'Brentford will always have a place in my heart'
Brentford first-team assistant coach Claus Norgaard has left the west London club, saying he departs with "fond memories".Norgaard arrived at Gtech Community Stadium in 2022, and has helped the Bees to two top-half finishes in the Premier League."I would like to thank Matthew Benham, Phil Giles, Lee Dykes, Ben Ryan and the players and staff for making this an enjoyable and rewarding chapter."There is such a strong culture and that has contributed greatly to a very successful period."Brentford will always have a place in my heart. I will look out for their results and wish everybody associated with the club the best of luck for the future."Director of football Phil Giles added: "In the three seasons Claus was a Brentford coach, we finished in the top half of the Premier League twice. That is the legacy he leaves."Everybody at the club wishes him well in his next role."Brentford are searching for a new manager after Thomas Frank's move to Tottenham was confirmed on Thursday.
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The Guardian
23 minutes ago
- The Guardian
‘We took a big leap of faith': how a community project built Arsenal Women
It is 40 years since the establishment of Arsenal in the Community, the wing of the club responsible for founding the women's team, and the announcement that all the side's Women's Super League games will be played at the Emirates Stadium next season returns the team to the N5 community that birthed it. With the players ending an 18-year wait for a second European title by beating Barcelona in the Champions League final in May, it has been a year of full-circle moments for Arsenal. Bringing all league games to the Emirates Stadium 'is another step in driving towards the best conditions for our players to be able to perform at their best and towards one of our main objectives, which is to win trophies', says Arsenal's director of women's football, Clare Wheatley. 'We also just felt that a connection back to where we began, back to our roots, was warranted.' Sitting in the sun in the playground of Haverstock School, with an Arsenal in the Community girls' football session taking place in the background, Arsenal's head of community, Freddie Hudson, tells the story of the birth of the women's team. 'The roots of Arsenal women are firmly connected to a community programme back in the late 1980s, when there was just no access or structured opportunity for girls and women to play football,' says Hudson, part of the community scheme for 37 years. 'You couldn't go to a local provision as a young girl and take part in any football activities. We recognised that and we thought that was wrong, so we began to run girls' football programmes in schools, after the school day and during holidays, and what we found was that those girls were as talented as the boys, and that was with huge barriers and challenges around them and without any football role models they could look up to.' The decision to engage further with those girls grew from this. 'If they wanted to model a football technique or a skill, they'd have to look to professional men players and that just didn't sit right with the football club,' Hudson says. 'So we took those girls' football programmes and the passion, commitment, togetherness, belonging and loyalty that those girls were showing, which was just so powerful, and took a big leap of faith. We developed a youth training scheme for 16- to-18-year-olds with the aim of mirroring what the boys had in terms of a pathway. 'There was no route into professional football for women but at least we could get to the point where they had a YTS scheme as an option. So they were full-time with us from 16 to 18 and were paid for by a government training scheme. The bulk of their time they were being coached as players, but then they gained lots of sports qualifications and gained experience in the JVC Centre at Arsenal in a sort of leisure centre environment. So we were equipping them with work skills and more. That was just such a powerful programme and all of a sudden that attracted players like Rachel Yankey.' The club would help senior players find jobs in the club too, Alex Scott famously washing the men's team kits in her early days there. The landscape is very different today but Arsenal are still doing that base-level community work. One of the coaches working with the girls at Haverstock School, Abby Webster, is a former pupil. 'As soon as I hit 18 I was able to get a job in the community,' she says. 'I've been out to other places to get some more experience but then I've always come back here; this has always been where my heart stays.' Bella, Myah, Kayla and Stevie step away from the session, faces red, to talk about its impact. 'We're closer now,' says Bella. Abby, says Stevie, is 'less like a coach and more like a person that you can go and talk to. She's more like a cool, younger person, like a cousin or something.' All four have been taking part since the sessions began, having previously had only the inter-form cup available for matches. They love the sessions and have loved being taken on trips too, including to the Arsenal Hub, the centre of Arsenal in the Community. 'We've met Declan [Rice],' says Myah. 'We got signed shirts, the new shirts,' Kayla says. Sign up to Moving the Goalposts No topic is too small or too big for us to cover as we deliver a twice-weekly roundup of the wonderful world of women's football after newsletter promotion When Arsenal in the Community was launched in 1985, it was a way to give back to locals facing disruption on match days and engage with a generation of young people 'that we felt they weren't being listened to', says Hudson, who was awarded an MBE last Friday for services to Arsenal's community. 'Unemployment was high, there was some racial tension in the city and we wanted to engage those young people.' Many of those challenges exist today. 'The riots in the 80s and 90s were kind of replicated in 2011,' Hudson says. 'Society was in a pretty bad place back then and the challenges nowadays are similar, though there are some differences and different nuances. Unemployment is still a real challenge for certain young people that haven't had any decent role modelling around education and work pathways.' The community programme has also enabled Arsenal to assist local authorities with issues such as teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, school attendance and punctuality, Hudson says. 'The beauty of the football club, though, is it's nimble,' he says. 'It's not a local authority, it's not an NHS, where there's levels of signoff you have to go through. We can be really responsive and with a bit of creativity and nimbleness and passion and commitment, all of a sudden you could be facing a challenge one day and the workforce could be out there with partners delivering on those challenges within a couple of weeks.' Arsenal want to ensure a route remains from their community work into the women's and girls' teams, alongside their talent ID programme and academy. 'We are also aware of barriers that are there for local girls to come through and have plans to reduce those,' Wheatley says. Those plans include moving some training to London and helping with the financial burdens that come with being a part of a team. Improving the diversity of the senior side is also an important driver behind the work done further down the chain. Wheatley is proud of Arsenal's diversity in the academy and says: 'We have strengthened the pathway between the academy and first team just to ensure that there is that progress.' The success of the first team and of individual players provides what Hudson describes as 'a golden opportunity that we can't let pass' at community level. 'All the success we've had in the 2022 Euros, with all the success that Arsenal women have had with 62 trophies, it's phenomenal,' he says. 'And we've got a great window to drive some female-focused messages, supporting those young girls through pinch points of anxiety in their lives, but not just with women and girls. We've got a great opportunity to take some of those conversations, some of that education, some of that awareness, to a male audience, and that's what we're doing too.'
The Guardian
27 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Cardiff City appoint Brian Barry-Murphy as new head coach on three-year deal
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The Guardian
27 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Royal Ascot ready to roll with MPs worried future of racing is ‘on the line'
Hundreds of staff were putting the finishing touches to Ascot racecourse on Monday ahead of the five-day Royal meeting. The champagne is on ice, a variety of crustaceans have been plucked from the seabed and transported to Berkshire and the famous grey horses that lead the royal procession are ready to be harnessed. The most valuable, historic and glamorous show on turf is good to go. So it was a little jarring, to say the least, to spend an hour on Monday lunchtime in the company of assorted heavy-hitters from the racing industry and a pair of racing-friendly MPs from either side of the House, hearing warnings of a 'triple whammy of challenges' that, according to a report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Racing and Bloodstock which was published on Monday, 'present no less than an existential threat to the sport.' John Gosden, who will saddle the hot favourite Field Of Gold in Tuesday's St James's Palace Stakes, the feature event on Royal Ascot's opening day, was among them. There were almost certainly things he would rather have been doing on the eve of the biggest meeting of the year, but he was keen to voice his support for the findings of the report, entitled 'Securing Racing's Future: The Threat to British Horseracing'. 'We are liable to be actually brought down by this,' Gosden said. 'Here, we have a gene pool of the thoroughbred that is by far superior to anything else in the world, and yet, we are going to blow it down the river. [And] what makes me beyond angry is that it's never grasped how important we are internationally.' The report was co-produced by Dan Carden, the Labour MP for Liverpool Walton, and Nick Timothy, a Conservative whose West Suffolk constituency includes Newmarket, the joint-chairs of the APPG, but claims cross-party support for its concerns from both Liberal Democrat and Reform MPs. In addition to a Treasury proposal to equalise the rate of duty payable on betting on sport with what is currently a higher rate for casino-style gaming products – which could reduce racing's attractiveness as a betting medium for both operators and punters – the MPs' report highlights the issue of 'financial risk' checks on gamblers and an ongoing impasse over reform to the Levy system, which returns money to racing from off-course gambling, as the other components of its 'triple whammy'. 'The government needs to carefully consider the unintended consequences of its decision in all of these areas,' the report warns. 'It is no exaggeration to say that the future of Britain's biggest sport is on the line.' It was a sobering way to start Ascot week, but the report will form the basis of the British Horseracing Authority's response to the Treasury's proposals in a consultation process which is due to end on 21 July. And the serene self-confidence of the Royal meeting, with everything in its allotted place and, for the most part, just as it was two centuries ago will offer at least some reassurance as worries about what the future might bring are parked for the next five days for a celebration of the best of British racing. The Breeders' Cup in America has more Grade One races. Arc weekend at Longchamp has the richest event of the season and half a dozen Group Ones on a single afternoon. But neither can boast the variety or depth of quality that comes as standard at Royal Ascot, where the daily feature events at 4.20pm are joined by historic handicaps like the Wokingham and Royal Hunt Cup, where fields of up to 30 horses charge down the straight mile. Cheltenham's festival in March is often seen as a more competitive meeting overall, but the average SP of the winners has been higher at Ascot in recent seasons. It is a meeting that sets its stall out from the start, with a Group One at the top of the opening day card and two more in quick succession, and does not, by any reasonable assessment, have a single afternoon that ranks as either superior or inferior to the rest. Contrary to popular belief, in fact, Ladies' Day on Thursday – when the Gold Cup, first run in 1807, is the feature event – has never been marketed as such by the track itself. And while other tracks struggle to shift tickets for their main events, Ascot is trying to find space to accommodate nearly 400 visiting executives from tracks around the world, eager to find out for themselves how Britain's top racecourse seemingly goes from strength to strength. Without the grass-roots industry to support it, of course, the top of the pyramid would soon topple. So this week's Royal meeting, with the King and Queen in attendance for most or all of the days and horses drawn from around the world to compete, is a timely reminder that there are still some things that Britain does quite well and also, perhaps, that you do not know what you've got 'til it's gone. It adds an extra dimension to the St James's Palace Stakes when the three major Guineas winners from Newmarket, the Curragh and Longchamp are in the field and Epsom's loss is very much Royal Ascot's gain following the late scratching of Ruling Court, the 2,000 Guineas winner, from the Derby 10 days ago. Ruling Court was half a length in front of Field Of Gold at Newmarket but John & Thady Gosden's colt was finishing best of all after allowing Ruling Court to get first run, and subsequently trounced his field in the Irish equivalent at the Curragh. The market for Tuesday's feature race on day one at Royal Ascot very much takes the view that Field Of Gold was unlucky at Newmarket, and he is odds-on to reverse the form with Ruling Court. Aidan O'Brien's Henri Matisse (4.20), meanwhile, is third-favourite among the principals, despite having won the French 2,000 Guineas – around a right-handed bend on good-to-firm ground – with something to spare. O'Brien has two stable companions in the field to ensure a strong pace, the race should set up ideally for Ryan Moore's mount as a result and a price of around 7-2 looks more than fair for Henri Matisse to give his trainer a record-extending 10th win in the race. Royal Ascot 2.30 The first four home in the Lockinge Stakes renew rivalry in the traditional opener to the meeting and Notable Speech, fourth at Newbury but less than three lengths behind the winner, could find the most improvement back on a fast surface. Royal Ascot 3.05 Twelve of the 21 declared runners for the Coventry Stakes arrive here unbeaten, and American Gulf, who was well-backed before a decisive debut win at Windsor, could spring a minor surprise at around 10-1. Royal Ascot 3.40 Last year's winner Asfoora arrives without a prep run this time around and is blinkered for the first time but she has won off a break in the past and is an obvious pick on last year's form. Royal Ascot 5.00 All the focus is on Willie Mullins's Reaching High in the royal colours, but his stable companion Poniros, the 100-1 Triumph Hurdle winner in March, is potentially very well handicapped returning to the Flat and the booking of William Buick suggests he is far from just a second-string. Stratford-On-Avon 2.05 Market House 2.40 Duel Au Soleil 3.13 Alshadian 3.50 Carigeen Kampala 4.30 A Dublin Job 5.10 Fillyfudge Thirsk 2.15 Royal Fixation 2.50 Ghaiyya 3.23 Blue Anthem 4.00 Captain Vallo 4.40 Blue Rc 5.20 Golden Rainbow 5.50 Jojo Rabbit Royal Ascot 2.30 Notable Speech (nb) 3.05 American Gulf 3.40 Asfoora 4.20 Henri Matisse 5.00 Poniros 5.35 Ecureuil Secret (nap) 6.10 Charlus Southwell 5.25 Frostmagic 5.55 Keldeo 6.30 Your Love 7.00 Irish Dancer 7.30 Panelli 8.00 Time Allowed 8.30 Petra Celera 9.00 Loch Leven Beverley 6.15 Command The Stars 6.45 Forest Caper 7.15 Dumfries 7.45 Freddy Robinson 8.15 Little Ted 8.45 Triple Force Royal Ascot 5.35 This is a significant step up for Ecureuil Secret after a convincing handicap success at Epsom's Derby meeting but he already looks like a much-improved performer after being gelded over the winter. Royal Ascot 6.10 Willie Mullins is going for a hat-trick in this 14-furlong handicap and while the lightly raced Charlus was beaten out of sight on his latest start in the Triumph Hurdle, he showed distinct promise in four starts on the Flat for Jean-Claude Rouget in France.
