Jonathan Wilson
@jonawils
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Football writer, author of Behind the Curtain, Inverting the Pyramid, Angels with Dirty Faces, The Names Heard Long Ago, Two Brothers; editor of The Blizzard
Joined August 2010
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Last time England reached a European Under-21 final was in 2009 when they lost to Germany. Six of Germany’s squad went on to win the World Cup, seven of England's went on to play for Sunderland.
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Fair play to Florentino Pérez. He said modern attention spans were getting shorter, looked at the 123-year-old Football League, realised that wouldn't do, and devised a competition that was done and dusted 48 hours after it began.
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Who'd have thought Anthony Martial breaking down in the warm-up against Midtjylland in February 2016 would lead to this?
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So what did you do at the weekend?
Me? I flew 7000 miles to watch a game not being played, twice.
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Devastating news for Al-Nassr’s pressing game.
🚨 Cristiano Ronaldo has signed for Al-Nassr.
He's expected to be officially announced after Al-Nassr's game with Al-Khaleej. Al-Nassr have had the logistics in place for weeks. Ronaldo expected to live in Al Muhammadiyah.
Story alongside
@jamesbenge
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It happened in 1984; José was 21.
José Mourinho: ‘I was nine or 10 years old and my father [Félix] was sacked on Christmas Day. He was a manager [of Rio Ave], results had not been good, he lost a game on 22 or 23 December. The telephone rang and he was sacked in the middle of our lunch’
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Delighted and humbled to become an honorary doctor of the University of Sunderland today.
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Kevin: a tribute.
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What are players told to do in those profile pics on Sky? Wilf Zaha looks like a woman he’s trying to impress has just told him her elderly pet dog has passed on.
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I've rarely been accused of being overly romantic but the 2030 World Cup, manifestly, should come home and be staged in Uruguay (realistically, with Argentina and probably Paraguay as co-hosts).
The stadium is even called the Centenario.
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I'm old enough to remember when three-goals leads meant something.
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This is one of the great terrible refereeing performances. Two penalties awarded that were never pens (one after a VAR intervention), a red card that was never a red card and blowing the full-time whistle after 85 minutes.
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The announcement said it was due to the "late arrival" of fans. These problems have been building all afternoon - fans have been queuing for hours. This is already an attempt to blame fans for rank incompetence.
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As it stands, for the first time ever, only teams from England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France in the last 16 of the Champions League. Hurrah for the rich lads!
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Ten years ago today, in a bar in Johannesburg, I told Gérard Houllier that Michael Jackson was dead. A little later, on the way to the toilet, I told Christian Karembeu.
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A maiden century? To beat second in the league by ten wickets for our first league win of the season? On this, the day of my 46th birthday?
A good day, I’d say.
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Is there a more powerful force in the world than the history of the Tottenham?
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No real feelings about Brazil, but the sooner Globo TV gets out of this tournament the better. Thousands of them, noisy and boorish in what's supposed to be a working area.
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Since October 2014, Watford managers have used every letter of the alphabet: XISCO MUNoZ, VLADimiR ivic, niGEl Pearson, Quique sancHez Flores, Javi gracia, marco silva, WalTer mazzari, qsf, slavisa joKanovic, BillY mckinley.
I doubt any other club has achieved this so quickly.
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Another Fifa triumph as I get to my seat at Germany v Spain and it turns out it doesn't exist.
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A reminder that with technology as it exists, offsides cannot be accurate to within 30cm, yet Son ruled offside by millimetres. A reminder as well that VAR as it is currently used did not see fouls on Haller or Matip (and others) to be clear and obvious. A nonsense.
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So
@barneyronay
has just turned up for my birthday with a cake, which is lovely. Only problem is, he’s at a restaurant in Moscow that shares the same name as the one we’re all at in St Petersburg.
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An attempt to explain why Maradona meant so much to Argentina.
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Is there anything more pointless than being sent off for preventing Joelinton getting a run on goal?
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If Mexico were even moderately competent at counter-attacking this would be 4-0.
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People will say this season Barcelona won nothing for the first time since 2007-08, but actually their laughable investment of the Neymar windfall won Liverpool the league for the first time in 30 years.
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There it is, it's done. At 12:09, I wrote the final word of my next book (as yet untitled, but about Hungarian football 1916-56).
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If Manchester United are quick, they can get Steve Bruce and pay £8m for the privilege.
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That penalty was so good a Russian man just congratulated me on being English. It may be the first vague stirring of patriotic pride I've felt since the 2005 Ashes.
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The good news for Barca is that this was twice as good as their last Champions League knockout game.
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Turns out that ketchup was really holding Harry Kane back.
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I'm old enough to remember when three-goal leads meant something.
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A reminder that being Manchester United manager is tough: more managers have won the league with Sunderland than United.
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The greatest trick Pep ever pulled was convincing the world club DNA exists.
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What is a football club?
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Several years later, in a bar in Edinburgh, I met an Italian lawyer who recalled being in a bar in Johannesburg when Christian Karembeu, returning from the toilet, told him Michael Jackson was dead.
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When real football doesn’t exist, you have to go round
@MiguelDelaney
’s and make your own.
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The betrayal of football.
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If Timo Werner doesn't score 50 goals next season, there's no such thing as the law of averages.
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What's lovely about this has been the sheer joy so many of my friends and colleagues have already expressed at this development.
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They say the grass isn’t always greener, but in this instance…
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This might be the best day of football since the 1990 FA Cup semi-finals.
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The ongoing nonsense of PSG.
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Thankfully, being a Sunderland fan has given me ample preparation for plunging rapidly through the tiers.
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This is, it goes without saying, a terrible day for the sport, a triumph for those who manipulated the competition to make the rich even richer and let the rest of the world function as nothing more than a vast farm supplying raw material for their product machines.
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It amazes me only six episodes of this were ever made. I still make way more references to it than any other TV programme or film. Real genius.
#OnThisDay
1994: The Day Today appeared on our screens for the first time, starring Chris Morris, David Schneider, Patrick Marber, Rebecca Front, Doon Mackichan and Steve Coogan.
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The poignancy of late-period Messi.
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So touching that Bruce will celebrate his 1000th game as manager in charge of the club he supported as a boy, with his people. And they say football has lost its soul.
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Humbled to win FSF Writer of the Year. Huge thanks to all who voted for me.
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Look at the delight on everybody’s faces after my 3hr 3min vigil to save the game. 35* off 121 balls.
Photo credit:
@paulframe85
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Can anybody tell me if my working is wrong here? Footballers commonly reach speeds of 25kph - ie, 6.94m/s. Sky HDTV broadcasts at 50 frames per second, ie, one frame every 0.02s. In 0.02s, a player moving at 25kph travels 138.8mm. (1/2)
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There is a family on the train playing Monopoly. The father has got on top and is slowly, relentlessly, grinding his way to victory. Nobody seems to be having much fun, but I feel a major lesson in the reality of the free market is being imparted.
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I met Jack Charlton only once, on a train from Derby to Newcastle. He read a magazine for a while, signed a handful of autographs, then made a ball from the foils his sandwiches had been wrapped in & spent an hour flicking it into a goal he’d made from coffee cups.
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If Lyon beat Bayern, there are two possibilities: a Manchester City v Watford situation, or the most hilarious result in football history.
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A tribute to the great Ivica Osim, who died yesterday.
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Early officiating drama at the Emirates, where Andy Townsend is denied dinner for not having a food voucher. His pleas that his producer, who has the vouchers, is out doing an interview on the pitch fall on deaf ears.
Rules are rules, and consistency has trumped common sense.
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Haaland is averaging 1.75 goals per league game.
The 2002 Africa Cup of Nations averaged 1.5 goals per game.
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Why are PSG and Real Madrid wearing the wrong kit? Literally have swapped colours. Nothing bespeaks the contempt of the big brands for all that is sacred so obviously as this.
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One last time… all the hits.
This is a Manchester United squad that has been expensively assembled, but it lacks coherence and whoever is appointed will have to face that first of all – and that means sales as well as signings. But the biggest problem is Ronaldo.
By
@jonawils
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Rich clubs making footballer shitter. Tremendous.
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Look, I don't want to overcomplicate this, but given the speed of sound is 343m/s, that means it travels just under 7m between frames. Did VAR official Simon Hooper take into account the distance of the microphone from Lee Mason's whistle?
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Classic Mike Dean. The run to the spot before the point, the timing of the red, the art, the finesse, the showmanship.
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Clearly the World Cup will be a better product if only half the good teams are there at any one time. Why stop there? Maybe a World Cup every week, but you can only play in one every four years. That's 208 winners in every cycle, disappointing only three of Fifa's 211 members.
FIFA to explore proposal that teams can't play in consecutive World Cups if the event is held every 2 years
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Pickford's save from Uribe just before the equaliser is stupidly good. Hope it doesn't get forgotten amid everything else (and the fact there was no replay of it at all on Russian TV).
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Good to see Goran Pandev scoring tonight. The only player remaining Philip II of Macedon saw play.
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Attack on Grealish another symptom of a society rotting from the head.
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Vladimir Granat has been on since half-time. He's attempted four passes and completed none of them. One of the great World Cup performances.
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Intrigued by the claim no ticketless fans have got inside Wembley and wondering why 30-40 lads have just rushed in one tight huddle past stewards into the seats below the press area, looking anxiously about them as they did so.
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The Europa League in Seville was a shambles as well with the stadium running out of water in 30+ degrees. It's as though the pandemic had led Uefa to forget how to run these events.
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This will (probably) be the 38th Premier League game this season in which one team has more than 70% possession. Between 2003-4 and 2005-06 there were 3.
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The paradox of Messi: he makes Argentina a better side defensively because nobody dares attack them.
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Messi, still at least one more game to admire him.
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Miles offside.
How close was that?
Just one one-hundredth of a second separated Kenya's Conselsius Kipruto from Ethiopia's Lamecha Girma in the 3,000m steeplechase final at the World Athletics Championships in Doha. Kipruto won after a dramatic sprint finish.
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Football: grim now, outlook grimmer.
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How was your weekend? Me? Oh, nothing much. I watched Sunderland lose 5-4 to Coventry and then stood with Robbie Fowler and Jim Beglin watching Tiger Woods lose me a three-year-old £500 bet on Kevin Kilbane's iPad.
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A year ago today, when it seemed quite normal to go to Wittenberg and dress as the 16th-century Protestant reformer Philip Melanchthon.
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Barcelona, the decadence of superclub culture, and a disgrace four years in the making.
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I can’t believe Sunderland are about to get promoted by mistake.
They are beautiful children. Promotion will destroy them.
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A tactical review of 2017.
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