Manchester United are a mess no one wants to take responsibility for | Jonathan Wilson

Even if Erik Ten Hag’s men had burgled a win on Sunday, it could not have disguised the issues of investment, personnel and tactical structure * Sign up to Jonathan’s weekly newsletter here There is a world, not too far removed from the one we live in, in which Alejandro Garnacho was not ruled offside, in which Gabriel Magalhães did not manage, like Catherine Zeta-Jones evading the infrared security beams in Entrapment, to contort his body around the VAR lines, and Manchester United stole a late winner at the Emirates on Sunday. We’d now be talking about the fine margins, about a finely executed smash-and-grab, about Erik ten Hag finally beating a major rival away from home. But in our world, Garnacho was offside and Arsenal scored twice in injury-time. Results can be great deceivers – take United’s 1-0 win over Wolves this season, in which the West Midlands club had dominated the match. But Sunday was part of a pattern. The only away point United picked up last season against teams who finished in the top nine of the Premier League was at Tottenham, where they have already lost this season. And nobody could claim, surely, that United had played well on Sunday. Continue reading...

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Wiegman’s Lionesses rekindle lost energy to fire spectacular comeback | Jonathan Liew

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Nations League victory against the Dutch arrives at the last despite a lack of clarity and brittleness creeping into the team They’ll always have Paris. Throughout this Nations League campaign this has been an England team fighting its own sense of entropy, still giving everything, still trying the same plans and processes in the hope that eventually something would click. And at 9.34pm on a briskly cold Wembley night, it finally did. Ella Toone’s injury-time goal earned England three points and kept their faintly glowing Olympic dream alive. But somehow it also did so much more. It breathed life into a team and a cycle, and a moment that for so much of the evening had felt like it was drawing to its natural conclusion provided a rousing encore to a cast preparing for its final curtain. There will be new challenges and new frontiers to conquer soon enough, a fresh set of European Championship qualifiers in the spring, but for now this iteration of the Lionesses still has tricks up
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US owners understand profit but do they appreciate clubs’ tradition and values?

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Half of the Premier teams are part- or fully-owned by Americans or US companies. Fans’ suspicions are understandable * Sign up to Jonathan’s weekly newsletter here It’s just over a year since Gary Neville declared US owners of English soccer clubs “a clear and present danger to the pyramid and fabric of the game”. The comment provoked a furore but the former England full-back turned high-profile pundit was unrepentant, insisting that if profit is the priority, there are vital aspects of the roles of soccer clubs that risk being lost. The issue, clearly, is not restricted to US owners. It’s unlikely that anybody who is not a fan who takes over a club is going to be acting primarily in the best interests of the community it represents. But given half the 20 Premier League clubs (and seven of the 24 Championship clubs) are part- or fully-owned by Americans or US companies, and given the prevalence of private equity companies whose sole interest is short-term profit, it’s perhaps
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‘Emotional’ Leah Williamson to make first England start in almost a year

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* Euro 2022-winning captain missed World Cup with ACL injury * Defender brings ‘flexibility in defence’, says Sarina Wiegman Sarina Wiegman has confirmed Leah Williamson will start for England against the Republic of Ireland on Tuesday night in their second Euro 2025 qualifying group game. Williamson, the Euro 2022-winning captain, said she would be emotional at the Aviva Stadium when she steps out with England for the first time in almost a year, after she was sidelined with an anterior cruciate ligament injury last April. Continue reading...
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