Perfect start for the Premier League in Europe and is it crunch time for Spurs already? Football Weekly Extra

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:30Rafinha sits down. The final defence, Michael Elise, is good. No one's quite sure if the Fenerbah chain manager's resigned or not. We'll round up all the Champions League stuff. A hard week for the Carabao Cup to get some airtime, but Chelsea 6-League 3 will do it. And then to a Premier League preview, including a Manchester derby. Plus some AOB, your questions. And that's today's Guardian Football Weekly.

0:54On the panel today, Barry Glendening, welcome. Hi, Max. Hello, Lars Sivertsen. Hello, Max. and happy new season Nader Manuaha thank you very much annual appearance good to see you Max good to be back oh annual appearance once again that's how it feels that's how it feels that's how it feels I can take a hint it's all good it's a come and get me plea from Nader Guardian Football Yearly yeah it's all good let's see let's see what we should do is just say this is the only one we do Nader we just do one a year let's start then with Man United's win over Sabah not because it was the most interesting game but like it was yesterday and the other games were two days ago pretty look I guess Barry Man United They couldn't win and they could lose, but they did win, if that makes any sense.

1:31Max Rushden:Yeah, I was intrigued to see how Sabah would do. They're this year's team in the Champions League, who I'd never heard of. This was their ninth game in this season's competition. They'd play three qualifying rounds and a playoff, which they got through. And I think the story about this game is probably all about their manager, a Lithuanian fellow called Valdis Dambrowskis, who most people will probably know the story by now, but for anyone who doesn't, about 20 years ago, he appeared on the Lithuanian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And the story I read, he won a chunk of money that allowed him to move to England to pursue his dream of becoming a football coach.

2:17Max Rushden:It turns out the chunk of money he won was less than£1 ,000, but a lot of money in Lithuania at the time. So he and his partner at the time, now wife and mother of his children, they moved to London and this guy just seems like a real grafter while holding down a number of part-time jobs, gardening, bar work, cleaning floors, anything where he could earn a buck to support his family. He was attending coaching conferences, doing voluntary work as a football coach at grassroots level. Then he got a job with Manchester United Soccer School, I think, which paid him a wage. And all this time he was doing his certificates and diplomas and badges and whatnot.

3:11Max Rushden:not. He left England in 2010 and has since managed in Lithuania, Latvia, Croatia, Bulgaria, Croatia again, Greece, Cyprus, Hungary, and now he's rocked up at Saba in Azerbaijan. And last year he won the... It's quite a new team. I think they only came into existence about nine or maybe nine years ago. He won the League and Cup double with them in his first season and has now got them into the Champions League. league stage, which is a phenomenal achievement for him. And I'd say just reading the stories about him and how hard he works and how industrious he is, I'd say that will already have got the antenna twitching of clubs in England at lower levels, League Two, League One.

4:02Max Rushden:Certainly piqued my interest anyway. He seems like a very impressive guy. but I think Sabah are also the first team from Azerbaijan to play in the Champions League that aren't Carabag. So they're about 30 miles north of Baku. I think they're going to have to play their home games in Baku because their stadium isn't fit for purpose. But yeah, that was the story of this game. And then they came, they gave it a bash. They could have scored two goals, missed two good chances, but United were just too good for them. But for this guy who had links to United, and it was United's soccer school who gave him his start as a professional coach, this must have been a great occasion for him.

4:51Yeah, I think he says he's looking forward to going to Arsenal as well because he studied on the Holloway Road. Yeah, it's an amazing story, I guess. And they're probably, I mean, not quite at this level, but the stories of people who managed to get into the game who don't have any background in the game, There are probably quite a few of those that we just don't know about. Lars, did you make anything of the Manchester United performance?

5:11Lars Sivertsen:Just that, like, when you're playing an underdog in the Champions League like this, you do have to be wary. They're not always going to be pushovers. But obviously, this is a team that's very inexperienced at this level. And they didn't bowl them over from the first minute, but they got a helping hand with the mistake for the really early sort of giveaway. away and then once you get going it's pretty it was pretty easy for united and it kind of felt almost like a confidence building exercise for some of their forwards as the game uh progressed uh there was some suggestion that a character had taken off grunner fernandez and rested him for the weekend but i actually think when you just kind of this is still a group of players that i think are finding um are finding their feet together and for them to have 90 pretty comfortable minutes in the game that counts to to work on their their connections and combinations i think was not necessarily a bad thing when you said they're not quite this level what does that mean when you've played nine games to qualify for this level it's the thing we've seen i'm i'm a veteran of this watching norwegian teams there is a sort of you you can play tns and cups from finland and teams like this in the qualifiers and even get through the final qualifiers but then you get and you play some of these bigger teams and it's so brutal it's like you have one sloppy loss of possession in your own half and you've considered a goal it's like the the margin for error is certainly so difficult and what we've seen i mean the greatest example and the reason again why you should one of the reasons why we should always take these underdogs seriously is what border glimt have done but border glimt were able to have this campaign they had last season having had multiple seasons in the conference league in the europa league having had quite a lot of european experience of of dealing with these situations and it is just really tough because you're used to playing at a level where you can make little mistakes and then you play teams that will punish you immediately.

7:02Lars Sivertsen:And that combined with the travel and the disruption, I feel like it's hard for teams of this caliber to come into this tournament and immediately do well with no runway. I thought your answer was excellent there, Lars. I didn't know you made them accepted, point one. It was a good answer, but it's just like when we think about the Champions League, are we thinking about the top, the middle or the bottom of it? because there are probably more teams like Sabah that will get the same amount of points throughout the season that also do kind of deserve to be there, if that makes sense. That's all it will.

7:30Sure, sure. Then the other side, Bruno Fernandes not coming off. Like, Bruno Fernandes plays all the time for Manchester United. Like, across the years he's been there, maybe he's missed the equivalent of about three weeks' worth of football. Like, him being in rhythm is probably more important than trying to give him a rest before any particular game. I think he's proven to be incredibly robust, and that's why he's been one of the stars for them for the last few years. So I think sometimes from the outside, people start to get a little bit soft and worried about things they don't need to worry about because these professionals, they do know what they're doing.

8:00I suppose what's hard is it's so hard to quantify because this is now and then in March, you know, and there's no, who knows if you play 30 games before March that you might do your hammy and, you know. See, this is what I'm saying. You've done it again. If you're worried about March, don't play today or tomorrow or the day after or the day after. Just wait till March. Well, the way my hips are, I can play about three times a year, and I do worry about it. Liverpool have Letty then. I mean, I guess, Barry, it had to be Alexis McAllister, didn't it, who won it after his... Johnny Lee was quite funny on stage about this in Hackney, saying, you know, he was saying, I'm sad Ryan's got a new deal, and Dominic's got a new deal, and I want a new deal, and I'm sad I haven't got one.

8:38And then he banged one in from 25 yards.

8:40Max Rushden:Atleti have played English opposition seven times in group or league phase in the Champions League. They've never won. I thought this might be their time to shine. And despite taking the lead, they did score. Alexis McAllister's pre-Champions League press conferences, even by the standards of football press conferences, are incredibly boring. It's just everyone saying we're expecting a tough game, we respect our opponents, blah, blah, blah. but Alexis McAllister sort of rolled a bit of a grenade in to the one before this game by voicing his sadness that he hadn't been offered a new deal unlike his mates Ryan and Dominic but I think the fact of the matter is he didn't do enough last season to earn one he had a good World Cup with Argentina and has been playing well this season I thought he was very good going forward in this game driving the team forward, passing well, and it took his goal brilliantly on what I believe is his weaker foot.

9:49Max Rushden:But when Liverpool didn't have the ball, I thought he was running around a bit like a headless chicken. So he was good in attack, not so good in defence, I would argue. And that is actually a sort of problem for Liverpool's midfield, I guess, isn't it? That they are good in attack and not so good in defence. But I think this win is really important for Areola. that yeah i totally agree and for him to be winning champions league games as liverpool manager will bring back a real strong feeling especially against a side like atletico who i think they lost at the weekend so they're not exactly in the best of shape but the fact is it's still atletico madrid in the champions league and you do want to start well but i would say that the mccallister thing i do find his words really interesting because do we know what question was asked of him that led to that answer does anybody know i don't know i don't know because Because sometimes I think the question is the interesting thing because otherwise it makes it seem like people are just making statements all the time.

10:44Alexis McAllister sits down and says, I am sad. I am sad that I don't have a new deal. He's got a new deal. He's got a new deal. And I'm happy for my friends. They deserve it. But why not me? You know what I mean? There's a question that's come out there, which may have been a loaded question to bring out said response. And again, I don't know what it is. It could be the opposite. But yeah, for them to be able to score in that, to win in that way, for McAllister to score in front of the cup and the passion, the emotion he had after he scored it. I think in some ways he probably said a lot more about where Liverpool are at now, where a player can talk about contracts that they don't have, but still have a lot of support from the fan base and they still have a connection with them.

11:21Because previously, just from a fan perspective, you just mentioned something even slightly negative about the club and someone will turn on a player. But instead, you'd sort of wonder from a fan's side, whether they're looking at the club and seeing the likes of Canarte, Alexander-Arnold, Salah, Van Dijk, all these people who went down to the last year of their deals. I wonder if McAllister is going to be the next person that's going to be doing that. And I take Barry's point that he wasn't great last year in McAllister, but neither was Gravenberch. So are they having buyer's remorse with that deal?

11:47Because Gravenberch wasn't great last year, and this year is even a guaranteed starter as such in some of these games. Possibly not. But yeah, I was actually happy for McAllister because the way he spoke, there are plenty of people who have English as their first language who will not be able to make the points that he made in the manner in which he made it because it was very nuanced. There was lots of sadness. There was praise. There was emotion. Didn't say I wanted to leave. Said he's going to give everything that he can. And it was all the things you'd want to hear from somebody that's sort of talking about quite a delicate issue for himself and the football club.

12:20So yeah, I'm happy for him. Lars, what did you make of Barclays debut?

12:23Lars Sivertsen:I thought that one chance he had when he had played a little sort of a little one-two with Virts and was played through a normal scorer. I mean, he didn't make the finish. But that was for me like a light bulb moment because my hypothesis ever since Liverpool were linked to Barclay is he's a really good player because he's physical, dynamic. He's quite a direct runner. He can make runs ahead of the ball. He's fast. He's used to being kicked around in the French League. So I think the acclimatization to the Premier League shouldn't be too difficult. But I also think having another sort of willing runner off the ball ahead of him, someone who will make those moves, could really help you unlock some of what Florian Virch has to offer.

13:03Lars Sivertsen:because I think being that connective player is harder if people are not making runs off the ball in front of you because it's the move that triggers the pass, not the other way around. So I just think, yeah, that was a really promising thing that I'm definitely reading way too much into. And he did miss the chance in the end. But sometimes you just see things on the pitch that your brain goes, yes, yes, that works. And I have a feeling that he will be very useful. Liverpool fans may look at it and think we've spent over$100 million on a winger when there's other parts of the team that remain completely unattended.

13:36Lars Sivertsen:But I do think he will add a lot to the balance of that attack. A great finish from Llorente. I think Kierkegaard was at four, I think. Well. Okay. Well, well, well. So we've just spoken about, say, gaps in midfield, and there certainly was a gap when I think it was Alvarez turned on it. And as he was breaking through, certain things about defending, like when there's no pressure on the ball, you kind of need to drop a bit and van dyke wasn't really dropping either so van dyke and kirkas from a communication standpoint haven't managed that situation well i don't think personally i don't think van dyke could look at that and say he did the right thing and then kirkas again he's been caught out but that's usually where a center half will probably be a little bit deeper so the run from your nt doesn't really turn out are you worried about van dyke sort of not worried about him but you know like do you think he is slowing down i think you could make the case that like most players in the later years aren't as good as they were but i think i'm not i know i'm not concerned about him now because he's very very good he's been very very successful and some of the sort of like physical limitations that may come to some players as they get older they haven't necessarily been ones which he's sort of like had to hang his hat on to this point anyway i think as long as he's still reading the game the same way that he does that's great but my only critique of him sometimes is he's a bit he's a bit passive because his presence is enormous but what use is that when if you give still give someone like half a yard or yard in front of you to be able to do whatever they want to do I think as long as he remains aggressive in terms of how he defends but I think he'll still be you know invaluable for Liverpool but it's just as I say sometimes when he doesn't really affect the people around him and what they're trying to do and that's sometimes what you do when like look I've got this all under control everything's calm well very quickly turns out to not be the case okay then Napoli nil Arsenal one um i mean arsler good aren't they last like they are good like they have next year 4.05 i mean i know nabody had some chance in this but like they just look so well put together they really do and i do think it's significant that they are adding like they still have this rock solid defensive units that they had last year and that they won the league on the basis of last year but i can't be the only one thinking they look a little bit more fun and adventurous going forward this year and Solis has made a positive impact after coming in and he made a positive impact after coming on here as well but people just look a little bit fresher.

16:01Lars Sivertsen:Makdun Olegho is crucially looking like himself again and I think that's an interesting thing. I'm not entirely sure how much we attribute the reason to why he was a little off-color last season. He had a couple of injuries so he didn't have that many very long runs of being unfit. I think he was playing with some physical pain in periods. But I also think Arsenal in the second half of the season in particular were quite defensive and conservative and weren't actually, again, coming back to the Virtspada Barcala thing. There wasn't a lot of movement ahead of him, which makes it hard for him to pick the kind of passes he wants.

16:36Lars Sivertsen:Whatever the reason was, he's looking very much back to his old self. the Norwegian national team coach Stoll Solbakken said after the charity shield game or the community shield game that he thinks it's important for Mokhten to feel like he is the focal point of things not necessarily from like he's not a big diva who demands to be the guy but I think it's important for him as a playmaker to feel connected with the team to feel like he understands the movements of the players around him and that he is at the hub of things and last season partially because of injury partially because Eze was preferred occasionally he was a little bit in and out and he was more peripheral and I think he struggles then when that happens.

17:12Lars Sivertsen:Now he seems to be very much at the heart of things and he is looking very much back to his old self.

17:16Max Rushden:Mikel Arteta said something interesting after the Chelsea game which nobody seems to have picked up on. He was asked about Odegaard and he made a comment to the effect, oh he's settled now in his personal life and I just thought it was an odd thing to say. I don't know if there was some turmoil in Odegaard's personal life last season and is absolutely none of mine or anyone else's business. But I just thought it was an interesting thing Artesha said. As far as this game was concerned, I mean, they won 1-0, but they were so dominant. It was an absolute hiding they gave Napoli, despite the scoreline.

17:51My only concerns for Arsenal, and looking at a way win

17:55Max Rushden:first time out in the Champions League, job done, great. But they missed a lot of chances. And once again, Victor Jokeres was very unconvincing, I thought. he was on the pitch. Are you saying do Arsenal need a striker? Is that what you're saying? I wouldn't like to say anything that controversial. Well, do you know what? Well, producer Taiyo, obviously, Arsenal man, says Martin Odegaard became a father. I mean, that excuses anything.

18:22Lars Sivertsen:December 2024, he became a father for the first time. So maybe it's that first 18 months of fatherhood.

18:29Max Rushden:The word turmoil probably covers that more than adequately. Odegaard Jr. starts tantruming and, you know, answering back at that age and then that's when his form falls off a cliff i did have a question that is related to that nadam so we i think me and baz were joking about either on here or the radio about you know james madison had twins and then another kid and then twins again right if you're a footballer and i can't remember nadam when your kids were born or not but like do you sleep at home with babies the night before a game because like you will be absolutely exhausted the next i mean are you always in a hotel when you're at that level like the night before a game or like even before training like or do you just say to mrs nade i've got to i'm a footballer so i can't do anything in the night so that's a really good question because it allows me to be able to describe how everyone is ultimately quite different sure i have i've had some peers who immediately bring in like night nannies and stuff like that and their sleep schedule remains exactly the same i've got some say like myself who realized that like this is one of the best things in life to have created life and you just and worse and worse and worse yes yeah of course yeah and uh like i'm sharing that with my partner you know the rest of my family and so on but then for other people when it comes down to game time like game time's everything for them some players they've got such a specific routine that it will not be budged like it has to be this food at this time i've got to do this thing before bed and so on and i think having a child can at times be the ultimate disruptor because of the chaotic nature of it all as everyone's probably seen before but um again it just depends because like again maybe it's anecdotal from me but my first child was born in 2014 when i was at qpr in the april they were relegated in the may no no this was this was the this was the april where we were promoted to the premier league oh wow okay um and i think in that first month i scored the very next game uh and then at the end of that month i was player of the month and i wasn't sleeping at all but i was on the high of like oh my god I've had my first child this is like the best thing ever but again it's deeply anecdotal especially when it's yourself but every player is different and what I would say is stuff away from the field can affect people because not to say this is Martin's case because it's probably not the case to bring a child into the world when two of you have not been used to it before as well can offer its issues for some people sure and I have and I have seen that and some I'm not going to name names here but some people arrive at the training ground extra early and leave extra late because there were places that they didn't want to be.

21:01He was always last on the training ground. Yeah, that one. He first did last out. 100%. Yeah, so it's different.

21:11Lars Sivertsen:On that note, it was one of the subplots of the great Norwegian World Cup run is that a lot of the players had had kids roughly the same time in the last two years. Coincidentally, a lot of the players also took off golf, took off golf recently. Is there a connection there? it's not for me to say yeah my golf clubs have been in a cupboard for five years and another different note on Kai Havertz and Do I Need a Striker I wrote a piece about this about that dummy and this is a I was trying to posit the theory that tall skillful players look more beautiful than short skillful players yes so like the grace of a Berbatov the Berbatov theory right the Berbatov theory that it's harder for them to look beautiful because their arms and legs are sort of...

21:57Compared to a Messi or a Maradona. And obviously, you watch Messi and Maradona and it is beautiful to see. But just when someone tall and like... Languid is always the word you use. I just thought that Havats dummy. I just loved it so much. I don't know, Barry. Do you subscribe, Barry, to this... A tall, beautiful player, a hodl, is more beautiful than a David Silva. A Messi or something like that.

22:20Max Rushden:Yeah. It's not something I've really thought about, Max. Are you saying because what they're doing should be more difficult for a tall person? Just saying it looks kind of more balletic. Yeah, maybe. You are so pro Havertz that you're calling him a tall, elegant player.

22:39Lars Sivertsen:Yeah, I think he's always been that. Whatever you say about Kyrie Havertz, his close control is pretty amazing. And I remember when he came, I watched him for Leverkusen a fair bit, and I trumpeted on some podcast or other that he's like, if you put Dimitar Bovatov and Mikhail Balak in a blender and just kind of put it together into a human. Yeah, well, there's that. But if it works, then it would be roughly Kai Havertz. Now, that prognosis did proceed to look a little bit silly because it did take Kai Havertz some time to win over the haters and the losers. But I do think the justice for Kai, the Kai Havertz trutherism movement has had quite a lot of indication now.

23:18I think he is very, very, very, very good. Yeah, to piggyback on this, yeah. So I do think he's very, very good. And I think he's the perfect player for Arsenal up front. Because say, for example, the way that Odegaard's playing now, the way he'll drift towards that right-hand side, you've got Saka there, you've got Ben White there. But Havertz will come over as well. And you start to see some of these really good one-and-two-touch combinations, taking the ball under pressure and so on. And this is why, for me, someone like a Jokeres doesn't really work with this Arsenal team very well. Because it has to look a bit different.

23:47Because Jokeres, for whatever his strengths are, it's not being able to be that fluid outside of the main spot that he's in and again just my final point on this certain people who do commentary were throwing that fella under the bus and then they tried to scrub the internet to make it seem like they've always thought he was good there was a point where Kai Havertz was playing against Liverpool I think three seasons ago possibly two and as he was running through towards goal I think he had a shot he was saved and Saka followed up and scored and somebody doing commentary on Super Sunday possibly from Manchester or Salford said Havertz was running through on goal he you look at him he probably didn't think he was going to score I didn't think he was going to score nobody believed he was going to score and I thought that is a very nasty thing to say fast forward a few months when Havertz has more of an influence and he says oh people have been so down on him this season but you know for me I've always thought he's been excellent I thought you diabolical diabolical human being for my Sky Sports package was nearly straight in the bin how dare you all right that'll do for part one part two uh we'll look back at the other champions league games

24:58welcome to part two of the guardian football weekly as i buy on five bodo nil uh lars and when i i didn't see the the the highlights until after the game so i saw it was nil nil at half time i was thinking oh bodo are in this but really it could have been five nil at half time Couldn't it? I mean, Bayern were astonishingly good in this game.

25:17Lars Sivertsen:They were. The first half hour, I would say, Bordegliem held on pretty well. And then Bayern had a couple of big chances towards the end of the half. But the Bordegliem manager, Ijeetlí Knusten, was actually quite angry after the game because of the nature of the collapse in the second half. And I think Bordegliem are now at a stage where, yes, you look at the fixture list and you look at Bayern away and you're a team from Norway and you think, well, that's a little bit of a write-off. Let's go to Bavaria and enjoy the occasion and then take our points somewhere else. But I do think after last season and the results they had against some pretty good teams, they actually now go into these games thinking, we have done this before.

25:58Lars Sivertsen:We've been able to hang with these teams before and we are expecting to show more of what we can do. And having three shots over the course of 90 minutes and conceding five and getting your first choice centre-half sent off towards the end as well. It's just not good. So the coach was quite angry after the game and said that he ominously suggested that the second half had given him some answers about who can be at this level and who can't. So he was actually quite pissed. Not to lose, I don't think, at Bayern. I think everyone accepts that that can happen. But to genuinely play it off the park in a way that typically doesn't happen to Bouloglind anymore.