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| BenĂtez holds Gerrard form crisis talks • 'Steven knows he has to improve' says Liverpool manager• Alberto Aquilani set for first league start against WolvesRafael BenĂtez has revealed he has held talks with Steven Gerrard over the midfielder's struggle for form as he looks to the Liverpool captain and Fernando Torres to end the club's alarming slump.Liverpool host Wolves on Boxing Day having won only four times in 17 matches, with two rivals for a Champions League place, Aston Villa and Tottenham Hotspur, to follow. A miserable campaign reached what BenĂtez hopes will prove its nadir at Portsmouth last Saturday, with Gerrard on the margins as the Premier League's bottom club secured a comfortable 2-0 win.The 29-year-old has made nine appearances since recovering from the adductor problem that kept him out for a month but his influence has been limited in a season disrupted by injury, the departure of Xabi Alonso and the prolonged absence of the Spaniard's intended replacement, Alberto Aquilani. And BenĂtez admits he needs a confident, in-form Gerrard to rescue Liverpool once again."Steven knows that he has to improve but that for me is very positive," the Liverpool manager said. "He knows he is a very important player for us and we were analysing his statistics and he is doing much better. In the last game he wasn't at his level but that can happen in one game.He knows he is improving physically and the main thing now is confidence."I was talking with him this week about how to improve. He wants to give more. I am 100% that he wants to give more. He is the captain and he is very important for the team and the club. He is someone who is pushing now and wants to improve."BenĂtez insists the onus is on every Liverpool player to lift the club and fulfil his guarantee of a top-four finish, although the manager concedes there is an added burden on Gerrard and Torres."Everyone talks about Gerrard, Torres, Gerrard, Torres. They are very important for us and in any team it would be the same," he said. "They have to be good and play well and that means the rest of the team would be better. But if everyone can improve a little bit it will be good for the team."With Javier Mascherano commencing a four-match suspension on Boxing Day, there is an opportunity for Aquilani, who missed the defeat at Fratton Park with a calf problem, to finally make his first league start four months after his ÂŁ18m arrival from Roma. And BenĂtez admits the Italian's recovery period contradicted medical advice Liverpool received before signing the midfielder."We spoke to three different doctors and the worst-case scenario was that he would be out for two months," he said. "It has been more because he is a person and each person reacts in a different way to injury. He wants to play and we have to manage different players in a different way. A lot of people are talking about him. We know he is a big signing for us and we want to protect him because he hadn't the match fitness he needed. But with Mascherano not available he will have more opportunities."Steven GerrardRafael BenĂtezLiverpoolPremier LeagueAndy Hunterguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Cesc Fabregas: Arsenal my future, not Real Madrid or Barcelona Spain midfielder linked with moves to Real and Barcelona, but insists he is focused on helping London club win trophies. telegraph.co.uk |
Sport in 2020: 10 predictions of what we'll be playing and watching China will be the world's best rugby team, people will choose TV over the stadium and Cristiano Ronaldo will have a team named after him – OSM speculates on what the future holds1. All sport will revolve around the TV viewerThe future came into full view on 1 November 2009, when 20 Formula One cars zoomed around the brand new Yas Marina circuit in the inaugural Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, an event that began in the desert sunlight and ended after the sun had set over the Persian Gulf, an arrangement devised to match peak viewing times in Europe. Those of us watching the race on television were undeniably witnessing a remarkable spectacle, but there was also the gnawing feeling that it was barely distinguishable from a videogame.Bernie Ecclestone's grand prix circus has been in the vanguard of sporting innovation for more than 20 years. It was his early recognition of the true value of broadcasting rights that inspired other sports, led by Premier League football, to achieve a game-changing increase in their revenues, while his Paddock Club established a template for the corporate hospitality phenomenon that has radically altered the atmosphere of major sporting events. His readiness to embrace new markets in faraway lands also encouraged the Premier League to explore the idea of exporting a round of matches to foreign countries.Will football, rugby, tennis and others now follow the example of Ecclestone's willingness to marginalise the spectator, whose passage through the turnstiles was once the major source of revenue in sport? Some analysts certainly think so, forecasting extinction for the paying customer at the top level. According to Roy Jones, professor of sports technology at Loughborough University, "We could have scenarios in the future where no one goes to watch sport live, preferring instead to watch it on television." With 3D promising to enhance the immediacy of the pictures – this year the World Cup will be filmed in 3D, and Sky will launch the first 3D channel – coupled with the possibility of controls that allow the viewer to zoom in and out, or to change his or her viewpoint – watching from home will offer the fan an experience they can't get in the stadium.A future full of empty stadiums seems unlikely, given that a Wimbledon without a packed Centre Court would hardly have the same attraction even to a viewer at home. Ditto the FA Cup final, the Lord's Test, the Epsom Derby, or the final round of the Open Championship. Just as the decline of the record industry has been accompanied by a rise in attendance at live music events, so sport can look forward to a future in which spectators remain a vital part of the scenery.Whether live or televised, however, the experience will undergo big changes in the coming decades. The arenas themselves are likely to become more flexible, interactive environments, following a trail blazed by Munich's main football stadium, the Allianz Arena, which changes its exterior colour from the red of FC Bayern to the blue of 1860 Munich according to which of its two tenant clubs is playing at home (and to white when the German national team are in residence). Spectators who turn up at the remodelled Lord's or the Emirates are likely to be offered an experience enhanced by personal TV monitors with replay facilities and access to the sort of data provided to coaches by companies such as ProZone and Opta Index.Motor racing fans in the grandstands will benefit from the increasing use of handheld devices giving them access to real-time data and a choice of camera shots. And we have hardly seen the beginning of the use of technology to customise stadium advertising and sponsors' messages aimed at different countries or market sector.The logic is inevitable: the greater the extent to which videogames take their inspiration from sport, the faster the rate at which sport will need to advance in order to keep pace with the digital world in all its ever-multiplying dimensions. For the affluent fan, the benefits are obvious. And the response of those who are either priced out, or simply yearn for the kind of ambience already vanishing from the superstadiums, will ensure plenty of support for all levels of sport. Richard Williams2. China will take gold at rugbyChina have already proved their mastery of unlikely Olympic sports using the militaristic pursuit of perfection. From the moment that rugby sevens was announced for inclusion in the 2016 Games, scouts will have been fine-combing the People's Republic, searching out bulky yet fleet-footed specimens who can turn on a sixpence (or a yuan). Competitive experience will be crucial, so we anticipate a mediocre showing on their debut, followed by a period of brutal improvement that leads to the Olympic title in 2020. By which point, a Chinese golfer will probably also have won a major.3. Football's old guard will resist technologyFootball has proved, to date, as resistant to technology as an Amish farm. This will not change. Not in March, when Fifa gathers to consider again the introduction of goal-line technology, nor when the suits assemble in South Africa this summer to watch a World Cup tarnished before it has even begun by France's farcical qualification, secured at the Republic of Ireland's expense in November after an illegal goal that might easily have been reversed with the aid of video replay. By 2020, when other sports are cheerfully umpired by omniscient robots and mistakes are a thing of the past, football will still be policed by a black-clad man approaching middle age, chugging up and down the pitch and trying desperately to keep an eye on 22 players and a pinging ball at the same time.Bossed by traditionalists including 73-year-old Sepp Blatter of Fifa and Michel Platini of Uefa, both of whom will be replaced by identical cheese-course nostalgists come the end of their terms, football will remain Luddite, a last stronghold of science-denial, stubbornly resisting sensible innovation. Why? Blatter, ruling in sepia, says he wants the sport to retain its "human face". A sweet thought - until that human face fails to see, say, an obvious handball.For his part, Platini - the supposed moderniser of the pair - has reacted to calls for officiating improvement by trialling the introduction of a fourth and a fifth referee, each hovering beside a goalpost to assist in crucial decisions. The scheme was tested in Uefa's Europa League, and it took all of one month to throw up a familiar incident of human error, when an extra official got into a muddle during Fulham's game against Roma in October and ordered the incorrect sending off of Brede Hangeland, mere feet away from him (the red card should have gone to Hangeland's team-mate Stephen Kelly). Whatever the number of men with flags and whistles, it seems that when asked to police an ever-quickening game on instinct, this unhappy troupe falter.The technology is ready. Dr Paul Hawkins, whose Hawk-Eye ball-tracking hardware has been introduced to the improvement of grand slam tennis and Test cricket, says goalmouth sensors for football are good to go, the system's six cameras informing the referee that a goal has been scored within half a second of the ball crossing the line. There were trials proving 100% accuracy at Reading's training ground in 2008 - trials which Blatter went on to dismiss with fact-mangling belligerency at a Fifa conference in September. "We need to find something better - that's obvious," he said, after getting most of the principal details of the test wrong. And in the meantime? "We wait."So football will wait. Indefinitely. As more and more games are turned by incorrect decisions, unwarranted red cards, questionable penalties, and phantom goals, the sport will remain a great spectacle. But its human face will bear an increasingly weary grimace. Tom Lamont4. Test cricket will only be played in four nationsThe long-awaited opening of the Twenty20 dome on 1 January 2020 took place in south London amid much pomp and celebration. Prime Minister Miliband delivered the ceremonial first ball to former England captain Stuart Broad, the latest addition to Sky's panel of cricketing galacticos.England's director of cricket, Ashley Giles, looked on with a beaming smile. So too did the chairman of the board, Giles Clarke, recently re-elected for a seventh term. The chairman of selectors, Angus Fraser, was less obviously overjoyed. Maybe he was still pondering his latest setback, the fact that another of his key players had declined the offer of a central contract in favour of a lucrative Twenty20 deal on the subcontinent.The dome with its massive sliding roof will mean that "rain stopped play" can become a thing of the past. So too will the scurrying to interpret those Duckworth Lewis sheets. Soon it will beggar belief that international Twenty20 cricket was ever played outdoors in England.Meanwhile several of the 12 remaining first-class counties have started to dismantle their floodlights in a belated recognition of the bleeding obvious: that floodlit cricket has always been a waste of time and money in a climate such as England's – unless it takes place indoors. Either it is not dark enough or it is not hot enough.The 12, which managed to survive the prolonged recession and the 100% drop in revenue that cricket receives from television, still have to tighten their belts and to diversify. In 2020 there will be six games of cricket, 26 pop concerts and 66 car boot sales at Old Trafford and the rest of the time the hallowed old ground will be used as a car park for the football club (where Alex Ferguson, speaking exclusively to the revived OSM, has scotched any rumours of his retirement).It is not anticipated that Test cricket will be played at the dome. The Alliance of Test Playing Countries – England, Australia, South Africa and India – which was formed after the recent abandonment of the World Test Championship, will continue to play with a red ball outside.Australia's coach, SK Warne, said that he pined for the old values of the great game to be protected (Warne was speaking at the end of a press conference in which he explained his reasoning for the draconian 10-match ban that had been imposed on the young Aussie superstar Brett Ocker for smoking in the dressing room and querying the coach's authority).However, the One-Day Consortium of Nations, which now includes Ireland, Scotland, Holland, Trinidad, Jamaica, Barbados and Afghanistan, is considering leasing the dome for the forthcoming Twenty20 World Cup, which has been the subject of much speculation.The MCC World Cricket Committee, which has now been bolstered by the addition of Mr Alastair Cook, Sir Kevin Pietersen and the Right Rev Mervyn Hughes, is about to produce a paper discussing how the middle overs in Twenty20 cricket can be enlivened.This meeting was deemed to be so important that Michael Vaughan interrupted his final preparations for the exhibition of his latest work at Tate Modern in order to attend. Vic Marks5. Boxing will fight backAfter a decade of decay, and an aggressive challenge from the mixed martial arts world, boxing is about to enjoy a major resurgence. The new World Series - which starts this year - will come to dominate the amateur game. Meanwhile, the world governing bodies – and all those anachronistic acronyms – will be marginalised by the Prizefighter and Super Series formats, which will be the norm in the pros, with the annual Britain v US matches a major highlight.6. Twitter replaces the press conferenceThere's a growing appetite among athletes for direct communication with their public through social media . By 2020, the arranged interview and the sit-down press conference will have been phased out completely, and comment from sportspeople (the post-goal analysis in football, the kind words for a beaten opponent in tennis) will be tweeted in 140 characters. The calibre of comment, however, may not improve.7. Snooker will die; F1 and skiing on life supportOne of the best things about sport is the constant sense of renewal. Every point, every game, every four-yearly cycle of self-delusion brings fresh hope. But not for snooker. After 80 years of proud professionalism, the game is unlikely to exist in its current form for much longer. By 2020, it could be an amateur sport again.Such is the view of Ronnie O'Sullivan, who ought to know. He should be part of the solution to snooker's sliding popularity, the only remaining colourful character in a sport that has never seemed greyer. Instead, he sounds like a man ready to jump ship. "It just feels boring. The sport is dying," O'Sullivan told reporters last year. Admittedly his own solution – bring in Simon Cowell – suggests a career in management consultancy might be a stretch too far. But he is right: snooker, a sport-pages staple throughout the 1980s, when 18.5m people watched Steve Davis lose to Dennis Taylor in the 1985 World Championship final, seems to be lurching into terminal crisis.This is a sport under attack from above and below. Money is tight. The golden era of lifestyle tie-in sponsorship – the fags, the booze – has long since passed. But there is also a sense of half-baked administration at play: the recent UK Championship final finished at midnight, too late to be covered in daily newspapers and out of reach of a family audience. The everyday circuit takes in half-empty exhibition halls in Bahrain and its results rarely trouble the mainstream media. At the same time, whatever grass roots snooker has are being aggressively theme-pubbed over as the late-night halls and snooker clubs close down.Suddenly, snooker looks like a fading anachronism. A game of genuine skill and drama has been let down by laboured TV presentation. It didn't have to be like this – compare darts, which has been gingered up by jazzy formats like Thursday night Premier League. Snooker has tried nothing so radical, and achieved nothing more than a grating air of tentative razzmatazz. After its Snooker Loopy peak years, the sport is sleepwalking towards oblivion.Of course, in a decade when there will be so many sports vying for our attention, other games look vulnerable too. Skiing and Formula One both face a different challenge in the shadow of a shifting ecological future. But none has a future as precarious as snooker. It already has a resigned look, slumped glassily in its chair, and looking like its thoughts have turned to the white-gloved handshake and the scattered sound of exit applause. Barney Ronay8. NFL takes up London residencyOn one side of the pond, a stuttering American football team like the Jacksonville Jaguars can't fi ll its stadium; on the other, thousands of British fans gag to watch live games (as evidenced by the recent sell-outs at Wembley Stadium ). By 2020, one of the league's 32 teams will have relocated to play its home games in London: problem solved.9. Sportsmen and women will run their own teamsWith good reason do today's top football managers emphasise "the group" and the collective will. Mourinho, Wenger and the rest know they must resist the shift of power from the club to the individual. The modern sporting superstar is a floating corporation. Over the next 10 years he might go freelance too.The assumption was that the club or country made the player. Increasingly, the star makes the country or club. This was clear when Real Madrid paid funny money for Kaká and Cristiano Ronaldo. A stalled team needed match-winners, certainly. But even the most illustrious organisations now depend on the parallel industry that manufactures icons and turns fans into consumers.Sportsmen and women are hip to the new beat. Last year Andrew Flintoff knocked up a template for the freelance cricketer, declining an "incremental" England central contract to be a lone wolf in Twenty20. Big Fred had sniffed windfalls in India, Australia and South Africa. The England badge that has been the mark of authenticity for all county-reared players can be unstitched and pushed to the back of a drawer.Imagine Kevin Pietersen's dilemma. The big-hitters could become multimillionaires without having to endure another Test series against New Zealand. But without the England Test match stamp, would Pietersen's box-office rating collapse? Agents and lawyers are working on these questions as globalisation brings jeux sans frontières. NBA games at the O2, sold-out NFL clashes at Wembley and Brazil v England in Doha are the harbingers of a new decade in which talent is realigning itself across frontiers.Tomorrow's 20-year-old tycoon will probably not measure his 10 years at the top against tradition's ancient stick. In 2009, Rory McIlroy, who shares an agent with Flintoff (Andrew "Chubby" Chandler), took a mallet to one of golf's institutions. "The Ryder Cup is a great spectacle but an exhibition at the end of the day and it should be there to be enjoyed," McIlroy announced. "In the big scheme of things, it's not that important to me."The golf punk was shouted down. Some of Europe's greatest golfers are defined by their Ryder Cup records: especially McIlroy's captain, Colin Montgomerie. In a more fluid, freelance future, the starlet will chase top dollar outside the old patriotic constraints.Nationality is already highly elastic. Consider Riki Flutey, the England centre. Flutey was in the All Black U-19 World Cup-winning side and even played for New Zealand Maoris, one tier below the senior team. Then he used the residency rules to qualify for England before representing the British and Irish Lions and signing for a French club, Brive. They will teach this case at sports business school.Imagine this, in football: the world's top 20 players form their own club, build a stadium (easy) and bring so much financial and celebrity clout that Uefa can't force them to start in the Ryman League. Remember the dread of Ronaldo (not Portugal, but Ronaldo) failing to make it to this summer's World Cup? Talent is the new tyranny. Paul Hayward10. Swimming goes slowIn last month's "duel in the pool" Michael Phelps wore an old-style swimsuit, the kind everyone will return to now Fina's ban on the hi-tech bodystocking has come into force. Phelps was beaten in two individual races, confirming what everyone already knew: last year's records, set in the super-suits, aren't going to be broken in the next 10 years.CricketBoxingSwimmingOSMRichard WilliamsTom LamontVic MarksBarney RonayPaul Haywardguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
BenĂtez's prospects bleak at Liverpool The FA Cup had become a key assignment for Liverpool, so where does their exit from the competition leave their manager?Just as well the Champions League place is "guaranteed". That pledge had not, of course, reassured everyone and Rafael BenĂtez's word looks even more suspect now. The FA Cup, after all, had turned into a key assignment when there was so little left to occupy Liverpool, yet that did not prevent them from being eliminated by Reading at Anfield.BenĂtez has been popular among fans who will always treasure that unprecedented European Cup final comeback in 2005, but he would have been among the targets when the boos cascaded from the stands at the end of extra-time last night. The disgust must have reflected the fact that Reading had been in contention throughout.Liverpool, indeed, had been lucky to score at all, since their goal from Steven Gerrard took a severe deflection. The most glaring aspect of the match was the fact that Reading had absolutely no apprehension. If they noticed the 'This Is Anfield' sign in the tunnel the team would surely have done no more than shrug.• Andy Hunter's report: Liverpool 1-2 Reading (aet)• Read Barry Glendenning's minute-by-minute account• Anfield humbling as new low piles pressure on BenĂtez• Marina Hyde: It's time to blow Tom Hicks Jr's trumpet• Reds won't sell Gerrard or Torres as RodrĂguez signsAfter all, last night saw Liverpool beaten at home for a fifth time in all competitions this season. This is a fortress where the drawbridge is permanently down and the guards have taken the day off. As if failure were not bad enough, Liverpool lived up to the cliches.It was clear to everyone that they might be in trouble as soon as Gerrard and Fernando Torres had to be replaced because of injury. If they seem to suffer from strains it is no wonder when they have to haul the club through so many trials. The main issue is where the blame for that lies.Finances are relatively straitened, but that will simply make people even more exasperated that, for instance, Alberto Aquilani cost ÂŁ20m, was signed while injured and appeared last night like a midfielder who will probably inform us in due course that he sees next season as the true start to his Liverpool career.BenĂtez does, of course, have the raw material to construct a case for himself. There have been wonderful nights in his time at the club and no one can readily sneer at a runners-up position in the Premier League last season, when Chelsea and Arsenal were in their wake.The predicament for Liverpool is that the feat enhances BenĂtez's standing to such a degree that a lucrative five-year contract was agreed with him last summer. Dismissing him would be costly indeed and that would further restrict the sums available to his successor. This week the owners have hinted at re-entering the transfer market more purposefully in the summer, but if such means truly are at their disposal there must be misgivings about pressing them into BenĂtez's hands.Until the day a new, revenue-boosting stadium is built, he must still, after all, be bidding at a cheaper end of the market than Europe's loftier clubs.The typical BenĂtez acquisition is worthy enough, but ill-equipped to transform a match. Torres, of course, is a magnificent exception, but Liverpool would have trouble landing another such footballer in that price range. Indeed, the Spaniard could hardly be faulted if he began to doubt the wisdom of remaining at Anfield.His sale would bring in a great deal of cash, but Torres' departure would also diminish further the credibility of Liverpool. BenĂtez's merits are known and the fans have often shown the bond they have with him, but he may simply have run out of ways to sustain Liverpool's status.He is a most methodical manager, but Liverpool, of late, have needed more dynamism. The side never came close to discouraging Reading, a team who came to Anfield with a caretaker manager and are having a drab time in the Championship.There may be even more troubles ahead for Liverpool. Gerrard has found it tough to regain his former vivacity and this has not been a happy campaign, either, for a familiar mainstay such as Jamie Carragher. It is not impossible that there will be further deterioration rather than a fightback from Liverpool.Tom Hicks and George Gillett will surely be conscious that Liverpool's habitual Champions League qualification cannot be taken for granted now, in particular when Manchester City are going to such expense to reinvent themselves. The proprietors would not be human if they did not have reservations about BenĂtez's capacity to reinvent himself to meet that challenge.It would, of course, be terrifyingly difficult to name a successor who could galvanise the club and do so on modest means. On the other hand, no manager survives for long simply because it is awkward to appoint a replacement. BenĂtez will have to pull off an astonishing upsurge if he is to survive beyond the next few weeks and months at Anfield.Rafael BenĂtezLiverpoolFA CupKevin McCarraguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |
Canada finishes undefeated in group stage: U-20 Adriana Leon, Vanessa Legault-Cordisco and Bryanna McCarthy scored for Canada in a 3-1 win over Guatemala in its final group-stage match Sunday at the 2010 CONCACAF women's under-20 soccer championship in Guatemala City. cbc.ca |