Latest news with #Toti
The Independent
01-04-2025
- Sport
- The Independent
Wolves take another step towards safety as Jorgen Strand Larsen downs West Ham
Jorgen Strand Larsen's first-half strike moved Wolves 12 points clear of the Premier League relegation zone with a 1-0 home victory over West Ham. Vitor Pereira's side were five points adrift of safety when he replaced Gary O'Neil but successive league wins for the third time this season eased the Molineux club closer towards safety. Evan Ferguson missed a glorious opportunity to give West Ham the lead on his first start for the club and the Hammers were punished by Larsen who put Wolves in front with his 10th goal of the campaign. Marshall Munetsi fired against the upright which denied Wolves a second while they were on top and Graham Potter was forced to ring the changes with a triple substitution at the break. Larsen failed to bury a second and Wolves were almost left to rue their missed chances when substitute Niclas Fullkrug headed on to the crossbar before he squandered a one-on-one in the last minute as Wolves were able to hang on for their first home win in two months. The Hammers were almost gifted a chance to take the lead when Toti lost possession to Jarrod Bowen and the England winger broke and squared for Ferguson but he was unable to sort his feet out and direct his effort on target. Wolves went ahead in the 21st minute when Emmanuel Agbadou found Larsen in space and the Norwegian turned and let fire from 20 yards with a strike that bounced off Max Kilman and beyond goalkeeper Alphonse Areola. The hosts were inches away from a second. Larsen turned creator this time and rolled the ball into the path of Munetsi who had the beating of Areola but not the bar. Wolves were well on top and looked to rubber stamp their first-half superiority with a second. Andre was next to have a go from distance but his effort flew harmlessly over the crossbar. The hosts continued to probe for a second, this time Jean-Ricner Bellegarde's curling effort was only good enough to hit the side netting and the game threatened to boil over when Nelson Semedo and James Ward-Prowse came head to head. For all of Wolves' dominance they were still unable to put West Ham away and Larsen sliced wide after Matt Doherty pulled the ball back to him inside the six yard box. Wolves began to invite pressure and the visitors almost found themselves level when Fullkrug looped a header on to the bar and Emerson was unable to turn in the rebound from close range. West Ham should have had their equaliser when Toti gifted the ball to Tomas Soucek, but the substitute slammed into the sidenetting with the goal gaping.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
WWII podcast sets sights on stories that offer lessons for future wars
What happens when a retired Navy captain and a military historian walk into a bar? That's what Capt. William Toti and Seth Paridon, hosts of the 'Unauthorized History of the Pacific War' podcast, wanted to find out in 2022. Two years later, what started as a lark has turned into a powerhouse program — approaching 10 million listeners and accumulating a die-hard fanbase. Paridon, the former staff historian at The National WWII Museum for 15 years, provides the story arc for each episode while Toti, who served more than 26 years in the Navy, 'riff[s] on the strategic concepts and the battle plan,' the retired officer said. 'I'll pull it up to the strategic level and try to put it in context that way.' Toti's 'riffs' have more substance than that, however. His 26-year Navy career included 'tours as commander of Fleet Antisubmarine Warfare Command Norfolk, as commodore of Submarine Squadron 3, and as commanding officer of the nuclear fast attack submarine USS Indianapolis (SSN-697),' according to his biography. 'He served for more than nine years in the Pentagon, including tours as special assistant to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, as Navy representative to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and as deputy director of the Navy War Plans Cell, Deep Blue.' Toti recently spoke to Military Times about plans for the pair's podcast and his key role in exonerating Charles McVay, captain of the World War II heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, which has the unpleasant distinction of being known as the worst naval disaster in U.S. history. Some answers have been edited for clarity. He and I were both on a Fox TV show together called 'The Lost Ships of World War II.' It was an exploration of footage that was filmed and paid for by Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen. Fox took this footage and I was the Navy analytical talking head. He was the historian. We got canceled after eight episodes — which is not surprising for a World War II TV show. We were commiserating after the show got canceled and said, 'You know, it's sad, because [Seth] has done over 4,000 oral histories.' He was the chief historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, so we had all of these oral histories from WWII veterans who had stories to tell. I'm not a historian, but I've been interested in WWII, particularly the submarine service, since I was a midshipman. After the movie 'Jaws' [featured] the story of Indianapolis, I ended up commanding the submarine Indianapolis and got to know the survivors of the cruiser. And that's really when I got pulled in deeply into the WWII history world. We were commiserating after the TV show gets canceled and we said, 'Podcasts are kind of hot. Maybe we should try that? We'll do it for a few months, there will be no listeners and we'll quit. But at least we'll have tried.' Our plan was to start at Pearl Harbor and then move chronologically through the war. If we had 1,000 viewers we would have been happy, but within a few months — I have no idea how since we didn't pay for any advertising, we didn't do anything, it's all word of mouth, as far as I can tell — we had 5,000 subscribers. Now we have close 40,000. We're getting several thousand views an episode and we're getting close to crossing the 10 million views threshold. We've already crossed the 1 million audio downloads threshold. There's a contingent of people whose grandpa or great uncle or great grandpa went to the war, they came home, they never talked about it. And now there's this group of people, family members, who wondered what they did. We're trying to put together truthful, character-based stories that haven't been told, to bust myths as we come across them and expose truths that people would find hard to believe. What we don't do is an academic script reading over video. Our concept was two guys talking about World War II. That's the way we tried to frame it, and it seems to have worked. Seth [Paridon] does the background research, because he's got it all at his fingertips. He has a million pages of archive material and over 4,000 oral history video interviews that have been transcribed. He's got footage and he's got photographs, so he kind of frames what he thinks the talking points are going to be for an episode and we decide together what subjects we're going to review. He'll do several hours to maybe a couple of days of research per episode, and I'll spend a few hours editing it and then we just kind of talk through it thematically. We know where we want to hit each plot point. We also know how many pages it takes for a two-hour segment. So, sometimes we go fast, sometimes we go a little long, but generally we try to target it to two hours. We actually wanted to cut it back, thinking two hours was too long. We were actually getting hate mail saying why did you cut it down? [Laughs] So, we went back to two. We assume people have no knowledge when we go into each episode. And by the way, I'm not sure they're digestible, on average. Would you listen to me for two hours? I don't think I wouldn't listen to me for two hours! [Laughs] We try to tell a story in an understandable way by focusing on the people. Every one of those guys and gals came back suffering from PTSD. We didn't know what that was called back then. And so what did they do? They self-medicated with alcohol. There were way more suicides than we want to admit. Among the Indianapolis crew alone, there were 12 suicides, including the captain who was court-martialed. They didn't think about it. They just kind of buried it because they believed that was the best way to deal with it. Many of these stories maybe got written down, recorded in history books and forgotten. That's the great thing about Seth — he hasn't forgotten. He has it at his fingertips. If you talk to high school kids about World War II, they'll know Pearl Harbor or dropping the atomic bomb, but they don't know anything else about the Pacific. We hope our episodes reach some of them and help bridge that gap. I love [Adm. Chester] Nimitz. I love [Adm. Raymond] Spruance. I have a love-hate relationship with [Adm. William] Halsey. I think Halsey said horribly racist things that were counterproductive, but early in the war, in the Guadalcanal campaign, he was vital. There are those kind of personalities that are not monolithic. It's not: 'This is a good guy. This is a bad guy.' Halsey was good at the beginning, and then the war passed him by. It got too complicated for him and he didn't know how to fight in any longer. After 1943 Halsey was probably doing more harm than good. He was only a morale builder, not a strategist. Obviously, I like the submarine episodes. I love the 'Mush' Morton, Wahoo episode we did. I love the [Richard] Dick O'Kane episode. O'Kane is the reason I became a submariner. He came to the academy, talked up submarines when I was a junior and convinced me. We did over 10 episodes on Guadalcanal I think are very good. No one has touched us as far as our accuracy and depth. There's a myth that that the Navy abandoned Guadalcanal but the Navy lost almost four times as many people as the Marines did in the Guadalcanal campaign. I talk to Navy officers and ask, 'Who lost more people?' Zero have gotten it right so far. They've all swallowed the Marine myth. Why doesn't the Navy tell that story? Well, we're telling it. We've done four episodes now on the atomic bomb, including the best episode I've ever seen on the morality of dropping the bomb. We did two of those — one with Richard Frank, a leading world leading historian, and one with John Parshall. If anybody watches those two episodes and afterward does not agree with the decision to drop the bomb, there's something wrong with their head. I saw an injustice and I committed myself to correcting it. I invited all survivors of the cruiser to come to the decommissioning of the [submarine] Indianapolis. They never got to decommission their ship, so I wanted them to come to mine. They came and they stood in formation with my crew. It was incredible. Afterwards, two guys — Paul Murphy and Glenn Morgan — grab me, not quite pushing me against the wall, but metaphorically so, and said, 'Bill, you're the last captain of the submarine Indianapolis. McVay was the last captain of the cruiser. He needs you.' When I started reviewing, I was aware, but hadn't studied in depth the sinking. I hadn't read [Mochitsura] Hashimoto's book. I talked to [Capt.] Ed Beach, who was still alive at the time and was trying to get [Husband] Kimmel and [Walter] Short exonerated. He said, 'Well, you know what you're gonna have to do, right? Failure to zigzag? You're gonna have to demonstrate that failure to zigzag didn't hazard the ship.' As we were decommissioning we had this actual torpedo fire control computer — it was about the size of my desk. You could program the torpedo and then it would run intercept courses and things like that. So, what I did was run how to do this manually, as many runs of the Indianapolis' course, with as many zigs as possible against Hashimoto's firing solution. I just did run after run. I stopped counting after 90 of these, and in every case, at least one of Hashimoto's torpedoes hit. I had this data and I got assigned to the Office of the Vice Chief of Naval Operations when the exoneration language was being voted on by Congress. The Navy's position continued to be that the court-martial was just. These Navy JAG officers kept arguing that if that single torpedo didn't sink the ship, Hashimoto would have gone home. I said, 'You don't understand the way this works. That first torpedo blew the bow off the ship. They were going to get sunk regardless.' That's what the data proves. They couldn't do that in 1945 but we can do it now. I was proud of my role in all of that, even though I was kind of working against my Navy. I think it was the right thing to do, and I'm happy with the way it turned out. We kept saying we were going to end in September 1945 when the treaties were signed on the Missouri. We kept saying that. And probably six months ago we started getting emails and YouTube comments — probably 150 to 200 a day — telling us that we couldn't stop, so we gave in. [Laughs] We know there are a lot more stories in our queue. So, we're going to go back to 1941 again and do the stories we skipped as we went through. There's a whole lot more submarine stories to tell and those are near and dear to my heart, obviously. But there's a lot of stuff to tell. There's a guy who lives not too far from me who's a 103-year-old veteran who served at Peleliu. He was a Seabee, and you know, generally the Seabees in World War II would go in on the fifth wave. I assumed he went in on the fifth wave and I did an episode with him and asked probably the stupidest question I've ever asked in my life: 'By the time you got there, did you see any Japanese?' Turns out he went in on the first wave with the Marines and he said, 'Did I see any Japanese? I saw a ton of Japanese. Most of them were dead.' He was looking at me like, 'How stupid are you?' I'm not sure this is exactly upbeat but as we approach the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, I'm hoping there's going to be an uptick in interest. I know there are going to be celebrations and things like that, but I hope there's also improved understanding of the most horrific war the world has ever known. Forget about learning about it — I fear we're not interested in learning anything from it as we face other potential conflicts in the Pacific and elsewhere. You know how sad that would be? I'm not looking for contrived meaning or linkages, but I do try to connect learnings from the Pacific War to things we need to understand today as we face new Pacific adversaries — and there are many. Is anybody listening? That's the question.
New York Times
14-03-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Vitor Pereira has a vision for Wolves' back line – and it means more change is coming
Six months ago, most Wolverhampton Wanderers fans had never heard of Emmanuel Agbadou. A few might have seen Nasser Djiga playing in the Champions League but he, too, was a relative unknown to an English audience. You'd struggle to find many Wolves supporters who had ever considered Matt Doherty as a right-sided centre-back or thought of Toti as an indispensable starter, and the majority saw Craig Dawson as a key figure for at least another year and were willing to give Santiago Bueno the benefit of the doubt. Advertisement All of this is a vaguely long-winded way of making a simple point — the outlook for Wolves' defence has changed dramatically over the course of this season. Dawson no longer makes matchday squads never mind the team, Bueno is almost out of chances, Agbadou is a lynchpin, Doherty is now a fixture in the back three, Toti makes Wolves markedly better when he plays and Djiga is next in line for a starting place. Maximilian Kilman, who was captain and an ever-present player a year ago, is barely discussed anymore having been sold to West Ham last July, and we have not even mentioned Yerson Mosquera yet. The picture has changed at a dizzying rate, and with another huge summer ahead for Wolves, the changes are likely to continue. Signing a centre-back was Wolves' priority throughout the summer window, yet somehow they failed to land one. Kilman moved to West Ham on July 6, and the club knew that deal was likely to go through for a few weeks beforehand. Gary O'Neil, Wolves' head coach at the time, had nagging concerns about both Dawson's age — he turned 34 in the final month of last season — and Bueno's ability to handle the physicality of the Premier League so was desperate to add a central defender with Premier League experience to the ranks. Wolves were close to a deal to sign Dara O'Shea from Burnley but refused to find some extra cash at the 11th hour and the Irishman moved to Ipswich Town instead. Other players were considered but none of those deals came off, so O'Neil went into the season with Dawson, Bueno, Mosquera and Toti as his centre-backs. For reasons that remain a little unclear, O'Neil opted to abandon a system that had been largely successful last season by switching to a four-man defence and trying to introduce a higher press into the game plan. His concerns about Dawson's pace and Bueno's physical weaknesses meant he started off with a centre-back pairing of Toti and Mosquera — the former a player who had rarely played in a back four and the latter a player who had never made a Premier League appearance. Advertisement When Mosquera suffered a long-term anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) knee injury in September, the high-press plans had to be abandoned, and when the goals kept flooding into Wolves' net, so did playing with a back four. A more familiar back three returned, but with Toti out of form and Bueno struggling for any consistency, Dawson was again left as the lynchpin. After he shut out Manchester City's Erling Haaland at Molineux for the second successive season in October, there was hope the veteran could hold Wolves' defence together for another season. But when his legs appeared to falter in real time on a grim evening at Everton's Goodison Park in early December, his career with the club was effectively over, the wider Wolves defence was in tatters and O'Neil was on borrowed time. Even before O'Neil was sacked and Vitor Pereira appointed in the middle of December, Wolves were lining up deals to sign centre-backs in the winter transfer window. But Pereira arrived with a clear vision of the profile of defenders he wanted — one that changed the kinds of players Wolves targeted in that window. The new head coach prizes athletic centre-backs who defend on the front foot and have the speed to cover space left in-behind. Crucially, he wants members of a three-man defence to be able to play out from the back. That is the reason why Pereira chose Agbadou over Kevin Danso at the start of the winter window despite the latter having been at the top of Wolves' target list for a while — they did go back in for Danso at the end of the month, only to lose out to Tottenham Hotspur. And his lack of pace is why Dawson was omitted from the club's 25-man Premier League squad at the end of the winter transfer window, albeit the former West Ham United favourite is still on the payroll with no agreement yet in place to bring a contract that expires in June to an early end. The change in approach can be seen in some basic data, which shows the average of 2.2 interceptions by centre-backs per Premier League game during O'Neil's reign rise to 3.8 so far under Pereira. Wolves centre-backs are also making an average of two tackles per game in the middle third of the pitch since Pereira's appointment compared to 0.9 when O'Neil was the coach. Dawson's future is clear. With Pereira's blessing, he is no longer even coming in to the training ground so will soon end his time at Wolves, either when his contract expires at the end of the season or before then if a deal to tear it up can be struck. Bueno appears to have a fragile position at Molineux. His lack of physical presence was an issue for O'Neil but his game is even further removed from Pereira's vision of an ideal centre-back, so a parting of the ways there in the summer also appears likely. Advertisement Mosquera is currently on course to be fit for pre-season in July after his ACL rupture. The 23-year-old Colombia international seems an ideal fit for Pereira's way of playing, potentially on the right side of the back three. 'What I know about Mosquera is that he is aggressive and he has a profile I like,' Pereira said in a recent press conference. 'I hope he recovers and can help us next season and we'll all be here talking about the Premier League.' One complication for Wolves is that former right-back and right wing-back Doherty has made a good fist of operating on the right of the back three and is under contract for next season, while Djiga was signed from Crvena Zvezda in the winter window primarily to compete for that role. So unless Mosquera can be coached to push Agbadou for the central position in the trio, Wolves might be over-staffed on that right side. It is different on the left of the three, where Toti's recent return from a hamstring injury has transformed the way Pereira's side look, offering a natural balance that was lacking when the right-footed Agbadou filled in there. 'It's important, because playing with a left foot on the left side is easier,' said Pereira. 'I want Toti to make overlaps, to cross and create superiority from the back and to do it with a right foot is difficult on the left. So we need to find another (left-footed) one. We need two with this profile.' It means that, once more this summer, adding a centre-back will be a priority, providing Wolves avoid relegation from the Premier League and Pereira is allowed to continue his overhaul of the team. A specialist understudy to Agbadou in that central position in the back line might also be required. So, while the picture has already changed dramatically in three months under Pereira, Wolves' back three remains a work in progress. (Top photo of Emmanuel Agbadou;)
New York Times
17-02-2025
- Sport
- New York Times
Wolves showed in 45 minutes of their Liverpool defeat why they can avoid relegation
Vitor Pereira was surprisingly scathing about his Wolves side's first-half performance away to Premier League leaders Liverpool. 'I didn't recognise the team on the pitch,' Pereira said at his post-match press conference. 'We didn't play our way. We didn't force mistakes. We didn't press them in the way that I want to press.' Advertisement But forget all of that. The second half at Anfield was the best 45 minutes of football relegation candidates Wolves have produced under Pereira since he replaced Gary O'Neil in the middle of December. It counted for nothing in terms of points, with two horrible first-half goals from a defensive point of view having handed Liverpool a 2-0 lead that brought them victory, despite Matheus Cunha's superb goal on 67 minutes. But it could yet count for a lot over the rest of the season if Wolves can use it as a blueprint for the games to come. Wolves are 17th, two points above Ipswich and Leicester, and have 13 games remaining — starting at in-form Bournemouth on Saturday — to win what now looks like a four-team scrap (three if you consider Southampton doomed already) for a single place in the 2025-26 Premier League. If they can replicate Sunday's impressive second 45 minutes in those fixtures, they should have no concerns about avoiding relegation. Here's why. It might sound a touch absurd, given the nature of the two goals they conceded yesterday, but Wolves defended extremely well against one of the most potent forward lines in Europe. For the first time on record (aka, since the stats began to be kept in the 2003-04 season), Liverpool failed to register a shot in an entire half of Premier League football at Anfield. It was a real shame, then, that such a sterling effort was undermined by a shaky few moments in the first half that brought Liverpool the goals that ultimately secured their win. For Mohamed Salah, one of the Premier League's all-time greats and a man in rich form, yesterday brought his joint-lowest number of total shots (two) and second-fewest shots on target (one) in any league match this season. He did extend his scoring run to six successive games in all competitions via a first-half penalty but was otherwise kept quiet by a combination of Toti and Rayan Ait-Nouri on Wolves' left. For Toti, that represented an impressive response to his difficult first half-hour which saw him make one costly mistake for Luis Diaz's opener and a couple of others that might have led to further Liverpool goals. Those errors undermined one of the best afternoons of organisation that Wolves fans have witnessed from their team in a long time. Advertisement Wolves must now hope January signing Emmanuel Agbadou's second-half injury does not keep him out for long. It's like Groundhog Day. Less than a year after it previously happened, Wolves find themselves once again playing Premier League matches without a recognised centre-forward. With Jorgen Strand Larsen still sidelined by a hamstring injury, it is doubtful whether Hwang Hee-chan would have started in his place at Anfield if fit, given the South Korea international's poor form this season. But Hwang's own hamstring issue, which has ruled him out for two or three weeks at best, left Pereira without the option of using a player who has significant experience playing as a central striker. It is a situation his predecessor O'Neil will sympathise with. To add to his problems, Pereira took two of his three starting forwards, Pablo Sarabia and Goncalo Guedes, off the field at half-time after they had failed to make any real impact on the game. Sarabia looked lightweight and ineffective while Guedes, who was deployed as a makeshift No 9, made a few darting runs that asked questions of Liverpool defenders but offered little to his team in terms of defending from the front. So the fact Wolves managed to make life so uncomfortable for the team seven points clear at the top of the table on their own pitch and with Marshall Munetsi — another January signing and a player usually viewed as a box-to-box midfielder — as their most advanced player during that second half speaks volumes for their performance after the break. Munetsi definitely lacks a striker's instinct when it comes to goalscoring, but he set the tone for the way Pereira wants his side to operate out of possession. If Larsen is not ready to start at Bournemouth, there is every chance Munetsi will be leading the line again. Advertisement And with Cunha in the team, Wolves always have the chance of scoring a goal from nothing. Cunha, who took his season's tally to 13 in all competitions when he halved the deficit midway through the second half, has scored more goals from outside the penalty area this season (five) than any other player in the Premier League — the only Brazilian with more in a single campaign is Philippe Coutinho, who got six for Liverpool in 2016-17. Wolves' new head coach spoke before this game about seeing his players beginning to enjoy the game plan he is aiming to implement. And the second half yesterday was the closest Wolves have been to the style the former Porto, Fenerbahce and Flamengo boss wants them to adopt. They won possession back in their attacking third six times during the second half — more than in any other half under Pereira and in stark contrast to the single instance of them claiming the ball in that same area of the pitch before the interval. From the graph below, which shows the trending expected goals (xG) for both sides throughout the game, it is clear how much Wolves' attacking threat increased in the second half. A high-press approach has been something of a holy grail for Wolves in recent seasons, with both Bruno Lage and O'Neil trying to make it happen and Julen Lopetegui flirting with it at times, too. GO DEEPER Marshall Munetsi, a player tipped for the Premier League from a young age in Zimbabwe But Pereira is the coach who has spoken about it most regularly and, while Lage and O'Neil were both forced to row back on the plan because they did not have the players to pull it off, Wolves have given him centre-backs in Agbadou and Nasser Djiga, along with the fit-again Toti, to put a high line into practice, and an extra athletic midfielder in Munetsi to maintain the tempo. If pushing title favourites Liverpool so hard at Anfield does not inspire confidence that Pereira's game plan can work, nothing will. Additional reporting: Conor O'Neill
