Jonathan Wilson's Blog

Egyptian left on bench in win at West Ham

‘Mo will have a very good future at club’

Arne Slot played down the significance of his decision to leave Mohamed Salah out of Liverpool’s 2-0 win at West Ham on Sunday. Salah had been selected for every league game for which he was available since a 2-2 draw at the London Stadium in April 2024, when Jürgen Klopp was still manager, but Slot was keen to stress that this does not mean that the Egyptian’s time at the club is coming to an end.

“I get this question a lot,” Slot said, referring to occasions when he has omitted Florian Wirtz, Alexander Isak – who scored his first Premier League goal for Liverpool on Sunday – or Hugo Ekitiké and suggesting that one of his vaunted forwards is always going to be left out.

For long spells nothing happened. At one point it was so quiet you could hear a distant plane droning by. But Liverpool will not care.

Sometimes you have to get back on the horse however you can, and if that requires a stepladder, an awkward bunk from a scornful stablehand and an ungainly scramble into the saddle, so be it.

That he stayed after relegation in 1978 and lifted the FA Cup with the team still in Division Two typified his commitment

Some players embody a club but few have ever embodied their side more than Billy Bonds, who died on Sunday at the age of 79. He was not a one-club man but by the time he finally retired, at the age of 41, in 1988, he felt like one, having racked up a record 799 appearances for West Ham. Just as significantly, he had lifted the FA Cup twice as captain.

There was applause at the London Stadium on Sunday as a montage was shown on the big screens. It featured a number of spectacular long-range strikes because it’s easier to show somebody scoring goals than preventing them, and still harder to somehow sum up leadership.

Top-four seeding shows Fifa prioritising marketing over sporting integrity once again but even best-laid plans can flop

The plastic balls rumble around the glass bowls of destiny. Portentous music plays. There is a sense of possibility, as though the inner workings of the universe have suddenly been laid bare, a door opening to reveal the three Fates sitting by their spinning wheel, measuring rod and shears in hand.

A World Cup draw is a moment of perfection, a platonic vision before reality has had time to intervene. Everybody is fit and in form. Every nation is playing as an ideal version of itself – no injuries, no disputes over bonuses, no concerns about fatigue or the temperature or whether a player might be distracted by a possible transfer; it’s the World Cup as pure potential. With Friday’s draw, next summer will suddenly feel a lot closer.

Englishman was not an obvious candidate to lead them but Swedes pushed Nottingham Forest all the way in 1979

Early in the 1979 European Cup final, Kenny Burns misjudged a long ball and ended up lobbing it up in the air for Jan-Olov Kindvall. He, in turn, attempted to knock the dropping ball over Peter Shilton but the goalkeeper was not as close as he had perhaps anticipated and Shilton ended up catching it simply. The chance was gone and, with it, Malmö’s hopes of beating Nottingham Forest.

“I had quite a good chance to score and then they were the better team,” says Kindvall. “But maybe if we had got the first goal, maybe we had a chance. We were very good when we didn’t have the ball ourselves. We had good organisation in the defence. And Forest were very good without the ball as well. It was more difficult for us to play against a team who were more like our team. We played the English way.”

Brazilian teenager’s goal in win against Barcelona was a classic and the winger could end up as one of the very best

Everything Lamine Yamal does oozes quality. Even when he is strolling about looking dejected, which he did quite a bit at Stamford Bridge, he does it with the nonchalant grace of a star. He caresses the ball rather than kicking it, generating remarkable power from limited back-lift. He plays on the balls of his feet, always alert, always able to go either way. He glides rather than runs, but does so at speed. He has already finished as runner-up in the Ballon d’Or. But he was not the best 18-year-old right-sided forward on the pitch on Tuesday, not even close.

In Estêvão, brought in from Palmeiras for a fee that could rise to £52m, Chelsea have recruited a player who could end up as one of the very best. He has been making more and more of an impression since scoring the late winner against Liverpool last month. His last four starts for Chelsea have brought four goals, and he also scored in both of Brazil’s friendlies during the international break. It’s very early, but Brazil may at last have found the player they desperately wanted to have found in Neymar.

Eberechi Eze’s hat-trick and Manchester City’s loss to Newcastle means Arsenal are in control of their own destiny

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So it turns out those who had already handed the title to Arsenal were right after all.

It’s absurd, of course, to start handing out the title in November but a feature of modern football is how obsessed it becomes so early with title races. It’s perhaps a legacy of the Pep Guardiola-Jürgen Klopp rivalry’s peak, when being champion meant amassing more than 95 points. It made sense then to scan the track far ahead for any potential hurdles because there were so few. But less than a third of the way through this season, Manchester City, who remain probably the biggest danger to Arsenal, have already dropped as many points as they did in the entirety of 2017-18, their 100-point campaign.

Five defeats in six and the anxiety is beginning to show for Leeds. For the second game in a row they took an early lead through Lukas Nmecha but ended up with nothing, Morgan Rogers producing a pair of remarkable finishes to lift Aston Villa into the Champions League qualification slots. Leeds remain in the relegation zone.

“Performance-wise we’ve turned back to what we want to be,” said Daniel Farke. “We should’ve taken some points from this game. We are not back to our best. We can still improve, but at the end we are just disappointed we did not get any points.” Given the way Leeds faded in the second half and their lack of guile throughout, that was perhaps an overly sanguine reading.

Whatever doubts there are for Arsenal, at Tottenham they are far greater – and the similarity between these old rivals is stark

Two goals for Harry Kane, another for Son Heung-min and, to compound Arsenal’s misery, Rob Holding sent off. Tottenham had won the derby and would go on to win their last two games of the season to take fourth place and the final Champions League qualification spot from Arsenal. It was the end of the 2021-22 campaign, and the sixth season in a row in which Tottenham had finished above Arsenal and, for the first time since the 60s, it seemed that they had a definitive superiority in north London.

Since when – although Spurs will point out they have won a trophy and Arsenal have not – the pendulum has swung decisively back the other way. Mikel Arteta has remade Arsenal, but the question is whether, after three straight second-place finishes, they can go one better and win the league for the first time since 2004, a drought that itself makes success more difficult.

Troy Parrott’s last-gasp goal and DR Congo’s triumph proved once again why the best soccer is almost never about the soccer

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Last Thursday, Irish football was in a bleak place. They had two games remaining in World Cup qualifying and apparently no hope of making it to North America next summer. Another campaign had collapsed in predictable ways: they couldn’t score, they made bafflingly simple errors, too few of their players play for elite sides and those that do seemed unable to reproduce club form for their country.

Their one possible star, Evan Ferguson, had not been energised by a move to Roma – quite the reverse – and although there was vague talk of a new contract for their manager, the amiable Icelandic dentist Heimir Hallgrímsson, everybody thought he would be off after the game in Hungary and was vaguely dreading another Football Association of Ireland recruitment saga, which would inevitably take months, throw up a series of implausible names and result in the job being given to Hallgrímsson’s assistant, John O’Shea.