The Jonathan Wilson Archive

This guy writes *a lot*. Post links to new articles and interesting old ones here.

Montenegro look a well-balanced team with explosive attacking potential
The Guardian, today

Argentina - the world's most competitive league?
Betfair, 12 August 2010

Barca's third man sets them free
Betfair, 23 September 2010

Why is full-back the most important position on the pitch?
The Guardian, 25 March 2009

that last one is fascinating, wading through the others. thanks

you can hear him on the most recent podcast, http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/audio/2010/oct/11/football-weekly-podcast-england-montenegro

also can follow him on twitter http://twitter.com/jonawils

On competitiveness nationally, internationally and domestically
something called 'FSF', yesterday

Are Barcelona reinventing the W-W?
The Guardian, yesterday

inverting the pyramid, i've not read all of it but dipped into various chapters, and it's excellent.

Argentina's romantic view of the beautiful game may be holding them back
There is a prevalent sense that playing the right way is more important than adopting a more 'European' approach
The Guardian, 25 August 2010

When the late Yevhen Kucherevskyi was coach of Arsenal Tula....

j-wils VMIC

http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2010/dec/07/shakhtar-donetsk-douglas-costa-champions-league/print

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/jan/05/edin-dzeko-transfer-manchester-city

read that today and thought it was really weird...why does it end with "Dzeko will have to change his attitude to the media if he's to fit in at City" after trying hard to paint him as good with the media for the entire piece? is he really saying "he'll have to become more of a cunt to the media if he wants to fit in at city."

yeah i don't get that.

jonawils To make matters, worse, making dal as I try to watch; chopped a chilli, didn't wash hands enough, went to loo and, well, that's numberwang.
27 minutes ago via web

something almost postmodern about that - he plays with genre so artfully

slightly off topic but are his non 'inverting the pyramid' books wortwhile?

Also, anyone who hasn't read inverting the pyramid really should.

The Anatomy of England is a little bit better imo, if only for being slightly more accessible - should've given it a more attractive title really. Really enjoyable writing on of ten iconic England games and how they fit in the development of the game here.

I have never heard/read/seen his other book(s?) discussed anywhere.

The only other one is 'behind the curtain: travels in eastern european football'. I assume it'll be a good read just don't think i'm, comparatively, v. interested in the topic but will prob. give it a go at some point.

i like that he looks like a grizzled war correspondant
http://i.cdn.turner.com/si/.element/img/4.0/global/writer_headshots/new/jonathan_wilson.jpg

fist issue of his new quaterly publication, The Blizzard, is avaialable as a download

http://www.theblizzard.co.uk/

Argh, pay-what-you-like?! There's a moral dilemma I don't need this evening.

Finally got round to downloading the Blizzard. Anybody else had a gander yet?

Yes, I settled on a fiver in the end cos I have to print it off myself. I've only read the first piece on St Pauli so far, which was good even if not something I normally find that interesting. It's packed full of other goodies though, there'll be plenty for me in there.

I am pleased to see my ex-landlord Ian Hawkey is on the roster.

I'm a tight arse. I gave 2.50 and that grudgingly. Will prob subscribe to a print version mind.

It was a dilemma alright. The download page started the bidding at £3 iirc, I'm impressed at you reëntering to save 50p.

I should have done £2.99 just to make the point.

This has been my lunchtime reading the past two weeks and I've nearly reached the end. Everything I've read so far has been blown away by today's episode, which is Jonathan's own piece on the Red Star - Bayern semi-final in 1991. When it comes to footy writing, this guy's miles ahead on his own.

is it just text?

this is going to sound really lame but I don't want to download it if it's not going to convert OK for my kindle ;_;

It's just text, with quite a nice graphic for each chapter heading but you don't need that.

This could be fun.
http://www.eventzi.com/warroom

I was reminded of something Zoran Avramovic, the former marketing manager of Crvena Zvezda, had said to me about a decade ago.

Four points clear with two games to go, Skenderbeu should go on to win their first title since 1933.

Vllaznia, apparently, had scored at Skenderbeu. The man behind me offered round a bag of kumbull - essentially unripe plums - in delight, but as phones were rapidly dug from pockets and confirmation sought, confusion set in.

In Berat a day earlier the receptionist in the hotel, a Tomori fan, had spoken of the "good stuff" Flamurtari have been playing this season, and at that stage it was easy to see what he meant.

<3 j-wils

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2011/may/03/jonathan-wilson-albanian-football/print

A couple of years ago, Serhiy Polkhovskyi, Dynamo's urbane vice-president, described Shakhtar as being like Eugène de Rastignac, the character from Balzac's Père Goriot noted for his thrusting ambition. When I mentioned that to Mark Levytksy, his opposite number at Shakhtar, he caught the allusion immediately, but in the same breath dismissed it as just the kind of nonsense you could expect from the intellectuals at Dynamo. "Let them read Balzac," he snorted. "We will concentrate on football."

Love this interview with Miodrag Belodedici

He even has his own disappointing parody twitter account.

http://twitter.com/NonathanWilson/status/66975403616636929

The Blizzard is now out in hard cover. I bought Issue Zero in the hope it will become a collectors item.

THE IDEA: Is the present Barcelona side the best team ever? The debate feels futile: this side was great going forward; this side was great at the back; this side had so many great individuals it was impossible to stop them scoring; this side was so good defensively it could stop anybody from scoring. So let's add a structure; let's design a tournament in which the best sides can compete against each other, analyzing virtual games between the best teams there have ever been. It's guesswork, of course, but at least it's educated guess work.

THE FORMAT: It was decided to admit only post-World War II clubs sides, and that each club was permitted only one entrant. This is partly because these are the sides for which information is most readily available, and partly to try to prevent any one player appearing for two different teams. To an extent the 16 is arbitrary -- certainly Millinarios '49, Benfica '62 and Boca Juniors '78 can feel a little unfortunate to have missed out, and there are those who would argue for, say, Liverpool '77 over Liverpool '84.

THE RULES: The teams were randomly drawn into four groups, each team playing each of the others once, the top two from each group to qualify for quarterfinals. The games are arranged AvB, CvD; BvC, DvA; AvC, BvD; the first named team is the "home" side and plays not merely in its own stadium but under the rules of its era. Groups as follows:

GROUP A -- River Plate '42, Ajax '72, Flamengo '81, AC Milan '89

GROUP B -- Barcelona '11, Santos '62, Honved '54, Manchester Utd '99

GROUP C -- Penarol '61, Independiente '74, Dynamo Kyiv '86, Bayern '75

GROUP D -- Inter '65, Real Madrid '60, Estudiantes '68, Liverpool '84

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/jonathan_wilson/06/20/alltime.tournament/index.html#ixzz1Pwi4gPox

Amazing. And:

when news filtered through of Zico's goal, discretion took over

ahahaha - this has been gamed *properly*

Oh wow... that is magnificent

Barcelona 5, Santos 0

lol

JW reports on last night's Copa Libertadores final, doesn't mention what the score was

That haircut is the worst

Just saw the highlights of this match, it was a good one. Crazy brawl at the end, I'm pretty sure I saw Neymar launch a flying kick at somebody.

And we have a winner in the Best Team Ever competition!

so they *can* be beaten

lol i forgot to come back and finish that, but yeah word-perfect

Selected tweets from today:

@iainmacint0sh Isn't Larissa promising to strip if Paraguay win a bit like me promising to write a tactical analysis? ie pretty much her job

My team of the Copa (3-4-2-1): Villar; Veron, Lugano, Vizcarrondo; Maicon (BRA), C Sanchez, Rincon, A Pereira; A Sanchez, Suarez; Guerrero

Right. Now, Guardian and si.com pieces done, I'm off for a big steak and a couple of bottles of malbec.

The Bergkamp piece by David Winner is excellent, exactly the sort of thing I like to read - ie, what exactly were you thinking when you did this? I think most footballers - EVEN THICKO ROONEYLOL - could handle, and would actually appreciate, this sort of question but it isn't in the armoury of our football journalists, and therefore our players don't have to think about how they'd go about answering it.

I remember an interview with Torres a while ago where he discussed something of this, why he makes the decisions he does on the pitch. John Terry also came perilously close to discussing the fascinating basics of positioning differences for defenders when playing for Chelsea and England, but in the same interview he also discussed how he was pissed off with not being given the captain's armband during a friendly so everybody wanked on about that instead.

Issue One of the Blizzard is good, although Sid Lowe's interview with Juanmo Lillo is something else.

Rodrigo of Bolton was intelligent in his movement and scored a header with the stumbling elan of Kevin Davies.

It's kinda weird that he doesn't mention Germany at all in that article

yeah. These things aren't predictable but I'm expecting a series of titanic battles between Spain and Germany over the next decade. For all the stuff written about France's youth system in the past, and Spain's now, I haven't seen much about Germany.

http://www.lifesapitch.co.uk/opinions/time-to-dismiss-the-big-spending-bruce-theory/

surprisingly thick article

Al-Ain paid a reported £6million to take the Ghana international for a year, while paying his wages (around £2million)

Bloody hell!

http://sbinfoplus.tumblr.com/post/10591675771/exclusive-jonathan-wilson

Beautiful. And a Clough bio to look forward to too, I had no idea.

my favourite Wilson laugh recently was following the link in this para on the eastern nations' euro 2012 qualification hopes:

Lithuania, who visit Scotland on Tuesday suffered another miserable day on Friday, being held to a goalless draw at home by Liechtenstein. As 3,000 fans protested, jeering the players and pelting them with coins as they left the pitch, the heady days of last year, when they drew with Scotland and beat the Czech Republic, seem a long way away. The fault lies, this magnificently angry piece in Klaipeda argues in a puzzlingly extended metaphor about fishing, with the coach Raimondo Zutautas and his connections with various agents. The right-back Marius Stankevicius is injured while the midfielder Edgaras Cesnauskis misses out through suspension

think I've... got something in my eye
http://sbinfoplus.tumblr.com/post/10591675771/exclusive-jonathan-wilson

Blizzard 'Question Time' at Wembley this evening - Wilson, Marcotti and Auclair on the panel. I take it no-one on here's going? They're covering it on Twitter and filming it anyway.

where will we be able to watch?

Wembley's an impressively large venue, well done JW

where/when can we see this?

If, as Samuel Weber said, "the pursuit of meaning; the activity of construction, synthesis, unification ... all this indicates the struggle of the ego to establish and maintain an identity", then what better way, when facing the dissolution of the ego, to assert mastery than for the ego to dissolve itself by following to the ultimate the philosophy from which it derived meaning?

This was a theme that fascinated Joseph Conrad, and the deaths of Jim in Lord Jim or Axel Heyst in Victory pursue a similar logic. The most striking literary template, though, is provided by Oedipus. Not only did Oedipus, running away in an attempt to thwart the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother end up preparing the ground for exactly that, but one reading of the Oedipus Complex has it that the child wishes to be rid of the father not because of desire for the mother but in order to remove the reminder of the "blind chance" (to use Darwin's phrase in his discussion of the issue) that has brought the ego into being. Becker's altruistic hero-ideal is a way for the ego to assert control at the end of life, the Oedipal longing to be rid of the father a way for it to do so at the beginning; for the ego to become, in Spinoza's formulation, causa sui.

writing about Venkys?

That again raises two questions. First of all, if it's not Rooney, then who or what is it? It's something behind the Cartesian cogito, perhaps analogous to Freud's id, or the autre of Rimbaud, something primal and, frankly, rather disturbing given western society is based on the notion that the self has free will and is responsible for its actions.

I opened that earlier, ctrl-f'd "shinned it," and closed the tab.

must say it surprised me that a piece featuring those references would end with "shearer was right". our alan knows his rambo.

I hate the notion of a top-scorer award, privileging as it does one facet of the game over everything else, but if I have to, Robin van Persie.

Our man on Brazil-Italy 1982

These in-depth pieces on a single game are my favourite things in the world to read.

At the moment, it's as though a selection of the world's greatest chefs have been gathered in one restaurant and have delivered nothing more than a couple of slices of slightly burned toast.

Jonathan Wilson on PSG

and with a bit on Arsenal too - quite persuasive on why Podolski might struggle

let the official records show that j-wils said an on-form andy carroll was "unplayable" on fitba weekly the other day

yeah

argument was that england tends to produce players at the extremes of different scales so combining carroll and walcott provides a threat most international defences aren't used to, in support of his wider view that international football is reactive and rudimentary

also he got in trouble for saying nordtjaelland are from jutland rather than seeland

official records do not include reasonable mitigation soz :)

i read the Anatomy of England

lol the english are stupid and h8 thinking

man does this guy fucking hate charles reep

his style can get a bit samey after 10 games in a row. interesting thing about the game - some history - match analysis - conclusion. it becomes kinda tough to read by the end of it, although doing it in 3 days maybe didn't help. and the fact that it is the same bullshit problems again and again for england. oh hei they refuse to train or work on tactics! robson gazza keegan gerrard etc all doomed to not be the best because they are lazy or selfish or refuse to ~play~! complaining about not being passionate enuf!

still really good fun tho, i really should subscribe to the blizzard

I'm glad somebody's read it! I thought it was just me. I thought it was fantastic and yeah, the same themes keep cropping up, but that's the nature of what he's writing about, no? The game descriptions are superb in any event.

I like The Blizzard, but When Saturday Comes is the best read imo.

'In Bed With Maradona' has had some good stuff lately, of course I may have been swayed by the photo that accompanies the article on Paraguay.

oh totally. this and ITP should be fucking mandatory reading for anyone thinking of getting their coaching badges. he hits the nail perfectly about the problems we continue to suffer from and when the 4-1 v. the dutch comes around and JW has his little vindication moment of 'HEY LOOK SHERINGHAM actually knew what the fuck he was doing tactically, so stfu about passion or that hey doesn't score a lot and we might be awesome'.

http://www./en-gb/news/4705/the-dossier/2012/10/26/3478624/the-dossier-manchester-uniteds-top-heavy-squad-presents-problems-

goal.com!

Tactical review of the year

nomark commenter: So how;s all this different from the Hungarians of 1953? Deep lying Centre forward and all that

Jonwilson: In and of themselves false nines aren't new especially.  G.O. Smith of the Corinthians in 1890s, Nolo Ferreira of Independiente in 1920s, Matthias Sindelar of Austria Vienna in 1930s or Vsevelod Bobrov of Dinamo Moscow in 1940s.  Merely a matter of degree, level of self-consciousness and how it fits with the rest of the team.

yeah he really overdoes this sometimes

g.o. smith always looked more like a david silva type of playmaking vectoral inside-forward moving into the centre that the sindelarian versatile 9 & 1/3 type

I'm only posting here because I can't seem to find the G.O. Smith thread

Smith's scoring record for the club - 132 goals in 137 matches - remains one of the best strike rates in the history of the game, equating to one goal for every 93 minutes played. His record for The Casuals F.C. was even more impressive scoring 42 goals in 29 appearances.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2013/feb/21/wesley-sneijder-galatasaray-didier-drogba

It is Sneijder who fascinates. He is only 28 but he has the air of an older man. It's not just the thinning hair; he seems also a player out of time. Something very strange happened to him at the 2010 World Cup, when he scored five goals and apparently decided to reinvent himself. What's odd is that he didn't adjust to a creaking body – as, say, Ryan Giggs has – or to burgeoning skills and confidence – Gareth Bale – or even to the changing tactical dictats of the game – Darijo Srna. Rather he seems unilaterally to have decided he was an old-fashioned No10.

No10s have their place, of course, but it is in Argentina 25 years ago. Sneijder, having been nurtured at Ajax a decade ago, was a very modern attacking midfielder. He may never have been the most industrious worker, but he tracked, he pressed, he moved. Then overnight, he seems to have decided to play 10 yards further forward and to wait. It was like a marine suddenly deciding he wanted to be a hussar and turning up to battle riding a horse and wearing a fluffy hat.

I feel like he's channelling Barney Ronay with that last bit

I'm reading 'The Outsider' atm and it's a little drier. Anyone read the History of East European Football one?

he does it better than egon tho

Jonathan Wilson ‏@jonawils 21h

The two players, Gustav Wetterstrom & Harry Andersson, have the shortest Wiki bios of any WC hat-trick scorers.

Jonathan Wilson ‏@jonawils 21h

The only WC match to feature two hat-tricks for the same team was Sweden 8 Cuba 0 in 1938.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BvzB9tOIIAAz0tJ.jpg

JONATHAN WILSON, HARROGATE, United Kingdom, 4 hours ago

I DO WONDER SOMETIME ABOUT EX-PLAYERS ;ANYONE WOULD THINK ALAN SHEARER WAS MOTHER TERESA THE WAY HE HAS DIGS AT CURRENT PLAYERS.THE ASSAULT ON NEIL LENNON WHEN HE LAID ON THE FLOOR THAT WENT UNPUNISHED BY THE BEAKS;SO MR SHEARER YOU ARE HARDLY IN A POSITION TO HAVE A GO AT ANYONE;I THOUGHT THAT DAY YOUR ACTION'S WERE OF THOSE OF A THUG;FOR YOU TO HAVE A DIG AT THE MAN UTD CAPTAIN AND ENGLAND JUST SMACK'S OF POT CALLING KETTLE ETC

he's on only connect on bbc2 rn

Enjoyed this quite a lothttp://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2015/nov/24/liverpool-arsenal-ethiopia-premier-league

A weird hierarchy of icons has developed: in Addis Ababa I saw a minibus adorned with wistful images of Jesus Christ and Mesut Özil.

And then there’s the language issue: presenters, commentators and pundits have a huge responsibility as shapers of English. When James Milner scuffed a cross, I heard Kassahul mutter: “Waste of space!”

liked this on 'dirty' spurs http://www.theguardian.com/football/blog/2016/feb/18/mauricio-pochettino-tottenham-premier-league-best-defence