Football news - The Warm-Up: Marcus Rashford continues to be an inspiration
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Updated 15/06/2020 at 12:29 GMT
No shocks in Spain, a little bit of violence in Italy, and Marcus Rashford is still excellent
Marcus Rashford of Manchester United celebrates
Image credit: Getty Images
MONDAY’S BIG STORIES
Nothing but respect for my Prime Minister
Marcus Rashford’s campaign to win the 2025 General Election continues with this extensive and heartfelt letter to every MP in Parliament, calling on them to extend free school meals through the summer.
The letter is illuminating, urgent, and a wonderful example of how to tell a political story through a personal one.
Rashford links his own story to the systems and structures in which he grew up, then draws attention to where those same structures are failing today.
My story to get here is all-too-familiar for families in England: my mum worked full-time, earning minimum wage to make sure we always had a good evening meal on the table. But it was not enough. The system was not built for families like mine to succeed, regardless of how hard my mum worked. As a family, we relied on breakfast clubs, free school meals, and the kind actions of neighbours and coaches. Food banks and soup kitchens were not alien to us; I recall very clearly our visits to Northern Moor to collect our Christmas dinners every year.
Helpfully the letter, and his impressive campaigning throughout lockdown, also works as a neat rejoinder to anybody still insisting that sport should somehow be kept distinct from politics.
Rashford’s very existence as we know him is a political act: a negotiation and defiance of the systems built by our politics. To recognise this is admirable; to seek to change it doubly so.
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Huge surprise: Barcelona and Real Madrid win
It didn’t take long. In fact, it took less than five minutes. That’s how much time Barcelona and Real Madrid spent at 0-0 this weekend, before Arturo Vidal (2′) and Toni Kroos (4′) put them ahead against Mallorca and Eibar respectively.
La Liga is back, baby!
We were all expecting the return of football to be strange. And, on the whole, we were right: from the empty stands to the fake crowd noise, from the elbow bumping to the masked benches. And things are only going to get stranger once the Premier League turns up on the flippin’ BBC.
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But most of this weirdness is, from a viewer’s point of view (and there is no other way to be a fan at the moment), just the surface level aesthetic effect of football. It looks strange, it sounds wrong. Beneath all that, the usual machinery of football is ticking away just fine. The bigger teams have the better players and the better players win the games.
Obviously, very early days. And of course the big teams were winning plenty of games before The Pause. But it’s going to be interesting to see if the pattern continues; if the absence of fans exacerbates the already huge competitive gap. The games look a lot like training matches, after all. And training is like football with all the weird stuff removed.
In any case, it’s good to have Marcelo back doing what he does best: totally failing to defend even a bit.
Coppa Italia that, mate
In the latest edition of Things That Are Going To Look A Bit Odd On Wikipedia In 20 Years Time, the Coppa Italia semi-finals finished this weekend. Having started some six or seven years ago in February.
Given the kind of tension that must build up when a game spends several months on pause, you can maybe understand why Ante Rebić was feeling a bit wound up. And then Cristiano Ronaldo missed a penalty! The perfect moment to stamp some authority on the game oh no no no not like that.
Poor lad. He should have been in London this weekend, helping Croatia draw 1-1 with England. Instead, with the entire world watching as Italian football returns, he’s pulled off the perfect De Jong. And 10-man Milan couldn’t get the goal they needed, so through to the final went Juve.
There were actually goals in the other game: two of them, in fact, but Napoli’s came away from home so they progressed. That away goals rule is going to start to look quite strange in empty stadiums. Sounds echoing back at strange angles might be off putting, but probably not as important as 60,000 angry Italians enthusiastically questioning your parentage.
IN OTHER NEWS
Let’s spend a little more time with Marcelo, he seems nice. Here he is doing something ridiculous in his back yard. High-risk nonchalance, this: if he gets it wrong, he wipes out that table behind him.
HEROES & ZEROES
Hero
Sure, Diego Costa may look like a marauding pirate captain who’d steal your doubloons and laugh as he did so. But under that gruff exterior there’s a human heart. Here is dedicating his goal this weekend to Virginia Torrecilla, an Atleti midfielder who is recovering from surgery on a brain tumour.
Zero
Ordinarily, scaling a two-metre security fence, sneaking into a football stadium, then charging onto the pitch to get a picture with your very favourite footballer is something that The Warm-Up could … well, not exactly endorse, but certainly understand. But seriously, unnamed Frenchman living in Mallorca, have you not been following the news?
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Messi fan
Image credit: Getty Images
HAT TIP
Over on the Guardian, Jonathan Wilson takes a look at whether home advantage has continued in the Bundesliga’s empty stadiums. Spoiler: possibly not?
Hertha (Olympiastadion capacity 74,669; average attendance 49,259) have improved remarkably. That may be down to their new coach, Bruno Labbadia, and the departure of the chipmunk vacuity of Jürgen Klinsmann, but if familiarity with playing in a cavernous vacuum is beneficial, West Ham could be poised for a surge.
COMING UP
A spot more La Liga this evening: Tenerife host Malaga, and Sevilla are off to Levante. If there is going to be a third horse in Spain, it’s going to have to be Sevilla; if they don’t win here there probably won’t be.
Marcus Foley will be here tomorrow to get you good and hyped about Project Restart.
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