit there all night, playing with your silly machines. By the end of this taut and thrilling match, the iPads and the tactics boards had been stashed away. Graham Potter and Erik ten Hag stood on the touchline, contemplating this 1-1 draw, looking drained and perhaps even a little concussed by the experience. It had been a game of stratagems and counter-stratagems, plans made and then remade, two coaches trying to control the space on the pitch with the space in their heads. But ultimately this is also a contact sport, a thing of guts and loins, of inches and...
Manchester United player lost a child and is struggling as his athletic gifts erode away. Does he not deserve compassion?Cristiano Ronaldo trained alone on Friday. In a way it was the perfect image: a footballer who perhaps more than any other embodies the trope of the individual superstar, the idea that one man can do it on his own, doing it on his own. The television cameras were there to film his arrival and they were there a few hours later to film Erik ten Hag as he weathered a squall of Cristiano-related questions. The soap opera continues. But for now the football career is on hold.Ronaldo will not feature for Manchester United against Chelsea on Saturday afternoon. He has...
Pep Guardiola’s Premier League champions took their game to a whole new level in the 6-3 trashing of their city neighbours“Yeah, not bad.” With 44 minutes gone at the Etihad Stadium Manchester City scored a goal that brought the usual cheers and roars, but also something else, the urge to laugh. City had already spent the first half playing football that seemed to have befitted from an operating system upgrade, demonstrating the latest miracle processor against a batch of red-shirted patsies.The move to make it 4-0 was a moment of super-compression, lines cut in a perfect zig-zag from outside City’s penalty area to the far left-hand corner of the Manchester United goal without friction or drag or loss of scale....
They faced very different tasks on arriving in Manchester but both were quick to make tough calls to improve their teamsTwo bald men with gimlet stares. Two coaches united by a Cruyffian vision of football and trying to impose it in a foreign land. But as Sunday’s Manchester derby approaches, it doesn’t feel as though Pep Guardiola and Erik ten Hag have that much in common.Ten Hag’s star is rising. After his successes at Ajax, only now are his ideas reaching a truly global public and being tested at the highest level. Guardiola is the old master, with 10 championships in the big five leagues to his name. His philosophy is not merely well-known but has shaped the modern game...
City and United grab the attention but Bury and Macclesfield have gone under although Stockport are thinking big Greater Manchester on derby day feels like a place on the cusp of a great awakening. All morning the trains pull into Piccadilly and Oxford Road, spitting their cargo on to the streets. The pubs begin to swell and heave. Everyone seems to have somewhere to be, even the people who don’t. And then the great gathering flood: a wave of red and blue washing through the city, powered along by songs, San Miguel and a skittish nervous energy, picking a careful detour around the half-and-half scarf sellers. For a few restless hours, this city feels like the very centre of the...