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Posts Tagged ‘beach’

• Manager without Gerrard and Torres for Europa League game
• ‘I couldn’t have envisaged a more difficult situation’

The handful of Liverpool fans congregating at Skopje’s Alexander the Great airport yesterday wore increasingly puzzled expressions as a series of red-tracksuited figures ambled through arrivals and out into the afternoon sunshine.

With Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Glen Johnson and Joe Cole left behind in England at a time when Fernando Torres, José Reina and Dirk Kuyt have still to return to pre-season training, there are few familiar faces on Europa League qualifying duty here in Macedonia.

Roy Hodgson seems hardly to have put a foot wrong during his first month at Anfield but Liverpool’s new manager appeared slightly terse last night, his refusal to answer questions about anything other than the game against FW Rabotnicki perhaps betraying a certain tension. Deep down he must wonder whether a scratch XI comprising reserves and academy players can avoid dissipating the considerable feelgood factor engendered by Cole’s signing and the decisions of Gerrard and Torres to remain on Merseyside.

Defeating a battle-hardened Macedonian team sprinkled with gifted Brazilians in this gateway to the Europa League proper is unlikely to be straightforward. “We are obliged to put our fate in the hands of many inexperienced players,” Hodgson said.

“We can only hope they come through against a side well versed in European football. I couldn’t have envisaged a more difficult situation at the start of my Liverpool career than the one I find myself in: playing a European qualifier against a good opponent without 10 senior players. I’m hoping we’ll be able to win but I’m far from confident that will be the case.

“It’s especially hard to play qualifiers on 29 July in World Cup years. Everyone, most of all Uefa, knows you can’t bring people off the beach, give them three days’ training and throw them into a top-class match. I’m relatively confident tomorrow’s team won’t let Liverpool down but we’ll have to be very good to survive.”

If there was an ominous sense of a honeymoon about to come to an abrupt end, at least Hodgson had not entirely lost his sense of humour.

Reminded that three years ago Rabotnicki drew 1-1 here in a Uefa Cup tie against a Bolton Wanderers team then managed by Liverpool’s current assistant manager, Sammy Lee, he said: “Sammy hasn’t been able to tell me much; I think he’s erased Bolton from his mind but he does remember they got through with some difficulty.”

Liverpool’s manager had earlier said he would discuss with his board the Europa League’s position in the club’s pecking order of priorities but, asked whether that chat had happened, he merely replied: “All we ever seem to do is have discussions so I’m pretty sure they’ll have taken place. But this is a very important game.”

Whatever this season’s European policy, this game at a ground in the process of being rebuilt – both ends of the Phillip II Stadium are largely rubble and, of the two functioning stands, one was surrounded by cranes yesterday as final building blocks were lowered into place – could be the opportunity Alberto Aquilani needs finally to begin demonstrating why Rafael Benítez paid £17m for him.

Just as Skopje is a mishmash of communist-period architectural atrocities and Ottoman era gems, Hodgson’s teamsheet promises to be a mix of delicate talent – Aquilani, Daniel Agger and Milan Jovanovic, a newly arrived Serbia winger once coveted by Real Madrid – and raw youth such as David Amoo. “Most people will not have heard of the players here, they won’t recognise them,” acknowledged Hodgson who is privately well aware that Anfield’s youth production line declined on Benítez’s watch. “But if you’re going to be a top player at Liverpool you need to be able to handle a game like this. We’ll find out if they can. It’s an opportunity to swim.”

He did not contemplate throwing seniors in at the deep end here. “Gerrard and the others never came close to playing, they’ve only been training four days. It would have been complete folly to play them in difficult conditions,” said Hodgson it was also too late to parachute any new buys into a club boasting only five of the eight homegrown players aged over 21 now mandatory in all Premier League squads. Asked whether he was poised to sign Luke Young from Aston Villa, Hodgson typically straight-batted: “Well he’s not playing tomorrow.”

He must trust Liverpool’s ersatz defence proves similarly unforthcoming this evening.

FW Rabotnicki (4-3-3, prossible): Bogatinov; Dimovski, Fernando, Belica, Sevlovski; Tunevski, Grigorov, Todorovski; Ze

A supporting cast of beach balls, bongs, footstools and fire hydrants have got in on the act

The year in sport has been dotted with unusual objects, a cast of inanimate gatecrashers that have picked their moment to leap up out of the landfill site and squat briefly centre stage. Sport has always been vulnerable to interruptions by the everyday. Usually the gambolling dog or the wind-blown crisp packet comes as a brief, welcome antidote to the willed solemnity of the occasion. In 2009 the objects have taken things further. The objects are getting uppity. They want screen time and script input. And in many ways this has also been their year.

In November England’s 2018 World Cup bid was almost derailed by a handbag. “This malaise of my wife and I has been allowed to fester for too long,” declared the Fifa vice-president Jack Warner, returning a £230 Mulberry handbag presented by the bid team as a gift for his wife Maureen. And suddenly the bag itself – red, shiny, matronly looking – was an object of fascination, as were the 23 identical bags subsequently not delivered to Warner’s fellow bid executives and now presumably lurking beneath the desk of the England 2018 bid (fancy goods distribution) officer.

Perhaps the most high-profile object of the year was the beach ball thrown from the crowd that provided a vital goalmouth deflection on Darren Bent’s winning goal for Sunderland against Liverpool in October. At the time it was dismissed as simply bad luck, not to mention the most notable rotund, inanimate object found in Liverpool’s six-yard box since Robbie Fowler’s brief return to the club. But if Poirot has taught us anything it’s that every detail has its own significance and the beach ball did also tell us things. For a start, we learned that it was possible to buy a Liverpool FC beach set (cost £10) from the club shop. Also, that perhaps in a simpler world where aggressively hair-gelled marketing men called Gavin had yet to convince our football clubs of the need for “alternative revenue streams”, the beach ball would never have existed in the first place – or would at least have remained a truly random object, rather than an intrusive rubberised accessory tinged with a mild dramatic irony.

In other random sporting object news, Olympic swimming gold medal-hog Michael Phelps was pictured smoking a marijuana pipe at a party, and suddenly sport was furiously swotting up on bongs. Phelps and his bong posed questions of their own. Such as, is using a drug that, rather than making you better at sport, makes you feel tired and unusually keen on peanut butter, really a matter for the swimming authorities? And also, what kind of person shares their bong with Phelps anyway? You’re not going to get it back from the big-lunged eight-foot bong-hog.

We also found out about crystal meth, the disco drug that Andre Agassi confessed to using at his peak. Agassi said it made him want to scrub his house obsessively, which, on a personal note, led me to consider leaving some crystal meth out for my cleaner in order to create a similar irresistible urge to Hoover and dust rather than simply texting and leaving early. Instead crystal meth made us think about the slackness of the ATP in accepting Agassi’s excuses for failing a drug test. And then about the strangeness of being a career tennis prodigy, and the collateral damage in chiselling out your own little twitchy, resentful child millionaire.

Otherwise there were plenty of peripheral objects that told us simply that a great deal of energy is expended staring beneath the fingernails of sport. For example, the screwed up paper ball that was thrown on to the pitch and helped Werder Bremen score the goal that knocked Hamburg out of the Uefa Cup (the original is now in the Bremen club museum). Plus there were objects that formed part of a larger narrative. The steward’s small plastic footstool hurled at Emmanuel Adebayor during his celebrations after scoring for Manchester City against Arsenal, now surely the most celebrated small plastic footstool in the chequered and seamy history of small plastic foot stools. And something called the “double-tier rear diffuser”, a go-faster-auto widget visible only to intense, fidgety men in overalls, the early adoption of which by the Brawn team nudged Jenson Button towards a Formula One world championship.

Finally, what has now become the biggest sports story of the year provided us with the roadside fire hydrant. It was one of these that halted the progress of Tiger Woods’ SUV in the wee hours, first drawing attention to the fact that something might be amiss in the burnished tableau of his lucrative family life. The hydrant is a brilliantly appropriate random object: mundane and bathetic, but providing as much insight into our own obsession with incidental celebrity narrative as it did into the prolific promiscuity of the world’s best golfer.

LiverpoolMichael PhelpsTiger WoodsBarney Ronayguardian.co.uk