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meaningofmotorsport · 2 years

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Mexico City Grand Prix Preview

The Americas swing of the championship continues, and the teams return to a track which has the potential to bring plenty of drama, thanks to some long straights and tight corners, as well as thousands of passionate Mexican fans, who now have a home hero, fighting for the win.

Right at the point where it matters most, Red Bull are turning up the heat, and Mercedes are struggling to keep their cool. Austin was a huge result for the Milton Keynes team, and they now come back to a track which has been kind to them in the past. It looks as if that could potentially continue this year, as Max had a fair few tenths in his back pocket over the Mercedes today in FP2. Things could easily change overnight though; however, it seems that the efficiency of the Red Bull is outdoing the German team. I wouldn’t say it is simple for Verstappen to win, as Hamilton will come back fighting, but he is definitely the favourite right now. The scenes this weekend if Perez won the race would be bonkers, yet, as much as I want it, it is hard to see him beating Max. That being said, it is possible he could beat both Mercedes, which would be huge for the constructor’s battle, and even a podium for Perez would make the crowd go crazy!

It must be a humbling position for Mercedes to be in after so long at the top, to be being straight up beaten race after race. They can at least take solace in the fact that they are executing the best they can with their car, after the 2021 rules were effectively aimed at slowing them down. They have slightly better straight line speed than Red Bull, but that comes at the cost of downforce, especially at the rear, as we saw Lewis sliding around a lot today. I am sure they will close the gap overnight, but it would take an almighty lap from Hamilton to get pole I feel. The race could help them more, as anything can happen. Bottas is in the mix too, unlikely to challenge Lewis, however, it would be great for the team if he could beat Perez.

The momentum behind Ferrari seems to be continuously growing, as they slowly get over their 2020 woes. At the moment their only challenger for 3rd best car this weekend seems to be Gasly, as McLaren have their own struggles. It wasn’t a perfect day for them, as Leclerc spun it into a barrier in the final real corner, which curtailed some of his FP1 running. Sainz looks as though he might have the upper hand of the teammates at the moment, although Charles is very good in qualifying.

McLaren may be in for another difficult weekend, as they lacked pace today really, with Norris outside the top 10. It wasn’t helped by Ricciardo losing a gearbox, which stopped his day early. I am sure they will fight back to be in the top 10, I would be surprised though if they are close to Ferrari, which could be painful for their fight in the constructors.

AlphaTauri started the year with the promise of possibly being the 3rd fastest team, however, it took them almost half the year to start realising that potential. As a result, they have recently started to bear down on Alpine for 5th, and this weekend that trend looks set to continue, partly thanks to the Honda working so well at altitude. It is unfortunate that Tsunoda has had to take engine penalties, as he looks very good this weekend, but I am sure Gasly will do his bit for the team, in another excellent year for him.

If it wasn’t for that crazy race in Hungary, it would be Aston Martin that Alpine are battling, which they seemed to have been doing on track all year. They will likely continue to do this over this weekend, to try and grab any scraps of points they can muster. Vettel has an engine penalty, which will severely hamper his chances, and Stroll didn’t look quick either, so it could be an open goal for Alpine.

Alfa Romeo are in their usual spot, just off the back of the battle for points, which must be rather depressing for them, can they break through again this weekend? Williams haven’t shown much yet, although with George missing FP2, he could still spring a surprise. Finally, shout out to Mick, who beat some good cars today, and was only 9 tenths off P10. I am excited to see if he can keep this going tomorrow!

The key thing about this track, is that pole position doesn’t mean much, as the run to Turn 1 is so long, someone on the 2nd or even 3rd row could be at the front by the end of the straight. So even if Red Bull have the clear pace to win, it could still be a crazy race!

-M

Thank you very much for reading this article! To keep up to date with when they go out, and to see my reactions to races and other news, follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/MeaningofMotor1

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#f1 #mexicogp #mexicangp #mexico gp 2021 #mexican gp 2021 #motorsport

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prepare4trouble · 5 years

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another alternative ending

They called it the Sorting Department, although that wasn’t its official name, and all Aziraphale could think about whenever anybody mentioned it, was the Sorting Hat, which led him, inevitably, to thoughts of Crowley, who had introduced him to the stories. He had heard of Harry Potter before, of course he had, he had simply dismissed it as not his kind of thing, until Crowley had — as Crowley had a tendency to do — changed his mind.

The demon had preferred the films to the books; he had never been much into reading. He was happy enough to listen though, and over the course of a month after the world didn’t end, Aziraphale had read the first book to him at a pace of around half a chapter a night, as they had curled up on the sofa together. They had been planning on finishing the series, although obviously that hadn’t happened.

At least, not yet. Aziraphale still held out hope that it would.

The Sorting Department did not deal with allocating witches and wizards a House. Instead, it sorted the souls of humans into one of two different locations. It was considered one of the least desirable jobs in Heaven, not least because it involved, occasionally, interacting with demons when they came up against a particularly borderline case that needed to be debated. It was also incredibly boring.

Aziraphale didn’t get to interact with any demons. Not officially, anyway. He was considered to be too much of a risk for anything like that; he had already proven himself untrustworthy. They were probably right, too, because he knew for a fact that the first thing he would do if he had to spend time with any demon, would be to begin tempting the demon. First into giving him information, and eventually into helping him.

He was reasonably confident that he would be successful too.

But he didn’t get to handle the complex or borderline cases. He was in charge of those cases deemed so basic that there was no actual consideration required. He was the angel that decided to send the purest souls to Heaven, and the most evil to Hell. He sentenced murderers and war criminals to Hell, and rubber-stamped the acceptance of saints into Heaven.

Despite this, despite the fact that it was physically impossible to make a mistake, every single decision that he made was checked and double checked by another angel, rendering his entire role pointless because, really, the angel doing the checking might as well have done the work in the first place.

The angel doing the checking was well aware of this, and occasionally — regularly — took it out on Aziraphale.

Of course, every decision he had made so far had been the right one; every case was so simple that there was only one choice that could possibly be made. He certainly wasn’t going to allow evil souls into Heaven, or sentence those who had done nothing but good with their lives to an eternity of torture. He was, as Crowley had taken great pleasure in telling him, a bastard, but he wasn’t enough of a bastard to do that.

Although, it would have been nice to imagine that he could, if the idea took his fancy. And he supposed that was the reason for the double checking.

In Heaven, there was no real concept of time. During six thousand years on Earth, he had grown accustomed to measuring his existence in terms of days and nights, months, centuries and millennia. In Heaven, he had no such frame of reference. Heaven was a never-ending flow of minutes, each more excruciating than the last. There were no tea breaks in Heaven, because angels did not drink tea. They didn’t need to sleep either, nor to eat. The concept of rest was a mortal one.

Aziraphale, however had grown accustomed to it; to all of those things. Crowley had even taught him how to enjoy sleep, on occasion, although it still felt like a decadent waste of time. A little downtime would have been nice though. Perhaps a room where he could sit for a few hours and allow himself to get lost in a good book.

The absence of measurable time wore on him more than he had expected that it would. After all, he had lived in Heaven for some immeasurable amount of time before he had been sent to Earth, and it had never bothered him then. But that was before he had known better.

He thought of his bookshop, abandoned and left to go to ruin. Long absences were normal for him; he would frequently have to leave on a day’s notice and travel to some other part of the world, either on heavenly — or, when the Agreement came into play, demonic — business, or to pick up some rare collector’s item from the other side of the planet. But long-ish absences with the intention of returning were different to a sudden disappearance like this. He had no way to be certain of how long he had been gone, and thus no way to even realistically imagine what might be happening to the shop.

He thought of dust gathering on well-loved books. He thought of several lifetimes-worth of memories intrinsically tied to that shop; of the nights that he and Crowley had sat together, drinking and talking, and of the hours spent in the simple pleasure of a cup of cocoa and a favourite book. He thought of the place going to ruin, and he wanted to cry.

In a way, he almost wished the shop hadn’t been re-formed after the world didn’t end. To imagine it destroyed was heartbreaking, but to think of it slowly fading away might actually be worse.

Crowley had been handed a similar punishment to himself, but in Hell. He did not get to judge the souls of the easy-to-judge, but instead was employed in organising Hell’s very disorganised filing system. As Aziraphale understood it, the work he had done was periodically undone, leaving him to start all over again.

If it was possible, it actually sounded worse than Aziraphale’s fate. But then, it was Hell, so he supposed that it would be.

They had spoken, once or twice. It was surprisingly easy to communicate with Hell for the simple reason that nobody had ever thought to put in any safeguards against it. Why would they? It wasn’t the kind of thing that any right-thinking angel should want to do. That rendered it not, technically, against the rules. The only tricky part was finding time alone to make the call.

He didn’t get a lot of alone-time anymore, and he found that he missed solitude almost as much as he missed Crowley’s company.

He knew that it wouldn’t be forever, though. He took comfort in that.

Oh, as far as Heaven and Hell were concerned, it absolutely would be forever. They had no intention of letting the two of them get together again, and certainly no plans to let either of them get to Earth. Gabriel had said as much, gloatingly, when he had allocated Aziraphale his new role.

But like communication with Hell, trips to Earth were not outlawed, they simply didn’t happen very often because most angels had no desire to go there except on official business. A little like a trip to Milton Keynes, Aziraphale supposed, or Hull. Most people who did not live there would not even think of visiting the place unless they were given a good reason to do so.

It was the same in Hell, although for the life of him, Aziraphale couldn’t fathom why. He had heard what life was like down there, and he had experienced what it was like in Heaven, and he knew without a doubt that Earth was preferable to both, yet millions of angels and demons willingly plodded their way through their lives without ever having seen Her greatest creation.

Which would afford himself and Crowley something of an advantage, when the time came.

They had a plan. One partially created before they had been taken, and then reiterated in snatched moments of conversation, and the occasional cryptic message passed on via the sympathetic and very easily manipulated angel in the Sorting Department who did get to speak to demons officially. It would, of course, take time to earn the trust — or more likely the complacency — of the demons and angels that surrounded them, but eventually they would do it, and then, the first opportunity they got, they would escape.

On Earth, it wouldn’t be easy to find them. They had the advantage of millennia on the planet, they understood the rules, and they knew how to be inconspicuous. They could go anywhere in the world, or even off the world, if Crowley was serious about that. If they could learn how to live without miracles, they would be impossible to track.

London was out. It would be the first place that anybody looked for them. But Aziraphale figured that he might have time to swing by his bookshop, if it was still there, and pick up a few important items before anybody noticed that he was missing. The difficult part was going to be deciding which ones were important, because without miracles, there was the question of how to transport them.

They had already decided upon a meeting place; a village in the South Downs. They had selected it before Heaven and Hell had made their move, and bought a cottage there; a cash purchase of enough money to buy silence along with a home. They had not spoken the name of the village out loud since they had been brought to their respective headquarters. It was safe. They would meet there, and perhaps they would stay for a short time, before they would move on. To where, he didn’t know yet. They would decide together.

Perhaps one day they would even return.

He would be counting the days, if such a thing as days still existed for him. Instead, he simply waited, kept his head down, and bided his time until he saw his opportunity to leave. It wouldn’t be long; some of the angels were already starting to trust him, and the demons watching Crowley were growing careless.

It had been some time since the two of them had last spoken; although how much time it was, of course, impossible to say.

For all he knew, Crowley could be there already, in the cottage they had picked out, waiting for him.

#good omens #good omens fanfic #crowley #aziraphale #potentially depressing #potentially not #depends which way you want to interpret it #alternatives #reblogs are appreciated

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spinsisters · 2 years

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How to find the right wedding DJ for you

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gadgetsrevv · 5 years

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Jadon Sancho will be soccer’s next superstar … but only on his terms

Craig Burley gives his top five U-21 English players, with Jadon Sancho, Marcus Rashford and Trent Alexander-Arnold all battling for the top spot.

DORTMUND, Germany — Jadon Sancho lives in a contemporary home overlooking an artificial lake in Phoenix-See, an affluent development on the edge of Dortmund. He drives a white Mercedes, but he doesn’t drive it far. He’ll go to practice, which is about five minutes away. If it’s hot, maybe he’ll get ice cream. Then he’ll come home.

He’ll settle in with a video game, FIFA or Fortnite, and wait for his private chef to make him dinner. It’s a life so bland, so willfully anonymous, that you’d think it wouldn’t matter where he lives.

It matters. Still only 19, Borussia Dortmund’s Sancho has emerged over the past year as a transcendent footballer. “He’s an exceptional talent,” Jurgen Klopp said after his Liverpool team lost to Dortmund, his former team, in a friendly in July. “There’s no doubt about the potential of Jadon Sancho.” These days, he’s regarded as the best player in the world born in the 21st Century; there is nobody younger who is better. The website Transfermarkt gauges his value at 100 million Euros. “He can be a very, very, very important player in Europe,” says Lucien Favre, the Dortmund manager.

Axel Witsel, Sancho’s teammate, goes further. “I’ve watched him improve since I came here,” Witsel says. “He works hard. He scores goals. If he keeps going like that, he will be one of the best players of his generation.”

Sancho scored 12 goals last season for Dortmund. ‘When I left Manchester [City], there were a lot of people that doubted me,’ he says.

And Dortmund? It’s a working-class city in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s version of Pittsburgh. Hardly a tourist destination, it would seem unlikely to attract a young, ambitious Englishman in any profession. But it’s crucial to Sancho’s trajectory because it isn’t Manchester. Or London, Liverpool, Watford, Southampton, or anywhere else in England.

Three summers ago, Sancho declined the opportunity to tour North America with Manchester City after refining his game at its youth academy. The club regarded him as a potential first-teamer somewhere down the road. Sancho believed he was there already, even at 17. “I was standing out, week in and week out,” he says, describing his success with Man City’s U-23 team. “I felt it was time to seek another challenge.”

Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s manager, wanted to move slowly. He proposed letting Sancho test his skills against the first team during training sessions. “You start the phase where you duel with Kyle Walker, with [Benjamin] Mendy, with [Vincent] Kompany,” Guardiola said, listing three of City’s — and the world’s — leading backs at the time. “And then we will see what is your level, your dribbling, when you are going to play against all the fullbacks in the Premier League. That is what we believe is the next step.”

It sounded sensible, but Sancho didn’t want to wait. Crucially, he didn’t have to. Over the past decade, starting around the time that Klopp inherited the team in 2008, Dortmund has aggressively pursued promising teenagers, including Christian Pulisic. It was primed to do the same with Sancho. “You could see how good he was,” says Michael Zorc, Dortmund’s sporting director.

The Premier League is regarded as the best in football. Aspiring stars are supposed to come to England to make their fame and fortune, not leave it. But rather than striving to play for Guardiola, who had won titles at Barcelona and Bayern Munich and would win at Manchester City, Sancho decided to leave him before his senior career had even started. He was driving, somebody said, the wrong way down a one-way street.

Dortmund isn’t much further from South London than Manchester is. But it was in another country, and it might as well have been another world. “Going there was a very bold move,” says Arsenal’s Reiss Nelson, a childhood friend. “Not everyone would have done it. It was brave.”

Sancho had never played a first-team match. He couldn’t speak German. He didn’t know anyone in Dortmund, where he became the first Englishman to play for the club. He wasn’t criticized so much as pitied. Was he delusional? Getting bad advice? “When I left Manchester, there were a lot of people that doubted me,” Sancho says. “Saying it’s too early to leave England. It’s a big club. I might not play. That it was very rare for an English player to do well in Germany.”

But Sancho knew he was ready to go because he knew where he’d already gone.

As a kid, Sancho honed his game playing street soccer. ‘There’s no rules. I was just freestyling, finding ways to nutmeg people. You’d bring back tricks to the training ground,’ he says.

The Kennington tube stop is the one after Elephant and Castle, heading south on the Northern Line. Topped by a metal dome, it has pretensions of grandeur. It must have looked quite stately some sixty or seventy years ago. But the stained and crumbling concrete, and the straggle of bystanders on the street corner in front of it — one in a workout pants and a ripped jacket, another in knicker-length trousers and a soiled checked shirt — give it away.

This is Kennington, in the London borough of Southwark. It’s where Sancho grew up, a lower-middle-class neighborhood with the accent on the lower. Like Camden Town and then Bermondsey, it has started to gentrify because affordable housing near central London is hard to find. It looks a lot better, residents insist, than it did a few years ago. But it has a long way to go.

Until he was 12, Sancho lived with his mother and sister on the ground floor of Kennington’s Guinness Trust Estates, red-brick apartments that were built in 1921 with a government grant. In primary school, Sancho would arrive home shortly after three o’clock. By four, he’d have eaten a snack, done his homework, packed his gear. If his father, Sean, was able to swing by in his old Citroen, Sancho would wait for him in the parking lot. If not, Sancho would head to that tube stop with one of his father’s friends, who had been designated for the assignment that day.

– Lukaku on a mission: Win with Inter and prove Man United wrong – ESPN FC’s Ultimate XI: We pick our dream team – Play ESPN Fantasy Soccer

Driving from Kennington to Watford F.C.’s academy, which is located on the far northwestern edge of Greater London, takes maybe two hours each way during the afternoon crush. By tube, the trip is shorter, but only slightly. Take the Northern Line toward Charing Cross. Get off at Euston and wait for the National Rail. Go two stops on a Midlands train toward Milton Keynes. Then transfer to an Overground train at Watford Junction for the short hop to Watford High Street. It’s a fifteen minute walk from there. Leave at four and you’ll make the 6 p.m. training, assuming none of the trains arrived late or got stuck in one of the delays that plague London transit. “It took a long, long time,” Sancho says.

Two hours there, two hours back — all for two hours of training with a Watford youth team. Watford had discovered Sancho during a camp it ran in Battersea, across the river from Chelsea’s Stamford Bridge. Sean Sancho’s friend was working as a liaison between the community and the club. Young Jadon showed up and impressed everyone. “They realized he was good,” Sean says, “and they sent that up the line.”

Pep Guardiola, Manchester City’s manager, wanted to develop Sancho’s game slowly. Sancho didn’t want to wait.

The first-generation son of a Guyanese father and a Jamaican mother, Sean, 45, grew up in Kennington. He never married Jadon’s mother, so he used football to stay connected with his son. They’d occasionally go to see Chelsea or Arsenal, but mostly Jadon liked to play. Sean encouraged it. Football would help keep him away from trouble. “If you’re idle, something can come and take your mind away,” Sean says. “You’ve got to have something else to do.” After Jadon’s skills started turning heads, Sean started thinking of football as his son’s ticket to a better life. “Without football, I don’t know what path he might have taken,” he says. “I’d like to be optimistic, but who knows?”

Soon Jadon was offered a place at Watford’s academy. “We saw it as the next step,” Sean says. “That was always what was in my mind. Whatever needs to be done needs to be done.” At the time, Jadon was eight years old. The academy had no provision for boarders that young. But the trip from Kennington to Watford was too long for him to make every day. It was agreed that he would do it three times a week.

On the other days, Sancho headed to the cages. Blacktopped playgrounds surrounded by chain-link fencing, they’d been devised by cynical developers as a way to devote as little real estate as possible to inner-city exercise. They’ve evolved into one of Europe’s greatest manifestations of street football. Games there are raw, unstructured, often dangerous. Nobody is ever offside. You call fouls at your risk. “You’re allowed to do anything,” Sancho says. “There’s no rules.”

More talented players are on display in the cages of South London than anywhere else in the city, maybe anywhere in Europe. A few make it out. Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha developed his game in the cages. So did Liverpool’s Joe Gomez. Tottenham’s Ryan Sessegnon and Chelsea’s Tammy Abraham are two of the latest to break through. “You come home from school and you maybe don’t even change your shoes,” recalls Nelson, who lived a short walk from Sancho in Aylesbury. “You’ve got the ball at your feet, and you learn what you can do with it. Going into the academy, you bring that rough flair from the streets with you.”

One of the playgrounds is located over a tall fence that borders the development where Sancho lived. What passes for a pitch there is tiny, no bigger than a basketball court. Even five-on-five, there’s little room to maneuver. Dribbling makes far more sense than trying to thread a pass through the crush of defenders. Sancho is renowned for his speed, but in the cages speed becomes irrelevant. It’s all quickness, a shake of the head in one direction, then acceleration in another. “You have to shuffle your body,” Sean Sancho says. “It’s about the feint, like boxing. You get the defender to second-guess.”

Because he didn’t go to Watford every day, Sancho was able to get the best from each of his disparate worlds. The skills he honed on rough blacktop were even more effective on a proper field. “I was just freestyling, finding ways to nutmeg people,” Sancho says. “You’d bring back tricks to the training ground. And not many people have them kind of tricks at a young age, so I would stand out.” At the same time, the coaching he received at Watford made him shine even brighter in neighborhood games. He learned how to make a pass, and how to effectively receive one. “You add that to the cage,” he says, “and become a complete player.”

Sancho commuted to Watford for four years. When he turned 12, the club proposed to pay his tuition at an elite boarding school near its facility. Many of the students there were sons of foreign millionaires. “It was a very different culture,” Sancho says. That, too, was part of Watford’s plan. Sancho had brought his street football nous with him from Kennington, but he’d also brought some of the street’s less desirable characteristics. “My attitude wasn’t the best,” he admits. “That part of the hood was still in me. I was getting into trouble, getting detention. And one of my coaches sat me down and said, ‘We rate you highly, but you’ve got to choose which way you want to go. Left or right. Good or bad.'”

By then, his game had evolved into a rough version of what we see today. “Some people said I seemed Brazilian,” he says. “I understand where they’re coming from. Because English players don’t typically play like I do.”

He had just turned 14 when Manchester City made an offer. Moving there was his third journey. “The hardest one,” he says. “Could I handle that next step? And obviously, I handled it very well.”

Sancho was a star for Man City’s youth teams. ‘I was standing out, week in and week out. I felt it was time to seek another challenge,’ he says.

“The team sheet,” Michael Zorc says. He smiles. “It’s my best argument.”

He’s explaining how Dortmund manages to get tomorrow’s stars to spurn some of world’s biggest clubs and come to the Ruhr Valley. “They know we are not afraid to use young talent,” he says. “I tell them, ‘Look at our team sheets. You will play!’ And not in a cup game against a second-division team, but important games against Schalke, Moenchengladbach, Bayern. In the Champions League.”

By 17, Pulisic was on Dortmund’s senior team. When Mario Gotze was 17, he was playing every week. Ousmane Dembele, now with Barcelona, had turned 19 when he came to Dortmund in 2016. Jurgen Klopp’s unheralded Dortmund team that upset Bayern Munich in 2011 had an average age of 22. “On 3:30 on a Saturday afternoon,” Zorc says, referencing the usual Bundesliga start time, “we typically have three, four, five players under 20.” Zorc wanted Sancho to be the next.

One of football’s most adept executives, Zorc has made a virtue out of necessity. Dortmund won the Champions League in 1997, a stunning apotheosis for a working-man’s club. By 2004, though, it had spent itself into bankruptcy. If not for a bridge loan of two million Euros from Bayern Munich, and then a crucial vote by investors in March, 2005, that ratified a restructuring plan, it would have been dropped into the nether reaches of German football, and without the financial capacity to return.

Frightened into frugality, Dortmund has since operated far more prudently. The home dressing room lacks the luxuries that even smaller clubs routinely offer. Players don’t even get a cubicle, just four metal hooks for their street clothes and accessories. A wooden bench runs the length of room like in a sauna, with a rubber-covered floor beneath. If the hair dryers, which are permanently installed beneath the small mirror at one end, look like remnants from the 1970s, it’s because they are.

Sancho joins a front line of Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane for England.

Even with one of the largest stadiums in Europe, Dortmund’s earning capacity doesn’t come close to matching that of the world’s biggest clubs. Its fans can’t afford the ticket prices that most of its Champions League competitors get. Nearly 30,000 standing-room places in Signal Iduna Park cost under 20 euros. Even the priciest seats top out at 60.

Like many small clubs, Dortmund generates revenue by selling players to the giants. The difference is, it also wants to successfully compete against them. So Zorc combs the world for young talent. He hopes his discoveries will make their most dramatic progress at the end of their teens and the start of their twenties, while they’re wearing black and yellow. Then he’ll sell them to a bigger club at a sizeable profit. These days, Dortmund’s alumni association would field a competitive team in nearly any league in Europe: Bayern’s Robert Lewandowski, Arsenal’s Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Man City’s Ilkay Gundogan, Barcelona’s Dembele, Chelsea’s Pulisic, Japan and Real Zaragoza’s Shinji Kagawa. Klopp took many of those players to the Champions League final in 2013. And Sancho was watching.

Sancho had shaken off homesickness and raced through the Manchester City youth program after arriving there in 2015. In the summer of 2017, director of football Txiki Begiristain offered a professional contract. Begiristain assumed it was pro forma, a done deal. Who turns down Man City?

But Sancho wasn’t convinced. The world’s greatest collection of forwards was already fighting for playing time under Guardiola: Raheem Sterling and Leroy Sane, Sergio Aguero and Gabriel Jesus. “The opportunity, I didn’t see it,” Sancho says.

And while Dortmund was noticing Sancho, Sancho had been noticing Dortmund. He saw that Pulisic was playing regularly. He knew that Dortmund competed in Europe nearly every season. He hadn’t been there, but when he Googled the city, Borussia Dortmund came up as the top attraction. “I thought of it as an opportunity to show the world who I am and what I can do,” he said. “I thought of it like just another away trip. ‘I just need to go away and play football.'”

The deal Zorc and Beguristain negotiated called for a price of seven million euros, with a clause that gave Manchester City 15 percent of the profit from a future sale and a first-refusal option. Dortmund gave him the same No. 7 shirt that Dembele had worn. “That surprised me,” Sancho said, but it also gave him confidence. As a 17-year-old in 2017-18, he started seven games and came on as a substitute in five more. His first goal in any senior competition came against Bayer Leverkusen on April 21, 2018.

Sancho’s progression has been so rapid, it’s hard to believe that goal happened only 18 months ago. He added 12 more goals and 14 assists last year, helping Dortmund finish second in the Bundesliga, a point behind Bayern Munich. Under Favre, whose idea of perfect football is Brazil’s 1970 World Cup team, Dortmund plays a free-flowing style that enables Sancho to show far more creativity than he would for another German side. “We can play very active football because we have players like Jadon,” Favre says. “He can play short, he can play long. He can play with one touch. He can dribble in front of the goal, he can use his head. He destabilizes the other team.”

Sancho is still learning, like any teenager. He makes mistakes. Accustomed to watching young players develop, Dortmund’s supporters shrug them off. That’s not the reaction he’d be getting if he’d stayed in Manchester. “There’s just a lot of pressure in England,” he says. “The media is so hard on young players. If you have not a good game, it’s like you’re not ready, you’re not good enough. Germany is relaxed. I think a young player needs that.”

Sancho played for England in the UEFA Nations League in June. By the time he reported back to Dortmund, he was a full-fledged star. “It isn’t just that he made the team, but that he continues to build on it,” said teammate Thomas Delaney. “I would almost call it a privilege to watch Jadon every day in training. It’s spectacular. He does things with the ball I’ve never seen before. If I tried to do what he does, I’d hurt myself.”

Will Sancho leave Dortmund after this season for a Premier League club? When asked, he smiles and says he’ll do what seems right to him no matter what the expectations dictate.

It’s a quiet night in Dortmund. But then, what other kind is there?

Zorc grew up there. He spent his entire 17-year senior career playing for Dortmund as a central midfielder. Now he has placed the success of the club in the hands of players who can’t legally drink a beer in the United States. In that situation, he understands, dull is desirable. “There’s no nightlife,” he confirms. “No distractions. It’s not Las Vegas, not Berlin, not London. You have to go 100 kilometers for anything.” That allows young players to focus on their football. If Sancho fritters away his evenings playing Fortnite after the occasional ice cream, well, Zorc knows he could be doing far worse somewhere else.

Eventually, Sancho will want more, on and off the field. Lewandowski ultimately left for Munich. So did Gotze, though he returned. Aubameyang and Gundogan moved on to the Premier League, and Dembele for Barcelona. They were replaced by the next generation of hot prospects, the likes of Pulisic and Sancho. Pulisic now plays for Chelsea, a deal that enhanced Zorc’s budget by $73 million. As he was leaving, perhaps the next great American prospect — Gio Reyna, Claudio’s son, who turns 17 next month — arrived. And hidden away in Dortmund’s youth program, a 14-year-old named Yousouffa Moukoko is scoring goals by the dozen.

Soon enough, too, Sancho will be gone. It almost happened last summer, after Manchester United made its intentions known. But Zorc advised Sancho that the time wasn’t yet right, and Sancho agreed. In August, Sancho signed an extension through 2022 that pays him more than 200,000 euros a week, but nobody is under the illusion that he will finish the contract. This season in the Bundesliga is almost certain to be his last.

Sancho reflects on his decision to move to Dortmund. ‘Could I handle that next step? And obviously, I handled it very well,’ he says.

On this particular quiet night in Dortmund, Sancho has just been chosen to represent England for Euro 2020 qualifying matches against Bulgaria and Kosovo. Unlike his first senior selection, when he was expecting to be chosen for the U-21s, this one was a foregone conclusion. Very quickly, Sancho has become the best sort of problem for England manager Gareth Southgate, whose front line of Marcus Rashford, Raheem Sterling and Harry Kane will need to make room.

Sancho is the only England player who hasn’t played in the Premier League. Until Kieran Trippier left Spurs for Atletico Madrid before this season, he was the only one not playing in England. But that hasn’t hampered his international advancement. “I don’t see a negative at all,” Southgate said recently. “Jadon’s playing before 80,000 fans at Dortmund every week. That brings huge pressure. We want our players to be feeling that intensity.”

Sancho ended up scoring twice in England’s 5-3 victory over Kosovo. That set the English media on its latest frenzy about which Premier League team he will be headed to next summer. In recent months, he has been linked not only with Man United but also Man City, Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea and Liverpool. He’d be open to the idea of playing in England but insists it isn’t something he needs to do, not now. That’s a point that Frederik Obasi, one of two South London brothers who represent Sancho, made before the summer. “Everyone is talking ‘England, England, England,'” he said. “But why do they assume he has to go there? There are other leagues and other clubs that would also make sense for Jadon at this point.”

For a player on the cusp of worldwide stardom, spurning an offer from one of the Premier League’s top clubs would seem counterintuitive. By next summer, he’ll be 20: a proven England international, and one of the biggest stars in the sport. Why wouldn’t he want to compete in the world’s best and most remunerative league, coming home as a superstar to a place where friends and family could watch him? To go anywhere else would be to defy logic.

Sancho smiles and says he’ll do what seems right to him, no matter what expectations might dictate. Believe him. He has done it before.

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ericfruits · 6 years

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British railways are reduced to chaos by a botched timetable change

IT SOUNDS more like an episode of “Thomas the Tank Engine” than a day in the life of a modern railway. But on May 25th an express train from Newcastle to Reading took a wrong turn, and got lost in Pontefract, 150 miles away. That might have been funny were it not part of a wider collapse in train services across northern England since a timetable change on May 20th. Shortages of rolling stock and drivers have resulted in up to 43% of Northern Rail’s trains being delayed or cancelled each day. From June 4th the train operator cancelled 165 trains a day, including all services to the Lake District. The anger of delayed commuters is building steam.

The scale of the timetable changes—the biggest for decades—caught the industry off guard. Schedules for 55% of Britain’s network were revamped, altering the times of over a million trains a year. The idea was to use the opening of the Ordsall Chord, a short line linking up stations in Manchester, and a new Thameslink tunnel under London to increase the number of services in operation. But in practice the new schedules for Northern and GTR, which operates Thameslink, proved impossible to implement. In the first week of the new timetable GTR delayed or cancelled a quarter of its trains. It now announces a new schedule for the next day at 10pm each night.

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The underlying problem is that the new timetables were not agreed on far enough in advance, says Anthony Smith of Transport Focus, a watchdog. Northern Rail’s woes were exacerbated by the bankruptcy in January of Carillion, a big contractor, which contributed to the failure of Network Rail, the track operator, to finish the electrification of the Preston to Manchester line on time. That delayed the co-ordination of the region’s schedules. As for Thameslink, GTR failed to agree on a realistic timetable with Network Rail until very late, in part because of the complexity of connecting the cobwebs of lines north and south of London.

The result was too little time to give drivers the several weeks of training they need before they are allowed to carry paying passengers on a new route. The government admits it will take weeks to achieve a steady schedule, and months before things work as intended.

Can Chris Grayling, the transport secretary, survive that long? On June 4th he promised Parliament that he would find out who was responsible for the mess—to which MPs roared: “You!” Unimpressive though he is, some of the problems pre-date his time in office. Network Rail centralised timetablers at its head office in Milton Keynes in 2012, and the resulting loss of local expertise harmed its ability to make big changes, says Christian Wolmar, a rail expert. Nonetheless, passengers may well wonder why there was no “Fat Controller” to organise a Plan B when it became clear that the new timetable alterations were not going to work.

Mr Grayling’s loyalty to the prime minister and to the Brexit cause mean he may be allowed to blunder on. Either way, the government’s reputation has taken a knock. Andy Burnham, the Labour mayor of Manchester, has attacked ministers for discriminating against the north. Even normally supportive Conservative MPs, such as Sir Michael Fallon, have lashed out, in the face of growing mailbags of complaints from angry commuters. Many marginal constituencies lie in exactly the areas hit by the chaos (see map). Tories remember the big swing towards Labour last year in places such as Croydon, where rail services into London had been hard hit by strikes in the previous two years.

As more jobs move to city centres, the ability to commute long distances without a the risk of cancellations or delays matters ever more to voters, says Jonathan Roberts, a transport consultant. One regular commuter from Borehamwood to London on Thameslink agrees. She has been forced to work part-time since her easy 20-minute commute became a two-hour nightmare after the timetable changes. It will give her more time at home, she says—and to go out and vote, too.

This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Votes on the line"

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torentialtribute · 5 years

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Wally Downes is scrapping to help his beloved Wimbledon punch above their weight

The first time Wally Downes and I had the pleasure of getting to know each other was in the summer of 2007 during a Football Writers & Association Dinner in the West London not far from his old country house in Shepherd's # 39; s Bush.

I wanted to contest a passage that appeared in it The autobiography of Neil Warnock, which I had written. The rules in question revolved around Wally who was in the state of discoloration in the manager's office in the Madejski Stadium after the game Reading-Sheffield United. Wally said the story was not true. I made it clear that he was looking for a form of story.

I suggested at that point that we go outside to arrange things.

[bewerken] External links [bewerken] External links [bewerken] External links Wikipedia Wikipedia has an article about: Wimbledon & # 39; s Crazy Gang and the cousin of World middleweight champion Terry Downes and equally well aware of my descent as the son of an actress.

Wally Downes once asked OLIVER HOLT outside to settle their disputes in 2007 to settle their differences in 2007

Wally Downes once asked OLIVER HOLT outside to settle their disputes in 2007

Downes was a ghostly book but since the bridge water has passed

<img id = "i-645168ee7362dde9" src = "https://dailym.ai/2GzQHn8. jpg "height =" 375 "width =" 634 "alt =" The former Crazy Gang member is back on Wimbledon and is trying to <img id = "i-645168ee7362dde9" src = "https : //i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/04/20/20/12519052-0-image-a-102_1555789833858.jpg "height =" 375 "width =" 634 "alt =" [Het voormalige Crazy Gang-lid is terug op Wimbledon en probeert degradatie te voorkomen]

I pointed out that Neil was at dinner and that Wally would solve it with him. I was just a ghost, I said. Wally said Neil had already left. So it was me

The proposition reached a degree of inevitability. By an irrational attempt to limit the damage, I said we should go down instead. Wally felt like it. We went downstairs. We took a friend, the BT Sport presenter Des Kelly, with us as a sort of mutual second. Even now, 12 years later, when Wally sees him, he refers to him as & # 39; The Ref & # 39 ;.

We have had a few double doors. Wally stuck his head in the men. To much people. More double doors. We were in a stairwell. We looked at each other for a few seconds and Wally took a swing.

Fortunately, I had something more to drink than me. I missed He took another blow. I stooped. At that moment, Des decided that I had reached the limit of my bravery and happiness and was between us, so that I could get back to the happy crowd.

Since then, much water has passed under the bridge. Downes, 57, even shook Warnock & # 39; s hand – by accident, he says – once in the dressing room on Elland Road.

It's hard not to admire what he has achieved in the game and the job he has done since becoming the manager of AFC Wimbledon in League One in early December, the club that shaped his character when he was a player was in the 1980s and fought its way back into the competition after being pulled out of their community and taken to Milton Keynes.

<img id = "i-c2c18d0e2827771b" src = "https://dailym.ai/2IISoQt image-a-105_1555789850534.jpg "height =" 423 "width =" 634 "alt =" [Hewashalfwaythroughtheseasonalloverwiththeclubbuthehadbeenwrittendownbutheturnedthingsaround"

He took over with the all-but-things club halfway through the season reversed

Wimbledon now has a strong chance of survival and has taken the relegation zone out strongly to survive and withdrawn from the relegation zone

<img id = "i-6c8733969741b309" src = "https://dailym.ai/2GxWfyf" height = "469" width = "63 4 "alt =" He also inspired the third generation to become a famous FA Cup for

<img id = "i-6c8733969741b309" src = "https://dailym.ai/2TZhFHY 20/20 / 12519068-0-image-a-110_1555789943273.jpg "height =" 469 "width =" 634 "alt =" He also inspired the third side of a famous FA Cup fourth round win over West Ham "class = "blkBorder img-share"

They looked doomed

They looked doomed to degradation when he but in a division that includes giants such as Sunderland and Portsmouth, Downes has inspired a revival and, in a relegation dogfight that has sucked up dozens of clubs, Wimbledon still has a chance to escape.

Downes also led them to a famous FA Cup fourth round win over West Ham at the end of January. There is a feeling of optimism and being together around the place and I deserve all the praise that has happened to him. And he has a son who is now a sports journalist.

] I ask him or it has evolved since the last time we met, making it sound like Neanderthal. I have a smile. & # 39; I wanted to say & # 39; undergo a metamorphosis & # 39;, & # 39; he says. & # 39; I am a very extroverted person. I have to trace that back to a manager. Even if you do it right, you have to have a humility that isn't really mine. I have done a lot in my naughty 40 & # 39; s. When I searched for myself, I might have thought: & # 39; Slow down & # 39 ;.

Downes is actually one of the most eloquent men in the game. There are many in football who have great respect for him and the jobs he assisted at Reading under Steve Coppell, then the manager at Brentford, then the assistant at West Ham and now the boss of Wimbledon.

After helping QPR promote to the Premier League in the last play-off against Derby, the offers of work dried up in England and he worked abroad again, mainly with Coppell in the Indian Super League. He didn't have a strong urge to become a manager of a lower league club in England, but when Wimbledon called, there was an emotional attraction that he couldn't resist.

<img id = "i-7c7033955c34171d" src = "https://dailym.ai/2IKyFjf -0-image-a-104_1555789844513.jpg "height =" 423 "width =" 634 "alt =" After helping the QPR promotion to the Premier League, Downes went to work overseas "Premier League Downes went abroad"

After helping QPR win promotion to the Premier League, Downes went to work abroad

<img id = "i-6705420d0af00c59" src = "https://dailym.ai/2GzkeNB" height = "444" width = "634" alt = "He had no urge to control a lower league club but could not resist the emotional tug of Wimbledon no urge to control a lower league club, but could not resist the emotional tug of Wimbledon "

He had no desire for a lower league cl ub but could not resist emotional tug of Wimbledon

He admits that the perception of him was brash and unwilling to be completely undeserved. When he took over at Wimbledon, I apologized for a homophobic tweet, I had it during his time in India that it was a misguided attempt at humor.

He has changed that since he worked his way up from non-playing. Competition game under Dave Bassett and with men like Dennis Wise, Mick Harford, Vinnie Jones and Lawrie Sanchez, built up an image of Wimbledon as an irreverent, challenging , uncompromising side that refused to be respectful of established clubs and opponents.

& # 39; My upbringing at Wimbledon has made me more of a guy than my childhood & # 39 ;, Downes says. & # 39; It gave me an underdog mentality. Every match I played for Wimbledon, we were the underdog: smallest budget, least wages, smallest bottom. Whoever we played, we had to find a way to work together and get better to win the games. It proved to me that things can be done.

& # 39; At Wimbledon we were the bastard child of the eighties. The way football was allowed to be played, we played it and exploited it as far as it could be exploited, especially until the time I went around when we won the 1988 Cup final. Shortly thereafter people decided that it needed to be a bit more refined. "

Downes has also changed over time. When he was the first team coach at Crystal Palace, during the peace of a reserve team against Swindon he only spoke loudly to Stan Collymore that Collymore was trying to pull him down.

& # 39; Society has changed & # 39 ;, Downes says. & # 39; Downes knows that there is now a different culture in the changing rooms that makes that kind of ranteless. & # 39; There is still a congenital hardness among footballers, because there is in every profession where someone has made it to an elite level, but when I started as a coach, football was a sport of the working class where you were spoken that way.

<img id = "i-1d5e22cfbaf362b6" src = "https://dailym.ai/2IKUr6s 103_1555789838347.jpg "height =" 423 "width =" 634 "alt =" Downes is not only the manager of Wimbledon but also the keeper of the future of the club "the manager of Wimbledon m to the custodian of the club's future "

Downes is not only the manager of Wimbledon but also the custodian of the club's future

& # 39; There are now far more welfare institutions and academics involved, so we don't talk to them the way former managers and former army men would have talked to us. Different nationalities, different religions.

& # 39; If you talk to a room with four different cultures, it makes no sense to use it. & # 39;

The original purpose of Downes is to try to avoid degradation, but there is also a larger picture. He is both manager and manager and wants to lead the club back to their old house in Plow Lane, where they are expected to move into a new stadium, ready for the start of the 2020-21 season.

& # 39; That was the whole point of the club reform & # 39 ;, he says. & # 39; It wasn't competition status that they wanted or did well in cups. The people who had re-formed the club had players like Roy Law, Allen Batsford, Dickie Guy and Dave Bassett as their heroes. It was the time of the Crazy Gang. So it was about getting the team back to Wimbledon and, even better, back to Plow Lane.

Wally breaks off briefly. The emotion touches him and he has to compose himself. & # 39; I got a little funny there & # 39 ;, he says. The old boy is becoming soft. Another 12 years and maybe I feel brave enough to offer him a rematch.

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