The News Caravan

Tag: Jonathan

  • Richard Sharp was Boris Johnson’s toxic legacy – never again should politicians pick a boss for the BBC | Jonathan Freedland

    Richard Sharp was Boris Johnson’s toxic legacy – never again should politicians pick a boss for the BBC | Jonathan Freedland

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    A word of advice for anyone who has worked hard to acquire a reputation they cherish: if Boris Johnson approaches, if he comes anywhere near, run a mile. Richard Sharp is the latest proof that, even out of office, Johnson continues to act as reputational napalm, laying waste to careers and turning good names bad.

    Sharp joins a long list that includes Christopher Geidt, who had the poison task of serving as Johnson’s adviser on ethics; Allegra Stratton, whom the former prime minister said had “sickened” him when she joked about a party in Downing Street, even though he had attended several himself; and the one-time rising star civil servant and current cabinet secretary, Simon Case, quoted this week as having said of Johnson, “I don’t know what more I can do to stand up to a prime minister who lies”. Each entered Johnson’s circle as a respected figure; each was diminished by their contact with the reverse Midas, the man who rots everything he touches.

    One question left by Sharp’s resignation as chair of the BBC is: what took him so long? He hardly needed to wait for today’s report by Adam Heppinstall KC, with its verdict that Sharp’s failure to disclose his role in brokering an £800,000 loan arrangement for Johnson represented “a breach of the governance code”, to know that he could not possibly continue in a job whose defining duty is to maintain the independence of the BBC. As the former director general John Birt said a month ago, Sharp was “unsuitable” for the role, thanks to “navigating a loan for the prime minister at exactly the same time as applying for the job at the BBC. It’s the cosiness of that arrangement that made it unsuitable, and I wish the cabinet secretary had called it out.” (The cabinet secretary being Case, serially Midased by Johnson.)

    According to those inside the BBC, Sharp had been a capable chair. But the manner of his appointment meant he could never do the job properly. Witness last month’s row over Gary Lineker’s tweet, aimed at Suella Braverman’s language on migrants. That was a moment when you might expect the chair to lead from the front, publicly explaining either why impartiality is central to the BBC’s mission or why it was vital that the BBC not succumb to government pressure – or both. Instead, Sharp was mute and invisible, too hopelessly compromised as the man who had helped bail out a fiscally incontinent Tory prime minister to say a word.

    It’s baffling that all of this did not occur to Sharp himself long ago – including right at the start, when he submitted his job application and was required to identify any conflicts, or perceived conflicts, of interest. The fact that he didn’t mention his role in the Johnson loan, even though he had discussed the issue with Case, suggests he knew that it looked bad – that it would give rise to the “perception that Mr Sharp would not be independent from the former prime minister, if appointed,” as Heppinstall puts it. Given he knew the importance of perceived, as well as actual, neutrality for the BBC, that silence was itself disqualifying.

    Boris Johnson
    ‘Many have been diminished by their contact with Boris Johnson the reverse Midas, the man who rots everything he touches.’ Photograph: Charles McQuillan/PA

    His grudging resignation statement suggests the penny has still not dropped. Dominic Raab may have started a fashion for passive-aggressive Friday departures, because Sharp was insistent that his breach of the rules was “inadvertent and not material”. Still, he invited our admiration for his decision “to prioritise the interests of the BBC” since “this matter may well be a distraction from the corporation’s good work were I to remain in post”. Er, yes, just a bit. Again, if preventing a distraction was Sharp’s concern, he should have gone the moment this story broke. As it is, he’s left multiple questions still to answer – including whether Johnson should not have recused himself from the appointment process on the grounds that he had an egregious conflict of interest, given that he knew Sharp had helped him out with the loan.

    What’s needed now is not just a new BBC chair, but a new way of doing things. Even if he hadn’t got involved in Johnson’s personal finances, Sharp was hardly a non-partisan figure. He is a longtime, high-value donor to the Tory party, to the tune of £400,000. True, political parties, Labour included, have been appointing allies and chums to this role since the 1960s, but that practice needs to stop. Lineker distilled the case nicely: “The BBC chairman should not be selected by the government of the day. Not now, not ever.”

    This goes wider than the BBC: there’s a slew of public jobs that might appear to be independently appointed, but that are quietly filled on the nod, or whim, of Downing Street. But it’s with the BBC that independence matters acutely. To understand why, look across the Atlantic.

    This week’s announcement by Joe Biden that he will seek a second term had to fight for media attention with the firing of Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson. That’s because Carlson had become second only to Donald Trump in influence over the Republican party, able to make senior elected officials and aspirant presidential candidates bend to his agenda and ideological obsessions – even when mainstreaming previously fringe, and racist, ideas like the “great replacement theory”, with its claim of a deliberate, if shadowy, plot to replace white Americans with a more diverse and pliant electorate.

    Fox News itself, with its repeated amplification of the big lie of a stolen election, is partly responsible for why nearly two-thirds of Republican voters do not believe a demonstrable fact: namely, that Biden won office in a free and fair contest in 2020. Today’s America is a land of epistemic tribalism: knowledge is not shared across the society, but rather dependent on political affiliation. There are red state facts and blue state facts, and which you believe comes down to which media you consume – which social media accounts you follow, which TV networks you watch.

    In Britain, there have been efforts to lead us down that gloomy path. There are partisan, polemical TV channels now, desperate to do to Britain what Fox has done to America. And Johnson was Trumpian in his contempt for the truth, determined to create a world of Brexit facts that would exist in opposition to the real one. But if those efforts have largely failed – and if Johnson was eventually undone by his lies – that is partly down to the stubborn persistence in this country of a source of information that is regarded by most people as, yes, flawed and, yes, inconsistent, but broadly reliable and fair. Trust levels in the BBC are not what they were, and that demands urgent attention, but it is striking nonetheless that, according to a Reuters Institute study, aside from local news, BBC News is the most trusted news brand in the US. It seems that in an intensely polarised landscape, people thirst for a non-partisan source.

    The BBC should be defended – and that process starts with governments treating it as the publicly funded broadcaster it is, rather than the state broadcaster some wrongly imagine it to be. That means giving up the power to pick its boss – and getting politicians out of the way. The BBC is a precious thing – so precious, we might not fully appreciate it until it’s gone.



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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • The revival of Test cricket is a fine thing – but ODIs would like a word | Jonathan Liew

    The revival of Test cricket is a fine thing – but ODIs would like a word | Jonathan Liew

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    I got a little teary the other night. It’s a really stupid story. You know that famous scene in Coronation Street when Hilda Ogden comes home from the funeral and there’s a parcel of Stan’s belongings on the table, and she opens Stan’s glasses case and suddenly, despite herself, she starts to weep uncontrollably? Well, it was like that, except rather than a dead husband I was mourning an era of English Test cricket. And instead of a pair of glasses, it was an interview with Graeme Swann on the Rig Biz sports comedy podcast.

    The bulk of Swann’s interview is not, admittedly, an abundant source of pathos. But among the many anecdotes on Andrew Flintoff’s drinking and Paul Collingwood’s sexual prowess is a segment where Swann recounts his time playing with Kevin Pietersen for England. And for all they achieved together, there is not a great deal of residual affection there. “Me and Kev always hated each other,” Swann remembers. Pietersen is described as “a bit of a dickhead”. This is good content, no notes.

    But then Swann starts talking about the 2012 text-message scandal involving Pietersen and Andrew Strauss, and that got me. I can’t explain it. “A bit of a soap opera,” is how Swann described it, and with the benefit of distance it is weirdly poignant to recall how big this silly little tiff seemed at the time. For a week the front pages were consumed with tales of slurs, rumours, crisis summits, YouTube disses. It mattered. I mean, it didn’t matter. But it felt like it did. And to hear it being repackaged as bog-brush banter on a second-rate podcast: on some level, something important has been lost here.

    The sacking of Pietersen in 2014 was a genuine national news story. By way of tangent, I tried to recall if the England men’s Test team had generated a single nationally resonant story since. Headingley 2019, maybe. Certainly not the 2015 Ashes. More often than not, when English cricket has punctured the broader consciousness, it has been through controversy: the Yorkshire racism scandal, the Ben Stokes trial (at which we all learned that nobody really knew who Ben Stokes was). A national sport essentially reduced to a fleeting curiosity in the space of a decade. What happened? And as the English summer of 2023 clanks sleepily into gear, what are we all still doing here?

    At which point: enter Bazball. I want to believe in this thing, I really do. I want to believe in the noble mission of Stokes and Brendon McCullum to save Test cricket by scoring at 5.5 runs per over. I love the way this team play and the memories they have already created. I like Harry Brook’s little face. I want to believe that English red‑ball cricket can somehow reinflate itself to the size it was before it needed to be saved, a time when it simply was.

    Kusal Mendis rattles off a run during Sri Lanka’s first Test victory against Ireland
    Kusal Mendis rattles off a run during Sri Lanka’s first Test victory against Ireland. Photograph: Ishara S Kodikara/AFP/Getty Images

    But let’s face it: I’m not the target market here. Last week I read an interview with Sri Lanka’s Kusal Mendis, who is playing in the Test series against Ireland: Ireland’s first two-Test series, a landmark occasion that has attracted barely a word of mention. Mendis smashed a brisk 140 in the first Test and afterwards explained how he thought Test batting was evolving. “The future of Test cricket is not to play out so many dot balls,” Mendis told Cricinfo. “Apart from the start, I don’t see a big difference in the ODI and Test formats.”

    This is an increasingly prevalent view: that the evolution of Test cricket, driven by Stokes’s England, is taking it firmly in the direction of white-ball cricket, with higher scoring rates, instinctive aggression, and the effective elimination of the draw. Indeed, listen to a proselytiser such as McCullum or Eoin Morgan and you will hear that this is the only viable future for the longest format: quicker games, bigger thrills, more interest. Sounds great. One question: how’s ODI cricket doing these days?

    Because it turns out there already is a format with no draws where teams score at 5.5 runs an over, and people don’t really like it very much. Over the past few years there is a growing consensus that ODIs are nearing the end of their useful creative lifespan, that they have become staid and formulaic. Two-innings Test cricket with a swinging, spinning red ball will always be a richer product. But let’s roll the Bazball tape through to its logical conclusion: not a few months or a few years, but five or 20 years. At what point does cheery novelty begin to crystallise into routine?

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    There is of course so much to admire in this brilliant England team and the way they play the game. But it is no more a magic formula or survival manual than any other style to have emerged in Test cricket’s 150 years. This is a game whose glory lies in its texture, its contrast of tones and shades and paces and approaches, not just the fast but the slow, not just the instinctive but the regimented, not just the instant gratification but the delayed, too.

    For lovers of the long game there will always be a seductive appeal in the idea of the quick fix, the one giant heave that will put the vase back on its pedestal. But in sport, as in marketing or politics, there is always a danger in modelling yourself on your biggest rival: there’s a reason they’re your rival in the first place.

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    #revival #Test #cricket #fine #ODIs #word #Jonathan #Liew
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Of course China’s balloon was spying. States all spy on each other – and we all benefit | Jonathan Steele

    Of course China’s balloon was spying. States all spy on each other – and we all benefit | Jonathan Steele

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    Long ago, in May 1960, an American U-2 spy plane took off from Pakistan to fly at high altitude across the Soviet Union as part of a mission to photograph key facilities and military sites on behalf of the CIA. The Russians saw it and shot it down. The pilot, Gary Powers, managed to descend by parachute and was arrested. In Washington, the Eisenhower administration lied about his mission, claiming the U-2 was a “weather plane” that had strayed off course after its pilot had “difficulties with his oxygen equipment” (sound familiar?).

    The incident caused a temporary poisoning of US-Soviet relations as the Kremlin turned it into political theatre. Moscow subjected Powers to a highly publicised criminal trial and gave him a 10-year sentence.

    In the US, Powers was portrayed as an all-American clean-cut hero who neither smoked nor drank (which was not true). In spite of the mutual fury neither side was genuinely shocked, since it was accepted that spying was routine. The technology might change as improvements were made in information-gathering systems, but the practice of surveillance went back to time immemorial and could not be stopped.

    The analogy with the US downing of a Chinese high-altitude balloon that intruded into US airspace last week is clear. It too produced a hurricane of hypocritical outrage. The Republicans attacked Joe Biden for being weak and failing to protect US national security. They said he should have shot the intruding balloon down as soon as it was spotted. Fearful of being seen as too old to run for a second term, Biden ordered his secretary of state to delay a planned visit to Beijing.

    In a pathetic parody of the political row in Washington, the UK government promptly ordered a review of Britain’s security. Rishi Sunak forestalled any Labour charges of being weak on defence by announcing that RAF jets were on standby to shoot down any Chinese surveillance balloons that penetrated UK airspace. What about Chinese spy satellites? Are they also going to be taken out by doughty British pilots?

    The reality is that using technology to spy on other states’ military capabilities is as old as it is widespread. So is the use of covert tools to discover another government’s intentions. The methods are constantly being updated. Listening devices and phone-tapping have now been supplemented by cyber systems to hack emails and other internet messaging. An Israeli company, NSO Group, has – as well documented in the Guardian developed the Pegasus technology that can listen to conversations, read SMS texts, take screenshots and access people’s lists of contacts. It has sold the system to a range of authoritarian foreign governments that want to monitor their own citizens’ views and behaviour.

    Phone-tapping and cyber surveillance are not only done by governments to potential or actual enemies. Remember the row in 2013 that erupted during Barack Obama’s presidency after Edward Snowden revealed that the US National Security Agency had been listening to German chancellor Angela Merkel’s mobile phone conversations for years. The Germans were almost as embarrassed as the Americans. Merkel angrily declared that “spying between friends just isn’t on” but an inquiry by the German federal prosecutor was quietly dropped.

    Let’s face it. Spying is a benefit. The more that countries know about a potential enemy’s defence systems the better it usually is. Starting hostilities is less likely if you have accurate and up-to-date information about what your army is up against (a lesson Vladimir Putin failed to learn before 24 February last year).

    Understanding another state’s or another leader’s intentions is even more important, whether this intelligence-gathering is performed by spies, diplomats and non-governmental political analysts or by what are politely called “technical means”. The crucial issue, which no amount of balloons or satellites can provide, is empathy. Put yourself in the other side’s shoes. Understand their history, culture and the economic and political pressures their leaders are under.

    There is no doubt that the relationship between the US and China is the leading global security challenge of at least the next 10 years. The two countries are rivals and competitors, but they are not enemies. Everything should be done by western countries not to slip into a mindset that treats China as hostile. Peace in Asia – and indeed the whole world – is too important to be hijacked by hysterical excitement over a roving balloon.

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    #Chinas #balloon #spying #States #spy #benefit #Jonathan #Steele
    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Arsenal appear to be out of steam as financial gravity brings them down | Jonathan WIlson

    Arsenal appear to be out of steam as financial gravity brings them down | Jonathan WIlson

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    What if the Queen hadn’t died when she did? If she hadn’t, Arsenal would have faced PSV Eindhoven in the Europa League in September and that game wouldn’t have had to be played in the midweek slot when they had been slated to host Manchester City.

    Arsenal would have gone into what could prove the defining game of the season in October on a run of seven straight victories, having beaten Tottenham and Liverpool in their previous two home league matches, while City would have been coming off a 1-0 defeat at Anfield. As it was, Arsenal were fretting in their worst run of the season, while City were just beginning to emerge from a post-World Cup blip. But still they’ll blame the referees.

    Arsenal are level at the top with a game in hand, but the sense of momentum has gone. It’s true they will win the league if they draw at City in April and win their other 15 games – and few before the season began would have predicted anything like that – but nobody at the club can be looking beyond Aston Villa on Saturday and getting out of this run of four games without a victory. Having dropped seven points in the first half of the season, they have let eight go in the first three games of the second. Eight-point leads, once squandered, are seldom regained.

    Guardiola says Arsenal still on top as Arteta bemoans Gunners’ ‘gifts’ to City – video

    The slump began at City in the FA Cup. At the time, a 1-0 defeat felt almost like the perfect result for Arsenal: even with a weakened team there had been no sense they couldn’t live with the champions and space had been opened in the calendar to focus on the more important competition. But that defeat broke the run.

    Nobody could realistically criticise Mikel Arteta for resting players given the slenderness of his squad, but it was as though that was the moment when, having gone chasing off the cliff, they glanced down and realised this progress wasn’t sustainable, that gravity was going to get them in the end.

    How much longer could they have gone on, defying football’s natural financial laws? There’s always misfortune to be blamed. Perhaps they were unlucky then to meet Everton enjoying the first (only?) game of a Sean Dyche bounce, but however tenacious Goodison’s new dogs of war were in midfield, there was also a sense Arsenal were flat. The zip had gone.

    Fatigue is almost impossible to prove in football and is often little more than a convenient post-hoc rationalisation. Only those with access to intimate medical data can say with any certainty whether players are physically exhausted and even those stats can’t account for mental weariness. But the fear for Arsenal had always been they would run out of steam and, recently, steam has looked in very short supply.

    Against Brentford, the VAR official, Lee Mason, was understandably blamed for becoming so fixated on a possible blocking run by Ethan Pinnock that he failed to consider whether Christian Nørgaard was offside in squaring for Ivan Toney to equalise, but there is rarely only one factor at play. Brentford had by far the better chances in the first half: they could easily have been two or three up. To focus on that one refereeing error, to blame that for Arsenal’s sputter, is to ignore the bigger picture.

    Arsenal’s Takehiro Tomiyasu
    Takehiro Tomiyasu’s duff back pass allows Kevin De Bruyne to score for Manchester City. Photograph: David Klein/Reuters

    Arsenal had their chance against City. By Pep Guardiola’s own admission he got the tactics wrong in the first half, with Bernardo Silva an unconvincing left-back torn apart by Bukayo Saka. At half- time, Arsenal had had 59.5% of the ball. They had had opportunities. Eddie Nketiah had put a free header wide. Saka had dithered in a good position. City had struggled to create chance until Takehiro Tomiyasu’s duff back pass.

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    What if Arteta had stuck with Ben White at right-back? Even then, for those minded to do so, it was possible to look at the refereeing. What if Silva had been booked for his second or third foul on Saka rather than his fourth? Might he then have been sent off before Guardiola could reorganise? What might Arsenal have been able to do against 10 players?

    But Guardiola was able to rejig and City in the second half were by far the better side. They scored twice, had an effort cleared off the line and were denied a penalty only by a narrow offside. Might it have been different had Thomas Partey been fit or Arsenal managed to sign Moisés Caicedo rather than Jorginho as back-up? Might they have had more of a chance of regaining the initiative had they landed Mykhaylo Mudryk rather than Leandro Trossard?

    Mikel Arteta speaks to Arsenal’s players during the defeat by Manchester City.
    Mikel Arteta speaks to Arsenal’s players during the defeat by Manchester City. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

    Perhaps, and that leads to a form of economic determinism that perhaps comes closest to an overall explanation for who wins titles: City have the most resources, so they can afford the best manager and the best players and provide for them the best facilities. Perhaps financial gravity was always going to catch up with Arsenal. But such things are rarely singular or simple and there may be twists in this season’s title race. Arsenal may come again but it doesn’t seem likely.

    What if the Queen hadn’t died when she did? What if the game had been played in October? For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Graham Potter and Chelsea still searching for a plan amid the chaos | Jonathan Liew

    Graham Potter and Chelsea still searching for a plan amid the chaos | Jonathan Liew

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    So, that plan. Everyone wants to see the plan, to see the world in a grain of sand, to see the nuts and bolts of a sophisticated modern footballing philosophy in a promising 15-minute spell either side of the break. The truth is, there is no plan yet. Just the kind of mid-tempo chaos you get when you are still at the thick end of one of the most audacious experiments ever seen in elite football. The bottom line is that Chelsea still can’t keep the ball and they still can’t keep it out. Everything else is bubbling test tubes and incomplete data.

    There were 21 shots in the 1-0 defeat at Dortmund, which is at least something. João Félix probably should have had a couple of goals, Gregor Kobel made several fine saves for the hosts and, naturally for a Graham Potter team, the xG was off the charts. You might even argue that this was the sort of game Chelsea deserved to win. All the same, they keep failing to win them, largely because they keep doing the sort of things that teams do when they have no map, no structure to fall back on, no collective consciousness to drag them through the tough bits.

    It was telling that with 20 minutes remaining, Potter reached for Marc Cucurella and Mason Mount: his tried and trusted toys. Mount made one fine tackle high up the pitch to create an opening; Cucurella, by contrast, wandered around like a man who had just stumbled out of a house fire. Booed when he came on and hounded every time he got the ball, there was a kind of pathos to him here: a £50m footballer who no longer really knows what any of this means, who no longer knows what the plan is here.

    But of course these things work both ways. Opponents can’t really work you out if you don’t know what you’re doing yourself. If you’re a rival coach who wants to know how this Chelsea side combine with each other, how they react in certain situations, what do you do? What footage do you consult? And perhaps Chelsea’s best moments here were when the patterns broke down and they were forced to trust to pure individual quality at each end.

    Thiago Silva heading away cross after cross. Mykhaylo Mudryk running at Marius Wolf on the left wing, losing it and inevitably getting it back again. Félix fluttering this way and that in the final third. Hakim Ziyech looking sharp in the second half. If you’re a coach with a vision and a blueprint, you take tactics over talent every time. But there are times when talent really doesn’t hurt.

    The flip-side was the ease with which Dortmund could pass through Chelsea’s press, which at this stage of its gestation remains a largely theoretical thing. There are players in positions, certainly. Some of them running in a gutsy sort of way towards the ball. But virtually no concept of spacing or coordination just yet, no sense of a team moving as one, a system run by Zoom call. Can you communicate at all when the noise is this deafening and nobody really knows each other’s movements yet?

    Graham Potter watches on
    Graham Potter watches on as his Chelsea side lose the first leg of their last-16 Champions League tie with Borussia Dortmund 1-0 in Germany. Photograph: Paul Currie/Shutterstock

    Perhaps the best example of this was at set pieces. Has a losing team ever taken as long over set pieces as this? Every free-kick seemed to involve a board-level summit, four or five players congregating on the ball while Silva waved his arms behind them. Goal-kicks were a similar story: as the centre-halves dutifully spread wide, Kepa looked up and realised that in the time he needed to set himself, every single teammate was marked. What’s the plan here, then?

    And after that promising 15-minute spell, things fell apart in the most Chelsea way possible. Chelsea were offside at a corner, some players stopped, some players didn’t, and all of a sudden Karim Adeyemi was burning Enzo Fernández for pace, scoring the only goal of the game. If there was an irony here it was that the immaculately honed and structured Dortmund had struck Chelsea in just the way Chelsea were most likely to strike themselves: with a searing direct counterattack, a flash of individual brilliance, a finish that seemed almost prosaic in its assurance.

    These are the sorts of things that happen when you are all cast and no movie. And as Dortmund cycled through their substitutes, there was perhaps another lesson for Chelsea here too. Dortmund have in many ways perfected a very similar model Chelsea are trying to follow: harvest Europe’s top young talent, develop it, nurture it, watch it swell in value. Adeyemi, a £30m summer signing from Salzburg, has been trusted through a torrid period by coach Edin Terzic, slowly learning his own game and Dortmund’s. Does Potter have the time to give a struggling young player that kind of leeway? Or does he simply shuffle in the next promising young card off the deck? What exactly is the plan here?

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    Potter, for his part, seems like a coach second-guessing himself, torn between long-term renewal and short-term impact. The fans are already beginning to turn; desperate to see an A-list coach with this A-list squad. Chelsea still have a foot in this tie, which represents perhaps their last remaining thread to Champions League football next season. If it breaks, Potter may well end up being cut loose with it.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • Erling Haaland, system-based teams and the role of the goalscorer | Jonathan Wilson

    Erling Haaland, system-based teams and the role of the goalscorer | Jonathan Wilson

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    Erling Haaland is a phenomenon. It’s not just that he has scored 22 goals already this season, plus a further five goals in the Champions League. It’s the sense he offers of being unstoppable: almost unbeatable for pace, almost impossible to knock off the ball and with a clinical eye for goal as well.

    His phlegmatic, almost flippant, personality makes him more terrifying. He jokes about the secret target he has set himself for this season. He is not some driven self-improver: he scores goals in record-breaking numbers seemingly because he finds it funny. He plays football like the early developer in year eight and as such finds the game almost laughably easy. In the history of the sport there has been only a tiny handful of forwards who have combined such physical and technical prowess.

    There was Bernabé Ferreyra, the Argentinian dubbed the Mortar of Rufino for the power of his shot. When River Plate signed him from Tigre for £23,000 in 1932, it was the first time the world transfer record was held by a club from outside Britain. There was the Brazilian Ronaldo, who ticked along at a goal a game even in the relatively defensive 90s before knee injuries hit his explosive acceleration. And there was Eduard Streltsov.

    Streltsov now is best known as the brilliant young Torpedo Moscow striker who was arrested on the eve of the 1958 World Cup, convicted of rape and jailed for six years before returning to win the league. His time in the gulag, and the various attempts to clear his name, understandably dominate discussion of him but his career also throws up revealing tactical issues.

    At Dynamo Kyiv the following decade, Viktor Maslov would in effect invent modern notions of pressing. His ideas had not quite reached that point when he was reappointed at Torpedo in 1957, but he was already thinking of the team as an integrated unit, aware of how a player’s actions in one part of the pitch could have profound tactical implications elsewhere.

    He acknowledged Streltsov’s immense talent but he never seemed quite as in awe of him as others were. In part that was probably because he recognised early how dangerous his wild streak could be, and seems on occasion to have lost patience with his star in the difficult months between Olympic success in 1956 and the player’s arrest. But it’s also possible to trace tactical doubts and it was only after Streltsov had been jailed that Maslov led Torpedo to their first league title in 1960.

    When Streltsov returned from the gulag, he was a different sort of player. His pace had gone and he would drop deeper. A forward who had been defined by his power began to talk about preferring shots that rolled slowly over the line to those that crashed into the net. Physically diminished, he had to learn a new way to play and to an extent he did, well enough to help Torpedo to their second Soviet title in 1965.

    But the game had changed and he could not change sufficiently to accommodate himself to this new world of systems and responsibility. Streltsov won individual awards because he still did eye-catching things (and because of the power of the narrative of the player who had returned from the gulag to resume his career) but he clearly frustrated Nikolai Morozov, part of the great Torpedo tradition of thoughtful and innovative managers who had given him his debut as a 16-year-old in 1954 and returned to the club in 1967. Notably, as national manager, Morozov made no attempt to have Streltsov cleared to play at the 1966 World Cup.

    Which is a roundabout way of saying that since football became a game of systems in the 60s, even players of profound individual gifts, physical and technical, can be detrimental to a system-based team.

    Ronaldo did not win a national league title until 2002. Ruud van Nistelrooy scored roughly two goals every three games over five seasons for Manchester United, but won just one championship in that time. Late-era Cristiano Ronaldo was top-scorer in three seasons at Juventus and one at United while making the team worse.

    There is a sense Haaland’s goals may be slowing down, although such statements are relative: with anybody else, would the 333 minutes between his goals against Everton and Tottenham have been spoken of as a drought? He remains on course to obliterate the Premier League goalscoring record for a season.

    Yet City as a whole, halfway through the season, have scored 50 goals and conceded 20; over the whole of last season they totalled 99 and 26. The addition of Haaland, the great goalscorer, has barely changed their goals per game scored stats, while apparently having an adverse effect on goals conceded.

    Cristiano Ronaldo at Juventus
    Late-era Cristiano Ronaldo was top-scorer in three seasons at Juventus and one at Manchester United while making the team worse. Photograph: Peter Powell/EPA

    And it’s not just that. Haaland had 20 touches against Manchester United last Sunday. When City beat United at Old Trafford last season, no City player had fewer than 71. Pep Guardiola’s football has always been about control through possession. Haaland demands direct early passes that run contrary to Guardiola’s inclination to build slowly to set up a base to counter a potential counter, and his lack of involvement in general play means in effect trying to establish that characteristic stifling domination of the ball with a man fewer.

    There was a moment during the second half in last Saturday’s derby when, with play stopped, Guardiola, encroaching on to the pitch, screamed at Haaland, apparently gesticulating at him to drop deeper. Haaland’s body language suggested a teenager being told to tidy his bedroom, although there were a couple of occasions when he fell back and, in the manner of Harry Kane, spun to play passes to players advancing outside him.

    Which is not to say Haaland cannot be a success at City. A tension between two opposing visions can be creative. Indeed, it may be that his incisiveness gives City the edge in the sort of European tie they habitually lose. But there is a tendency in football to over-emphasise the role of the goalscorer. Just because a striker is prolific, just because he is obviously a great player, does not mean he is making the team better.

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )

  • What to do with a Met police that harbours rapists and murderers? Scrap it and start again | Jonathan Freedland

    What to do with a Met police that harbours rapists and murderers? Scrap it and start again | Jonathan Freedland

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    The whole barrel is rotten. Perhaps it began with a few bad apples long ago, and of course some good ones will remain even now, but the rot in the Metropolitan force has spread.

    You read of David Carrick, the officer who kept his uniform, his badge and, for many years, his gun even as he pursued a parallel career as a prolific sex offender, and of course you are sickened by the evil he has done: dozens of rapes and sexual offences against 12 women, over two decades, including imprisoning one of his victims, naked and terrified, in a tiny cupboard under the stairs. But an equal horror comes when you learn that the police had been warned eight times about Carrick’s behaviour – eight – but did nothing. In fairness, that’s not quite right; they did do something. They promoted him in 2009 to an elite armed unit.

    The horror is familiar. We felt it when another serving Met officer, Wayne Couzens, raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021. We felt it when, that same year, Met officers were jailed for circulating photographs of the bodies of two murdered sisters – “dead birds”, they called them – for the titillation of their colleagues. And we felt it a year ago when we learned of the group at Charing Cross police station in London who traded WhatsApp messages casually joking about rape and speaking of women in terms so filled with hate the word “misogyny” scarcely does it justice.

    The pattern is so clear that the individual perpetrators are best understood as symptoms of a larger sickness. The Metropolitan police is a diseased institution. The new commissioner, Mark Rowley, is said to be a decent, well-intentioned man, but few would rate his chances of healing the Met. Anyone who tries runs into a stubborn, suspicious workforce ready to feed hostile stories to a receptive press – which is how you end up with a commissioner like the last one, Cressida Dick, who seemed to regard her prime mission as keeping police officers happy, with serving the public a distant second.

    So what can be done? A generation ago, after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, it became impossible to deny that the police lacked the confidence of black Londoners. The result was the Macpherson inquiry. We are at a similar moment now: London’s women can no longer trust the police. How could they, when, should they have the courage to report a rape, they might be questioned by an officer who’s committed that very offence, or harbours the attitudes displayed in those Charing Cross messages? As a first step there needs to be a Macpherson-style investigation of misogyny in the Met.

    The conclusion would surely be drastic. Recall that, in the same era as the Lawrence murder, it became similarly unarguable that half the population of Northern Ireland had no faith in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The result was the dissolution of that force and its replacement with a new service. Keir Starmer, who played an advisory role in the establishment of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, was right to cite that precedent this week, because the Met has similarly lost the confidence of half the population it’s meant to serve: namely, women. The remedy should be the same for London as it was for Northern Ireland: scrap the Met and start again.

    It’s an extreme solution, but the problem is extreme. The Metropolitan police fails the two tests that count. It cannot demonstrate efficiency – see last September’s damning report by the police inspectorate, finding that the Met is failing when it comes to investigating crime and protecting the vulnerable – and it has lost legitimacy. As in Northern Ireland, a new service needs to be born, under wholly new leadership, with a head experienced in criminal justice but untainted by Met culture. Joan Smith, the definitive authority on police misogyny and onetime adviser to the London mayor on violence against women, has an intriguing suggestion: she nominates the lawyer, former minister and former police and crime commissioner Vera Baird.

    Still, this is hardly a problem confined to London. A second inspectorate report in November looked at eight separate forces and concluded that “a culture of misogyny, sexism, predatory behaviour towards female police officers and staff and members of the public was prevalent in all the forces we inspected”. Literally every female police officer and staff member the inspectors spoke to told of harassment and, in some cases, assaults.

    It won’t wash to say that the police reflect society and so will always include a proportionate number of abusers. These numbers are disproportionate. That suggests that the police are attracting more than their share of violent, abusive men. There’s no mystery about that. A job that gives you power over women and the vulnerable, including access to their personal information, is bound to lure men bent on doing harm. The answer is to tighten vetting, so that recruiters are looking out for those who want a police badge for all the wrong reasons.

    But the grimmer truth is that this malady goes far beyond the police. There were 70,000 rapes recorded last year in England and Wales alone – 1,350 a week – and those are just the ones that were reported, estimated as a mere quarter or fifth of all the rapes that happen. Of those recorded, just 1.3% resulted in a suspect being charged. Obviously only a fraction of those ended in a conviction. When fewer than one in a hundred rapists ever face any consequences, it’s time for a society to be honest with itself – and admit that it has, in effect, decriminalised rape. Worse, says Smith, it is creating serial rapists: a man does it once, gets away with it, and realises he can do it again. And again.

    There are remedies, starting with a system that investigates the suspect instead of the victim rather than the other way around, as things work, perversely, at the moment. But the first step will be a recognition that a society where a woman is killed by a man every three days – more if you count the women whose suffering of domestic abuse leads to suicide – is confronting an emergency as lethal as any terror threat. Yes, we should tear down and replace the Met and shake up every other decayed force in the land. But this rot goes deeper than the police. It lies within.

    • Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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    ( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )