Manchester City’s young attacker delivers his best work yet on the biggest stage for his country in his preferred roleA very normal thing happened on Sunday night. Phil Foden was sensational. I do not want to oversell this. There is no deep or meaningful theme here.There are no hidden layers or wider significances, no political or cultural context. It rests almost entirely on a single argument, and the argument is that Foden is sensational. If you are not on board with this idea, the next 840 words may not be for you. Continue reading...
England’s midfield sensation was magnificent in difficult moments, a source of control when it was close to the edgeEngland’s second goal just before half-time at Al Bayt Stadium, the goal that killed this World Cup last-16 tie, was a pure Jude Bellingham moment. Watching the three white England shirts surge and veer like an aerial display team across that wide-open lozenge of green, it almost felt like a moment of show-Bellingham, a gloss to go with all the close-quarter moments in between, the moments of graft that had kept England in this game in its early stages.This, though, was pure cinema. England had been flat at times in the first half against Senegal, had seemed to be playing with a...
Cissé and his England counterpart have proved adept at blocking out critics back home during the World Cup campaignTake the handbrake off! Unleash this golden generation of attacking players! In a World Cup that has felt at times one tedious Twitter spat about differences of perspective and who has the right to criticise whom, it’s heartening to find some things are reassuringly the same wherever you are.The clamour for Iliman Ndiaye has perhaps not quite been as vociferous as that for James Maddison but Aliou Cissé has been, as the Senegalese newspaper Le Quotidien put it, “heckled daily for his tactical choices, caricatured for his conservatism”. Continue reading...
Calculating the value of Liverpool’s attacking duo is impossible, but they are certainly better together than apartNaturally, the lasers lent the scene a certain pathos. As Mohamed Salah stepped up to take Egypt’s first penalty against Senegal on Tuesday night, the swarm of green laser beams dancing across his face were a reminder of football’s capacity to render even its greats temporarily powerless. Here was one of the biggest stars in the world’s biggest sport. But he couldn’t make his team win. He couldn’t get his country to a World Cup. And now he didn’t even have the use of his own eyes.“I was luckier,” Sadio Mané said afterwards. This was his second consecutive triumph over his Liverpool teammate, Senegal’s...
Billing Sunday’s Africa Cup of Nations final as a clash of Salah and Mané misses the wider point in a shambolic tournamentMohamed Salah against Sadio Mané, two great Liverpool forwards going head-to-head in Sunday’s Africa Cup of Nations final. It’s the headline clash of Egypt against Senegal, the meeting of the most successful side in African history and a team that has never lifted the trophy. But to focus on them would be misleading: although both have had an influence late in games, neither Senegal nor Egypt could be said to be teams based around their attacking talent.There is an unavoidable sense that even to focus on the football is itself uncomfortable, given the tragic events of a fortnight ago...