Women's Nations League: Wales and Scotland both relegated after defeats
Wales and Scotland both had their likely relegations confirmed while the Republic of Ireland enjoyed a late winner on a dramatic night of Women's Nations League action.
Wales lost 1-0 away to Denmark in controversial fashion in Group A4. Rhian Wilkinson's team had realistically required victory in Odense to avoid being sent down to League B but Pernille Harder's 48th-minute strike consigned them to a third defeat of the campaign and bottom spot.
It could have been a different story had Jess Fishlock's first-half effort been awarded, with her follow-up shot seemingly crossing the line but not given by the officials and with no VAR in operation, Wales went down narrowly.
A 2-1 home loss to Denmark in April put Wales on the verge of relegation from the top tier and they got off to a poor start with defender Mayzee Davies forced off after only six minutes. The 18-year-old sustained a knee issue which could put in doubt her participation in this summer's European Championship.
The Welsh did regroup and a moment of controversy occurred midway through the half when Ceri Holland was denied by Maja Bay Østergaard and Fishlock sent an effort towards goal, but Stine Ballisager got back to clear.
Replays later appeared to show the ball had crossed the line, but it remained goalless at the break after Amalie Vangsgaard squandered a fine opportunity for Denmark and Harder was twice thwarted in quick succession.
It would not take Harder long after half-time to break the deadlock, though, as the Danish forward slotted home in the 48th minute. Wales had chances but relegation to League B was confirmed.
Melissa Andreatta began her tenure as Scotland head coach with a 1-0 defeat by Austria which confirmed their relegation and meant they are without a point from their five games to date. The lacklustre home side were fortunate to go into the interval level at Hampden Park with goalkeeper Lee Gibson in fine form.
However, the more dominant visitors broke the deadlock in the 62nd minute of the Group A1 clash when ever-dangerous attacker Julia Hickelsberger glanced in a header from a corner.
Scotland picked up later in the second half but ended the game still bottom of the tabl. Their final fixture of the campaign comes against the Netherlands on Tuesday for their final fixture, which will also be the final international outing of their captain Rachel Corsie, who came on as a substitute on Friday.
Barcelona star Ewa Pajor scored twice within the opening nine minutes as Poland romped to a 4-0 Group B1 win over Northern Ireland in Belfast. Pajor celebrated her 100th senior international cap with a quickfire double at Seaview before Paulina Tomasiak and Adriana Achcinska put the game beyond Tanya Oxtoby's side, who travel to Bosnia and Herzegovina on Tuesday needing a point to finish second behind the Euro 2025-bound Poles.
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The hosts enjoyed a huge escape inside the opening 60 seconds when Pajor lobbed advancing goalkeeper Jackie Burns and saw her attempt bounce over the bar and on to the roof of the vacant net.
However, the respite proved temporary and Pajor gave Poland a fifth-minute lead and then doubled her tally four minutes later after catching the keeper in possession.
Paulina Tomasiak made is 3-0 before Adriana Achcinska added a fourth shortly after the restart. Northern Ireland finished strongly with Rebecca Holloway and Rebecca McKenna both going close to a consolation goal before substitute Emily Wilson hit the bar at the death.
Substitute Emily Murphy's first senior international goal handed the Republic of Ireland a 2-1 comeback victory in Turkey to secure second spot in Group B2.
Murphy's 89th-minute winner, which came after Busem Seker's own goal had cancelled out Kader Hancar's opener at the Esenler Stadium, sent Ireland into Tuesday night's home clash with group leaders Slovenia just three points adrift.
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Telegraph
37 minutes ago
- Telegraph
The SNP stronghold that could fall to Reform – and help Farage win over Scotland
Nigel Farage jetted back to Britain from Las Vegas on Friday ready to roll the dice on what could be his party's biggest electoral breakthrough in Scotland. The Reform UK leader is expected to hit the campaign trail on Monday for a Scottish Parliament by-election on Thursday. Once upon a time it would have been inconceivable for Scottish voters to back him. Less than a decade ago, he was forced to seek refuge in a pub and required a police escort after he was chased out of Edinburgh by angry locals. But now support for Reform is surging north of the border, as locals become increasingly disillusioned with the SNP and Labour alike. At stake, the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse seat and an opportunity for the party to secure its first MSP in a contest seen as a bellwether for next May's Holyrood elections. Quite what that victory might look like remains to be seen, but Ross Lambie, Reform's candidate, has the air of a confident man. 'We are loving this campaign,' says the 41-year-old architect. 'Because we have nothing to lose. The SNP and Labour have lots to lose, they have got everything to lose, they're fighting for their careers; we feel like we're fighting for the country.' By his own admission, the Reform party in Scotland is more of a movement than an established political force. But the married father-of-one says that momentum is building. He said hundreds of volunteers from across the country have travelled to Hamilton in recent weeks to assist his campaign. 'People feel badly let down by the SNP and Labour and they feel like this is the last chance. There is frustration with the current political parties. What little public money we have is being spent on things like net zero while there are two-year NHS waiting lists. We're calling these decisions out,' he says. Reform winning or even finishing a close second to the SNP would give credence to polls showing it is on course to overtake the Tories and Labour to become the official opposition in the Scottish Parliament. The by-election was supposed to be a straight fight between the SNP and Labour when it was called in mid-April, following the death of Scottish Government minister Christina McKelvie. However, both parties' activists have been surprised by the strength of support for Reform on the doorsteps and are worried that it could pull off an unlikely win. Brenda Maclean has lived in Hamilton for about 50 years. She has always voted Labour but the town's steady decline has left her disillusioned and angry. 'This used to be a bustling town,' she says. 'Hamilton's half-empty now, it's like a ghost town. Look at it. Charity shops. Nail bars. Turkish barbers. It's disgraceful and they want you to vote?' The 70-year-old pensioner said she intends to vote in the by-election but her message to Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer is not to bank on her support. 'We were brought up with Labour as the working party but they're not interested in working people. Starmer's more interested in [what's happening] abroad than his own country. I think I'll vote for Reform, I'm in two minds. People want something different because they are fed up.' Ewan Spence is also undecided, but the 59-year-old accountant and Tory supporter said he might vote tactically for Labour. He described Reform as 'divisive' on issues such as immigration. 'I don't want that in my country,' he said. 'It should have been a two-horse race between Labour and SNP, but it's not going to be. Reform are pushing hard in the area, they are building votes and I think they could push Labour into second place, which would be seismic.' On Hamilton's high street, many locals are only vaguely aware of the looming election battle. Lucas Land, 34, a self-employed window cleaner, said: 'I'm not interested, look at the state of this place. Every second shop is a charity shop. It's a mess.' Kellyanne Macdonald, 40, said she had no plans to vote despite being canvassed by Reform and the SNP in recent weeks. 'Nothing changes,' she said. 'I remember when Hamilton was bustling.' For the SNP, defeat in a seat where it is defending a 4,582 majority would be nothing short of humiliating for First Minister John Swinney, who recently convened a summit to 'lock out' Reform from Scotland. He has already warned that the by-election is a 'straight contest' between the SNP and Reform UK as he urged voters to back his party last week. He said Labour support had collapsed and urged voters to act and 'unite behind our shared principles' to defeat Nigel Farage's party. Mr Swinney described Mr Farage as a 'clear and present danger to our country' and said he must be stopped. However, for Labour, the political consequences are far more devastating, especially if predictions of a distant third-place finish behind the SNP and Reform are realised. Labour's Imogen Walker – the wife of the Prime Minister's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney – won the equivalent Westminster seat in last July's general election with a majority of nearly 10,000 following a huge swing from the SNP. She gained 49.9 per cent of the popular vote compared to 7.8 per cent for the Reform candidate but the decline in Labour's popularity has been precipitous during the troubled early months of Sir Keir's government. With the Tories also in the doldrums, Mr Farage sees an opportunity to supplant both parties in Scotland. Before visiting the by-election, the Reform leader is expected to travel to Aberdeen, where he plans to highlight his party's fierce opposition to net zero. This is expected to play well with thousands of oil and gas workers in the North East of Scotland, many of whom are deeply unhappy at Sir Keir's ban on further exploration in the North Sea. Back in Hamilton, Katy Loudon, the SNP's candidate, admits that many voters feel 'politically homeless'. She blames decades of Tory austerity and a sense of betrayal over Labour's changes to winter fuel payments and the decision not to grant compensation to WASPI women hit by pension reforms. She is also candid about the choice facing voters. 'This is not a testing ground for Reform, it's a by-election for electing someone to champion this community, as Christina did. With Labour being out of the race, it's really only the SNP who can stand up to Reform.'
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
I found myself Googling: can brain cancer cause hiccups? How I fell into a hypochondriac rabbit hole
Throughout my adolescence and into my mid-20s, I spent a lot of time trying to understand my body. I was unwell, that much was certain. The question of exactly what was wrong with me was one to which I applied myself studiously. I had theories, of course. Looking back, these tended to change quite frequently, and yet the fear was always the same: in short, that I was dying, that I had some dreadful and no doubt painful disease that, for all my worrying, I had carelessly allowed to reach the point at which it had become incurable. This started at university, when I developed a headache that didn't go away. The pain wasn't severe, but it was constant – accompanied by a strange feeling of belatedness that told me it had already been going on for some time. How long, exactly, I couldn't say – weeks, definitely. Maybe it had been years. After about a month, I visited the doctor. She had an earnest, warbling, confident way of speaking, which, in spite of her evident commitment to the tenets of mainstream medicine, gave her the air of an alternative healer. She explained that what I was experiencing were tension headaches, a common ailment among students, and during exam season practically universal. I said that I didn't feel very tense. The doctor asked whether the pain felt like a tightness across both sides of the head. A kind of squeezing? Like an elastic band being pulled tight? Like a fist clenching around your skull? I said that it did not feel like these things. Yes, she said, nodding meaningfully. Every person experiences tension differently. The doctor asked me what medication I'd been using to manage the pain. I was thrown by this question; the thought had not occurred to me. This was, in many ways, quite surprising, since I consider my tolerance of pain to be less developed than the average. In the case of this headache, however, my attitude was edging closer to that of Franz Kafka. A century earlier, the writer told his fiancee, Felice Bauer, that he never took aspirin because doing so, he said, created 'a sense of artificiality' far worse than any 'natural affliction'. As Kafka explained to Bauer, if you had a headache, you had to undergo the experience of pain and treat it as a sign, before examining your entire life, right down to its most minute detail, 'so as to understand where the origins of your headaches are hidden'. The idea of taking painkillers struck me as irresponsible, even reckless, like disconnecting the fire alarm because it has interrupted your sleep. Like Kafka, I wanted to understand the headache. I wanted to know what it meant. The doctor told me to come back in a few weeks if things hadn't got better, sooner if they got worse. I left the practice holding a bottle of aspirin, which I promptly deposited in the bin. In the months that followed, I began using Google to research what was wrong with me. The thinking here was not unreasonable: I wanted to know what was causing the headache, so it made sense to go searching for information. The problem was that these online searches often produce a sense of disproportion: the list of 10 things that cause headaches might fail to mention that certain items account for the vast majority of cases, while others vanishingly few. And for those of us looking for trouble, our eyes tend to pass over the more prosaic – and plausible – explanations (eyestrain, dehydration or indeed tension). Only the worst will satisfy us. As the critic and Nobel laureate Elias Canetti once wrote, hypochondria is a form of angst that 'seeks names and finds them'. Predictably, I arrived at the conclusion that I had a brain tumour – an interpretation for which my Googling provided abundant evidence. As I trawled through lists of symptoms, more and more aspects of experience came to fall under my conscious scrutiny. Soon I was noticing lots of other little anomalies. I became forgetful; words kept escaping me. At the same time, I seemed to be walking around in a continual state of deja vu. I developed a twitch in my left eye. One pupil became slightly larger than the other, and coffee started tasting weird and metallic. I developed a mild but persistent case of the hiccups; just one, two, maybe three solitary little hiccups each day. 'Can hiccups be caused by brain cancer?' I asked Google. Yes, it answered – if it is advanced. Sometime later I started to smell things that didn't seem to have any external source. Burning, usually. Other times an astringent, chemical smell. One morning I woke up and my nostrils were filled with the indescribable scent of the villa in Spain where as a child I spent my long, dull, lovely summers. My eyesight, which had always been perfect, began to flare at the edges, as though there were always something flickering just outside my field of vision. I would turn suddenly, trying to catch it, at which point it would cease, recommencing as soon as I turned back around. I started keeping a list of all these things as they arose, on a loose sheet of paper headed 'symptoms'. Reading back over that list, it seemed to resemble the descriptions of illnesses that I browsed online. The doctor, however, took a different view – and the greater my fear that I was seriously unwell, the more she became convinced that my headache was being caused by 'tension'. In her recent book The Invisible Kingdom, Meghan O'Rourke writes about suffering from an undiagnosed autoimmune illness, an experience she describes as 'living at the edge of medical knowledge'. She writes: 'What really terrified me was the conviction that … I would never have partners in my search for answers – and treatments. How could I get better if no one thought I was sick?' O'Rourke is pointing out that diagnosis starts with a conversation between a patient and their doctor. There are important questions here about privilege: about who is and isn't deemed to be a reliable narrator of their own experience. Studies have shown that women are less likely to be believed by their doctors than men, and black women are less likely to be believed than white women. But, for everyone, conversations with the doctor are constrained by the need to appear credible – and if you are hoping to get a referral for medical testing, this might mean being careful to avoid seeming too anxious. In a desire to economise on my trips to the doctor, I would sometimes seek alternative paths to diagnosis. On several occasions, I visited the optician, because I knew they would use an ophthalmoscope to examine my optic nerve, which, I had learned online, might be inflamed due to the increased pressure inside my skull if I did have a tumour. (In the end, this did result in a diagnosis – one that, come to think of it, was rather apt: myopia.) On the occasions when I did visit the doctor, I was always very careful to limit what I said, not wishing to appear like one of those 'knowledgable' patients, a hypochondriac, who turns up requesting a second opinion on a diagnosis that they themselves have made. 'The position of hypochondria is still suspended in darkness,' declared Sigmund Freud in 1909. His colleagues wanted to make a publication celebrating the achievements of their new science, but Freud was cool, arguing they would have to be honest about what he called 'the limits of our knowledge'. For millennia, hypochondria has confounded patients and doctors alike. It first appears in the writings of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, and then in those of the Roman physician Galen. According to these accounts, hypochondria was a subspecies of melancholy, which was caused by an excess of one of the four humours, black bile. This meant it was a physical disease, seated in the abdomen, though it could cause an array of mental symptoms such as fear and sorrow. This view remained more or less unchallenged for many centuries. Then, in the 18th century – with the waning authority of humoral medicine – hypochondria was redescribed as a nervous illness with a set of symptoms that spanned mind and body. It was often considered to be a peculiarly male disease: a counterpart to the hysteria that was said to affect women. Having long been considered a 'scholar's disease', it became a fashionable ailment among an urban literati, with eminent sufferers including Samuel Johnson and James Boswell. During this period, several books such as Samuel-Auguste Tissot's An Essay on Diseases Incidental to Literary and Sedentary Persons (1768) warned of the consequences of reckless and excessive reading. This trend accelerated in the 19th century with the emergence of a genre of popular medical manuals. A Victorian physician was expressing the view of his profession when he decried the spread of 'pernicious books of 'popular medicine'', adding that there is 'no doubt that the reading of this kind of literature has often resulted in an attack of hypochondriasis'. As more and more people were reading about health and sickness, hypochondria settled into its current meaning: a fear of illness that is also a form of illness. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion By the time I came to worry about my health, attention had been turned towards the internet, with some doctors speaking about the rise of a worrying new scourge: 'cyberchondria'. And for anyone who fears they may be suffering from this disorder, Dr Google promises to step in to help: '5 Ways to Tell If You Have Cyberchondria' (Psychology Today); '15 Signs You're a Cyberchondriac' (Yahoo). (One sign is 'you assume that the first result is the most plausible explanation'; another is 'you trust the internet more than your doctor'.) At the heart of hypochondria is the fact that it's impossible to really know what's going on inside your body. A person can 'feel well … but he can never know that he is healthy', Immanuel Kant wrote in 1798. Today, medical websites, with their lists of the seemingly innocuous 'warning signs' of serious illness, have grown into multimillion-dollar businesses by publicising this potential gap between reality and perception – between how well you might feel, and how sick you might be. More than a year after the headache started, I was referred to a neurologist. The referral was made reluctantly, with a mixture of sympathy and contempt. The neurologist sent me for an MRI. A few weeks later a letter arrived. In its entirety, it read: 'Dear Mr Rees, your brain is reported as normal.' Over time the other symptoms started to disappear. But that was not the end of things. Up late one night, I found myself looking into error rates within radiology. Across all areas, it's about 3-5%. This was not that bad, I thought. Then I Googled the number of annual radiology scans in the UK; that year it was about 40m. If 4% of those were wrong, this amounted to 1.6m incorrect scans – a number, I reasoned, that was certainly large enough to include me. In a study of those diagnosed with a lung carcinoma, the lesion could retrospectively be found in 90% of 'negative' scans. After a brief, ecstatic period of reprieve, my fears came back. At some point I forgot my headaches and directed my attention towards the lymph nodes in my neck, which I nervously fingered as though they were rosary beads. Once again, I was sure there was something seriously wrong with me – and, as I sought to get to the bottom of things, I found myself trapped in the same cycle of recovery and relapse. If hypochondria is a need to know, then no test is likely to offer a definitive cure. Ultimately, one has to learn to make peace with uncertainty. Perhaps this is what Freud meant when he said that hypochondria exposes the limits of our knowledge. Not simply a gap that could be filled with new information, but a more categorical deficiency: the failure of knowledge to ever bring about the states of health and happiness or even certainty we desire. I'm not really sure how I came to stop worrying so much about my health. After nearly a decade of anxiety, in my mid-20s I simply ceased to give it much thought. It is probably fair to say I've overcorrected. A couple of years ago, when I woke up in a state of extreme allergic response (shortness of breath, dizziness, eyes swollen shut), I took a hay fever tablet and tried go to work. Luckily, my partner convinced me to go to A&E, where I was immediately given a shot of steroids. The poet Anne Boyer has written about what she calls 'reverse hypochondria', and I suppose I have joined these ranks. I think writing about hypochondria helped. Reading about the fears of others – writers such as Kafka, Marcel Proust with his extreme sensitivity, and Alice James with her wavering and debilitating symptoms – was strangely comforting and helped to keep my own fears under control. Besides, researching and writing a book is a sort of apprenticeship in uncertainty: finishing it required me to give up my fantasies of fully understanding the topic. The NHS's standard treatment for health anxiety consists of cognitive behavioural therapy. Some people report being helped by CBT, but it's never really interested me. By the time I started psychoanalysis at the age of 30, my fears had been more or less put to rest. But I think it would have been helpful back at the height of my hypochondria. One thing I enjoy about conversations with my analyst is how they generally make me less certain about my version of events – the way they loosen me, in an undramatic and indefinitive way, from my attachment to my own narratives. And so I can't help but feel this would have been good then, back when I only had one story to tell: the story of my illness. Hypochondria by Will Rees is out now, published by Coach House Books at £12.99. To order a copy, go to Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
‘It's thrilling': almost three centuries of the Belfast News Letter go online
There was a packed news agenda on 3 October 1738. The father of the notorious highwayman Dick Turpin had been arrested after being found with a stolen horse. Cannon fire rang out in St Petersburg to mark a Russian victory over the Ottoman Empire. In America, four families had been killed in Virginia in clashes with Native Americans. Meanwhile, a horse fell in the Thames at Westminster, nearly causing a drowning. Welcome to the pages of the Belfast News Letter, where updates on the French Revolution run alongside adverts for brandy and the American Declaration of Independence was reported as a contemporary event. The 3 October copy has a special place in newspaper history – it stakes a claim as the oldest surviving edition of the world's longest continuously published English language daily newspaper. In fact, the paper is so old that it predates the UK's switch to the Gregorian calendar. The edition would have been published on 14 October according to modern dating. For the first time, the News Letter's coverage of the most momentous events of the past three centuries can now be accessed free by anyone with a library pass or an online subscription, after the completion of a project to digitise its surviving editions. Everything from the Crimean war to the Troubles in Northern Ireland are covered, thanks to the joint project between the Northern Ireland Office, the British Library and online platform, Findmypast. While the earliest editions are austere in appearance, Ben Lowry, the Belfast News Letter's current editor, said they had many of the ingredients of the modern-day newspaper. 'They look so severe that they're like a reminder of an almost ancient age of poverty and hangings,' he said. 'But actually, you see the genesis of newspapers in them. They're full of fun. They have gossip. They have salacious stories.' The first edition was probably published in 1737, some 60 years before the Act of Union and 175 years before the sinking of the Titanic, a major news event for a paper published in the city where the doomed liner was built. The American Declaration of Independence, reproduced in its 27 August 1776 edition, featured alongside adverts for books, an appeal for a lost watch and a reward for finding a stolen horse – one guinea for finding it, or three for delivering the horse and thief. Adverts were the only items featuring illustrations at the time. Theft was denoted by woodcut prints of the devil. It was once thought that its publication of the declaration was a Europe-wide scoop. The editor sneaked a peek at the document as it travelled to London via Northern Ireland – or so the story goes. Like other journalistic stories of triumph, it appears the tale may have grown in the telling. In truth, two London papers, the St James Chronicle and the General Evening Post, had already printed the historic text a week earlier. While the paper was dominated by world events, even the oldest editions have examples of unusual yarns too good to leave out. The 20 April 1739 edition carried a lengthy piece about a marriage near Dunluce, County Antrim, at which the bride was so drunk she demanded to go to bed the moment the ceremony had been completed, only to fall and break her nose. She was later spotted in bed with a man who was not the groom. The oldest surviving edition recounts the dramatic tale of an Italian woman who stabbed and killed a man who had been harassing her for 18 months. The earliest copies ran across just two pages and were largely made up of letters from around the world, or material relayed from other sources. 'There was a lot more censorship during this early period,' said Beth Gaskell, lead curator of news and moving image at the British Library. 'There's a bigger focus on international news and a lot of verbatim reporting of events. There's less opinion because it was dangerous. But that doesn't mean that you don't get these kinds of really interesting stories.' From 1789, the paper was dominated by the French Revolution, but the news could be a little on the slow side. In the days that followed the storming of the Bastille, an edition stated: 'The French mails, which arrived this morning, brought little of consequence.' However, accounts of the tumultuous events in Paris appeared later that month, including how 'armed burghers paraded the city, attended by drums, beating to arms', before giving accounts of the storming itself. It described the Bastille's governor 'holding out a white flag and opening one of the gates' before a party entered and were fired upon. It states the governor was later beheaded. On Thursday 11 April 1912, the paper ran an enthusiastic if lowkey piece on the Titanic's maiden voyage. 'The departure yesterday from Southampton of the newest ocean giant, the Titanic, of the White Star Line, was an event that marks the last note of progress in modern shipbuilding,' it stated. 'A large concourse of people had gathered to speed the vessel on her maiden voyage and she made an impressive picture as she quietly glided in brilliant sunshine.' Just five days later, it ran what looked like a modern-day headline, albeit on page seven. 'The Titanic sunk. Collision with iceberg,' it declared. '1,500 lives lost.' In a sign of the printing timeframes, the front page of the same edition ran an advert for White Star Line and its 'triple screw' steamers, including the Titanic. The Belfast News Letter was founded by Francis Joy, a lawyer and notary. His death was recorded in the paper in 1790, but he had the misfortune to die just as the paper carried a lengthy obituary of Benjamin Franklin, one of America's founding fathers. Joy's passing was given a single sentence. Lowry said he had not 'given up hope' that more of the oldest editions would be located, but said the new digital archive would open up the existing back catalogue to anyone wanting a glimpse into the past over their morning coffee. 'It is thrilling,' he said. 'It's very important history, but above all, it's very readable and enjoyable history.'
