Your Guardian Sport weekend: Liverpool on verge, FA Cup semis, Women's Six Nations finale and London Marathon
Join Gregg Bakowski and Barry Glendenning for the latest news and buildup to Saturday's football action in our new weekend news blog. Send your thoughts to matchday.live@theguardian.com.
Tanya Aldred provides updates from day two of the latest round of County Championship games, with defending champions Surrey hosting Somerset.
Tony Paley covers the final day of the jumps season with trainers Willie Mullins and Dan Skelton battling it out for the title at Sandown, plus updates from the day's Flat action.
David Tindall will have all the latest as Chelsea chase a top-five finish. Join him for the buildup from 11.30am, followed by Yara El-Shaboury's report from Stamford Bridge.
Barry Glendenning leads coverage of Saturday afternoon's action. Eddie Howe returns to the Newcastle dugout as they bid to confirm Ipswich's relegation, and in the EFL, promotion and relegation battles are going to the wire.
After four wins apiece, Europe's two dominant sides face off at Twickenham for the title and grand slam, before England host the World Cup later this year. Join Luke McLaughlin for live buildup and match updates.
The first spot in the FA Cup final will be decided at Wembley as Oliver Glasner and Unai Emery's sides meet in a clash that's too close to call. Scott Murray has all the news, up to and including penalties if required.
With Barcelona and Inter set to meet again in the Champions League semi-finals, Jonathan Wilson takes a look back at 2010, when José Mourinho foiled Pep Guardiola's side in one of the great European Cup contests.
For the first time since 2014, Barça and Real Madrid meet in the Spanish Cup final. Join Luke McLaughlin for live updates from the showpiece game in Sevilla.
This long-awaited, generational grudge match finally takes place at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. Join Bryan Armen Graham for undercard updates from 8pm including Anthony Yarde and Lydon Arthur's third meeting, before the main event.
Dominic Booth will take a look at the best of Saturday's action before a look ahead to Sunday's big matches in the FA Cup, Premier League and Women's Champions League. Email matchday.live@theguardian.com with your views.
Every Sunday, our email newsletter will feature the Guardian's best sports writing of the week. Sign up to get your copy here.
It's one of the biggest days in Britain's sporting calendar, as tens of thousands of runners descend on the capital. Join Daniel Harris for updates, and get in touch if you're taking part.
Join Tanya Aldred for our continued coverage of the latest county cricket games, including Nottinghamshire v Sussex at Trent Bridge.
Will United find any form at the end of a dismal top-flight campaign, or suffer more embarrassment against tricky hosts? Join Tim de Lisle to find out.
Defending champions Barça lead 4-1 after the first leg; Xaymaca Awoyungbo will be helming our updates to see if Sonia Bompastor's side can pull off a remarkable comeback at Stamford Bridge.
Pep Guardiola's side are aiming to rescue their season with a major trophy, but face this season's Premier League surprise package at Wembley. Forest are chasing their first FA Cup final appearance since 1991; join Taha Hashim to see if they can make it.
Is this the day? Arsenal's midweek draw with Crystal Palace means that a point at home to Tottenham will be enough to seal a 20th league title for Liverpool, and a first Premier League crown for Arne Slot in his first year at Anfield. Join Simon Burnton for the latest match updates, with a liveblog covering all the celebrations if they get over the line.
Will the Gunners reach the Women's Champions League final for the first time since 2007? They head to France down but not out after a 2-1 home defeat in the first leg. Join Emillia Hawkins for buildup and live match updates.
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Times
an hour ago
- Times
Why Tomas Soucek is unique player in Premier League
During his first months at West Ham United, after the medical and the signing and the debut had passed in a blur and he was beginning to settle into his new surroundings, Tomas Soucek became aware that he was missing something when his team-mates talked about the club's Rush Green training ground. His English wasn't great at that point, but it didn't have to be to detect the fizz and jest of playful banter. Eventually he got the message: Rush Green was commonly considered, by Premier League standards, pretty basic. When he found out that they were dissing the training ground, Soucek was genuinely and sincerely amazed. It had never occurred to him that it was anything other than top-notch. At his previous club, Slavia Prague, they used one training pitch all year round, and in the winter it was bumpy and hard to pass on. Here, they had five pitches, beautifully mown and perfectly flat, each one a gorgeous, lucent green. He turned up to training each morning and felt like a holidaymaker arriving at a resort with five swimming pools. 'Everyone told me it was basically a second-division training ground,' he told the Czech website iRozhlas, 'and I was like, 'What more could you want?' ' Obviously, this story sums up some of the qualities that have made Soucek, in his 5½ years in England, a cult hero to West Ham fans. His lack of hauteur. His uncomplicated way of going about things. But in hindsight I wonder if it's even more telling than that, if it hints at something essential about Soucek the footballer. To him, you see, the absence of luxurious trappings beside the training space was an irrelevance. To him, the space was the luxury. At the start of his seventh season Soucek is facing one of the lowest moments in his West Ham career. Before Chelsea's visit on Friday night, they have taken ten points from their past 12 matches, and he is fighting to convince an under-pressure head coach in Graham Potter that he is worth a place in an underperforming team. In the loss to Sunderland on Saturday he came on after 71 minutes and the game slipped from 1-0 to 3-0. This may be the beginning of the end or just another bump in the road. Regardless, he has earned a moment of appreciation. About 550 players will take to the field in the Premier League this season, but not one of them uses this rectangular canvas quite like Soucek does. He may well be unique in English football. Soucek, you've probably noticed, was not blessed with pace. We can quantify this: with a top speed of 30.2km/h (18.8mph), he was the fifth-slowest player in the entire top flight last season, behind Bernardo Silva, Craig Dawson, Mikel Merino and Casemiro. However, he uses his limited gifts of locomotion in an extraordinary way. According to a fascinating article by Ali Tweedale for the Opta Analyst website, last season Soucek spent a higher percentage of his game time jogging than any other player in the league, and a lower percentage of his game time walking than anyone else (he spent just 54.2 per cent of his time walking, compared with 77.6 per cent for Matheus Cunha, the top outfielder by this metric). As a result, only Dejan Kulusevski covered more ground per 90 minutes than his 12.2km. In other words, in a game increasingly tilted towards explosive, high-intensity bursts, Soucek is a total outlier, cruising around the pitch with the slow, incessant, purposeful motion of a robot lawnmower. And as he moves, he affects the game in an assortment of ways that no one else comes close to emulating. Consider: since his Premier League debut on February 1, 2020, only 24 players have scored more than his 36 non-penalty goals, and only three of them — James Maddison, Bruno Fernandes and Kevin De Bruyne — are midfielders. He has scored only two fewer than De Bruyne, even though, in that period, Manchester City have averaged 65.2 per cent possession, whereas Soucek has been working with 43.8 per cent. He is an exceptionally efficient shooter: his 36 goals have come from 262 shots. De Bruyne has taken 356 for his marginally superior haul, and Fernandes, for four more goals, has attempted 539. Only four players have scored more non-penalty goals than Soucek from fewer shots: Yoane Wissa, Alexander Isak, Jamie Vardy, and his new team-mate Callum Wilson. What makes Soucek even more unusual is that he doesn't really do any of the things that prolific midfield goalscorers typically do. For example, in those 5½ years, Maddison, Fernandes and De Bruyne have played a combined 303 through-balls; Soucek has played two. Last season Scott McTominay had a sort of 'deluxe Soucek' season at Napoli, crashing the box and banging in goals and using his big frame to win duels and aerials. But he also made 56 progressive carries (moving the ball either into the box or at least ten yards towards the goalline) and attempted 88 take-ons. Soucek, in a comparable number of minutes, mustered nine progressive carries and 12 take-ons. On the other hand, if we look at the 26 Premier League players who, since Soucek's debut, have scored more or as many non-penalty goals as him, they've averaged in that time 10.3 blocks and 67.5 clearances. Fernandes has the most, with 17 blocks and 197 clearances. Soucek has made 98 blocks and 492 clearances, a number of defensive actions which, in that company, even considering that he has spent more time out of possession than most, looks absolutely prodigious. Soucek has said that his way of playing is 'a lot about intuition' and that he is guided by the impulse to 'simply be useful at the back and going forward'. You may not be surprised to learn that he was not a shining academy prospect: in fact, his formative loan spell at Viktoria Zizkov only happened when the manager, Jindrich Trpisovksy, who was initially reluctant, was prevailed upon to take him because the loan was free. (When he went back to Slavia, the coach, Dusan Uhrin Jr, was honest enough to admit he too was unconvinced. 'It didn't look very good when he was running,' he told BBC Sport.) Because he wasn't a prized starlet, Soucek continued to play with his high-school friends in the Prague grassroots league, the Hanspaulka, up until his late teens, and it's this which is the most visible and interesting influence on how he plays: that connection to the untutored, amateur football of weeknights on astro and one-man-and-his-dog Sundays. Soucek plays football, essentially, like any of us might, if we were gifted with elite-level mentality and engine and heart: putting himself about the pitch, making himself useful, obeying the instinctual satnav of his own brain. As he put it in an article for Bez Frazi, in what sounds like a fallacy but is actually, I think, a profound and meaningful statement: 'I learnt football by playing football.' Of course, he's not a flawless player. Soucek has some big weaknesses that affect West Ham in real ways. All the things those sceptical coaches saw in his youth are still kind of true: he is slow. His passing is ordinary. For a player in his position, of his size, he doesn't win the ball a lot. Potter, who is trying to get back to the best work that he did in his latter seasons at Brighton & Hove Albion, when he had much more technical midfielders like Alexis Mac Allister and Moisés Caicedo, hasn't seemed enamoured of him, and West Ham have lately been linked to midfielders including Southampton's Mateus Fernandes and Barcelona's Marc Casadó. Yet Soucek, for all his limitations, has that thing you can't teach: stickability, resilience, the drive to get the absolute most out of himself game after game, year after year. Of all the players signed in that January window, only Soucek, Fernandes and Jarrod Bowen are still at the same Premier League team 5½ years on. West Ham have signed six midfielders since then — Nikola Vlasic, Flynn Downes, Lucas Paquetá, Edson Álvarez, James Ward-Prowse and Guido Rodríguez — and, besides Paquetá, Soucek has outlasted or outperformed them all. They have tried to evolve beyond him before, and every time he has hung on to his place with the obstinacy of a limpet. Maybe this is the moment when Soucek's sheer determination finally stops being enough. Or maybe we haven't seen the last of the man who can't be moved, and who never stops moving.
Metro
an hour ago
- Metro
Neville highlights 'big question' that could cost Arsenal the Premier League
Gary Neville says there is so much to 'admire' about Mikel Arteta's Arsenal, but there remains a 'big question' over their capacity to play expansively and score the goals needed to win the title. The Gunners have finished runners-up in each of the previous three seasons in the Premier League, with Liverpool topping the tree to end Manchester City's sustained period of dominance last time out. And while Arsenal have undoubtedly evolved into a defensive force under Arteta, the lack of a major trophy since their FA Cup triumph in 2020 means the Spaniard finds himself under mounting pressure to deliver the goods. With that in mind, Arsenal's hierarchy have given Arteta significant financial backing across a busy summer, in which Martin Zubimendi, Viktor Gyokeres, Cristhian Mosquera, Christian Norgaard, Kepa Arrizabalaga and Noni Madueke have all arrived through the doors. Eberechi Eze looks certain to become the seventh signing of the transfer window after Arsenal hijacked Tottenham's deal at the 11th hour. The Crystal Palace midfielder is set to sign for a fee of £60million plus add-ons over the coming days. Metro's weekly football newsletter: In The Mixer. Exclusive analysis, FPL tips and transfer talk sent straight to your inbox every Friday – sign up, it's an open goal. The weight of expectation on Gyokeres, in particular, though, has been a hot topic of conversation at the start of the campaign, with the Swede tasked with scoring the goals required to lead the club to silverware once again. It proved a difficult first outing for Gyokeres away to Manchester United last weekend and the striker will be eager to silence his doubters when Arsenal return to action against Leeds in two days time. Asked about the Gunners' title chances on the Unfiltered Soccer podcast, Neville said: 'There's a lot to admire about Arsenal. 'Remember that period where we were all criticising them a good few years back, when they were quite flimsy and they'd concede goals and they'd give leads away? 'Now, they're probably the only team I can think of in the league – and one of the few and rare teams in world football – that really you can trust when they go a goal up. 'It's an old principle of teams maybe 15, 20 years ago that they could defend leads and they could be really focussed and concentrated on the defensive side of the game.' To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video For a third year on the spin, Neville has backed Arsenal to finally end their long wait to lift the Premier League trophy. But while Neville has confidence in Arsenal's defensive solidity and set-piece nous, he believes there remain 'question marks' over the side's firepower up front. 'They're like a bit of a throwback to an old Italian team at times with the long throws, set-pieces, compact, don't give a lot of space away,' the legendary ex-Manchester United and England right-back continued. 'They've also got the dark arts of the game where the manager is trying to waste time and the players are going down feigning injury. They've got a bit of that going on so they're wise. 'Carra [Jamie Carragher] actually said something interesting, that they remind him of that Rafa Benitez Liverpool team that had those qualities, but they didn't have the star quality and flair up front to score the goals and win the league over a 38-game season. 'It started to play on my mind a little bit because I've gone for Arsenal again this year [to win the title]. 'I've gone for them the last three years and they've finished second and I've gone for them again just because of the fear of missing out if I didn't go for them and they won it! I wouldn't be able to forgive myself! [laughs]' Neville added: 'There's part of me that looks at them and thinks: [Gabriel] Martinelli has dipped a little bit, [Martin] Odegaard is a good player but is he going to score the goals that they need? I think Gyokeres will do okay, but is he going to score 20 goals? [Bukayo] Saka's obviously got to stay fit. More Trending 'So there are question marks up top about them and that's the big question: can they get the goals and can they be expansive enough to win games and do what Liverpool and Manchester City will do, which is go and outscore teams and times?' Arsenal supporters are nervously awaiting updates on Kai Havertz's fitness after it emerged that the German had sustained a knee injury which could keep him sidelined for a significant period. Arteta is likely to provide some clarification when he faces the media on Friday afternoon ahead of the Gunners' second match of the season at home to newly promoted Leeds. Daniel Farke's men will be looking to pick up where they left off on their return to the top flight after a late Lukas Nmecha penalty saw them edge out Everton on Monday night. For more stories like this, check our sport page. Follow Metro Sport for the latest news on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. MORE: Manchester United sent transfer message by £40m target: 'I'm happy with my choice' MORE: Paul Merson says Chelsea are making £65m transfer mistake that could 'come back to haunt them' MORE: Man Utd star warned he could 'suffer' under Ruben Amorim after £200m spending spree Your guide to the week in football. Exclusive analysis, FPL tips and transfer talk – sign up, it's an open goal.
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Harry Maguire admits it would be 'silly' to leave Man United now after they rejected approaches from FIVE clubs, as he opens up on his future
feels it would be 'silly' to leave Man United now and has spoken about the club rebuffing approaches for him. As Mike Keegan previously exclusively revealed for Daily Mail Sport, United shut down interest in the centre-back from clubs in the Premier League and Italy. Maguire has now told BBC Sport: 'Last year, the clause was in their hands. There was no option for me there. There was no talking. It was just they activated it and it got extended. 'I'm pretty sure the club made it clear this summer that I can't leave on any terms. A couple of clubs enquired and I think they got a quick response.' Maguire went on: 'I'm sure over the next few months we'll have to have a conversation about where we want to go and if they want to extend. 'Obviously, I have something in my mind about what I want to do and where I want to be. I don't want to put it out there to everybody but it's an amazing club to play for and you'd be silly if you wanted to jump out of it as soon as you could. The defender and former club captain has played his way back into form after nearing the exit 'Since I started six years ago to now, it's in a completely different place in terms of the structure behind the management staff. We're in a good place. A lot better place.' As Mike Keegan previously reported, a number of interested parties at home and abroad have been told the likelihood is that the England defender is likely to extend his contract – and spend the rest of his career at Old Trafford. Whether that happens remains to be seen however, three top flight sides and two from Italy explored a move for Maguire this summer and were turned away. The 32-year-old sees his current, £190,000-a-week deal expire at the end of the forthcoming season. Maguire's desire is to emulate the likes of Denis Irwin, Gary Pallister, Steve Bruc e and Bryan Robson, who are all fondly regarded as key United mainstays by the club's support. Regardless, the man with 64 England caps is unlikely to be short of options. He is known to be aware of stunning season former team-mate Scott McTominay has enjoyed following his switch to Napoli, which saw him named Serie A's most valuable player as he scored 12 goals to help his side win the league. In Maguire's case, former United bosses Jose Mourinho and Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, who brought him to Old Trafford, could offer escapes to Turkey via Fenerbahce and Besiktas, while Galatasaray are known to be admirers. French duo Monaco and Marseille are monitoring the situation for a player who could move for free at the end of the season. Clubs from outside England can approach players to negotiate pre-contract agreements as much as six months before the end of their contracts. That means that, should United and Maguire fail to reach an agreement, his exit could be sealed as early as January. A new deal would cap a remarkable turnaround for the Sheffield-born centre-half. He lost the captaincy under Erik ten Hag and came close to joining West Ham United in 2023. However, Maguire has enjoyed something of a renaissance under Ruben Amorim and became a key figure for United following the Portuguese's arrival. Indeed, at times he was often thrown up front thanks to his aerial ability, with United short on attacking options, and delivered the dramatic late winner in April's staggering 5-4 Europa League quarter-final win against Lyon. In January, United triggered a one-year extension to his deal, with Maguire also named as captain in Bruno Fernandes' absence.
