Liverpool are champions
Liverpool win Premier League: Reds’ 30-year wait for top-flight title ends with Manchester City losing at Chelsea.
It had seemed all but clear that in March the long wait would be over because of the large gap of 25 points between Liverpool and Manchester City, but then the coronavirus stopped the campaign and could have ruined Liverpool’s hope of winning the Premier League.
Finally football came back in June with Liverpool drawing 0-0 with Everton in their first game after the restart. They then went on to win 4-0 against Crystal Palace, meaning a draw or Chelsea win in their game against Manchester City on Thursday would cement the championship for the Reds, having played an incredibly dominant campaign this time around, in which they have won 28 of their 31 fixtures so far.
And when the final whistle went at Stamford Bridge with Chelsea beating Manchester City 2-1, there were scenes of jubilation outside Anfield, while a group of Liverpool players gathered to watch the game.
The title is Liverpool’s 19th and first since the 1989-90 season, when they won the First Division under Kenny Dalglish.
“I’m very pleased for everybody connected with the football club,” Dalglish told Sky Sports. “Jurgen has done a fantastic job. The highlight has been the camaraderie within the team and the way everyone has helped the team. Last night’s game (against Crystal Palace) was a huge example of that.“
In winning the league after just 31 games Liverpool have recorded the earliest Premier League victory by matches played, yet football’s 100-day suspension because of coronavirus means it is the latest success by date.
“We had to wait 13 weeks,” Liverpool defender Andrew Robertson said. “It was 13 long weeks with uncertainty but a lot of our fans had to wait 30 years so it was a short time compared to what they’ve had.
“It shows the character in the squad to get so close last time and to go again,” Liverpool midfielder James Milner told Match of the Day. “We have proven we are fuelled by disappointment and learning.”
And that’s what manager Jürgen Klopp had to say after winning the title last night:
Could have done without them…
West Ham returned to London Stadium more than 100 days after their last Premier League game (a 0-1 defeat against Arsenal away).
Well, I had missed PL football, but I could have done without this match… West Ham haven’t improved within these months, and they deservedly lost 0-2 to Wolves.
By the way: Hairdressers still aren’t allowed to work in the UK, and barbers are closed as well, as the pic of West Ham manager Nuno Espírito Santo (above) shows.
But there is hope for Boris and all the others having “bad hair days” every day now:
Hair dressers are expected to reopen from July 4 if the government feels the spread of coronavirus is under control.
As the government has already lowered the five-stage coronavirus alert level from 4 to 3 recently, shaggy haired Brits could get back to their coiffed best soon. However hair dressers will still have to wait until they are allowed to get cutting again.
And when will West Ham be able to get winning again?
Well, in variation of the famous song which Dame Vera Lynn (who sadly passed away these days aged 103) sung during wartime and Queen Elizabeth remembered in a speech on the virus:
“We will win again.”
I hope it’s not too late by then …
Links: https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/11234166/when-hairdressers-barbers-reopen-uk?
End of lockdown in sight: http://digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/data/265/reader/reader.html?social#!preferred/0/package/265/pub/265/page/2/article/53199
Premier League Restarts Tonight
It is almost 100 days since calling off all games which should have been played on the weekend that we would have been to London Stadium watching West Ham v Wolves if Corona had not hit the world. And now, the Premier League is back tonight with two initial games.
Aston Villa is going to face Sheffield United and Manchester City take on Arsenal. At last the Premier League joins Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain and other countries that have already resumed their football leagues. But as with life, there is uncertainty all around. Even uncertainty over what kind of football it will be after a break that lasted longer than the gap between last season and the start of this one.
It will be some kind of a “mini tournament” with a frenzy of 92 games in just 39 days until he end of July and with the FA Cup shoehorned in. There will be no margin for error, Jason Burt writes in The Telegraph. It will be a test of organisation and coaching and we will quickly see which clubs and managers have had a “good” lockdown with their preparations.
The only certainty is that Liverpool, with their 25-point advantage, will win a maiden Premier League title, and their first league crown since 1990. The fight for European places should be fascinating, and the relegation battle including six or maybe even eight clubs will surely go down to the wire.
I’m pleased that football returns tonight, and hope that West Ham will have been well prepared by David Moyes. We will know after tonight‘s Aston Villa game if the Hammers will start into the upcoming nine rounds in 16th or 17th place. With a home win over Sheffield Utd, Villa could leapfrog two of their opponents and get out of the relegation zone from which WHU is only separated by goal difference.
Anyway David Moyes’s men will have to hit the ground running when they commence the restarted campaign with tough matches against higher rated teams as Wolves, Spurs and Chelsea.
Come on you Irons!
All about the return of the game: ▶️The Premier League returns – all you need to know
Rashford 1 Government 0
… that was one of the headlines under which it was reported that now more than a million school children will be given vouchers for free meals over the summer following pressure from 22-year-old England footballer Marcus Rashford.
The Government has announced a new “Covid summer food fund” to cover the six-week summer holiday for children who qualify for free school meals, fending off a looming Tory MP rebellion which was expected in a vote on Tuesday, and easing the plight of the country’s most vulnerable children.
In what has been seen as a policy U-turn by ministers, about 1.3m children will now qualify for the new vouchers. The move came after Therese Coffey, the Work and Pensions Secretary, was criticised for giving a “snarky” response to a tweet by Mr Rashford – who received free school meals himself and had written an open letter in The Times on this topic urging the government to provide for free meals during the summer holidays. “Ending child poverty is a bigger trophy than any in football,“ Manchester United and England forward Marcus Rashford wrote.
The motives behind Rashford’s fight against food poverty are indelibly linked to his own experiences growing up in Manchester, Northern Moor and neighbouring Wythenshawe as one of five children to a loving mother who worked full-time on minimum wage. Rashford’s mother Melanie worked long hours but it was not enough. The family were reliant on food banks, soup kitchens, the generosity of neighbours who would feed Rashford on those occasions when there was not an evening meal on the table and, of course, free school meals.
Rashford’s talent for football was first spotted on the Mersey Bank playing fields with local club, Fletcher Moss Rangers, and brought him to the attention of United, whose academy he joined at eight. Now he is the club’s leading scorer and talisman, and a key figure in Gareth Southgate’s England team. Furthermore the United and England striker has risen to become a very influential voice; an inspiration on and off the pitch; a young, black man proud of his inner city Manchester roots but not a system “designed to fail low-income families” as he so eloquently argued in his emotional open letter to MPs. Rashford’ partnership with FareShare, the food distribution charity, has helped to raise over £20 million to feed three million vulnerable people every week – and shame the Government into coughing up a £120m summer food fund.
Asked if he had lost touch with electorate, Mr Johnson said he had thanked the England star for his campaign – and claimed he only learned of it today.
The victory for Mr Rashford comes as figures laid bare the scale of the damage to the jobs market caused by the lockdown in the UK. Unemployment is rising faster than during the Great Depression. The North East has the highest unemployment rate. Click here to see the British regions hit hardest by the crisis.
Pay plunged in April at the fastest rate on record as a combination of the furlough scheme, wage freezes and cuts to bonuses demolished earnings.
How and why I joined West Ham
How and why I joined West Ham United – Teddy Sheringham and other former West Ham players give a personal insight how they came to play in Claret and Blue:
https://www.whufc.com/news/articles/2020/june/13-june/how-and-why-i-joined-west-ham-united-teddy-sheringham
38 year old Sheringham signed a one year deal with West Ham for the season 2004/05. That was the second consecutive season that West Ham, the club he had supported as a boy growing up in east London, played in the Championship. The Hammers had missed out to get back to the Premier League when they lost in the play-off-Final to Crystal Palace in May 2004. Then manager Alan Pardew phoned Teddy Sheringham who had been with PL Club Portsmouth the season before, and it didn’t take much to convince him to join West Ham.
Sheringham scored in his first West Ham game, went on to net 20 goals that season and helped the Hammers to achieve promotion to the PL (winning the play-offs with a win over Preston Northend). He was named Championship player of the year.
In the top flight, Sheringham would go on to reach another FA Cup Final and become both the Premier League’s oldest outfield player (40 years, 272 days) and oldest player to score in a Premier League match (40 years, 268 days), two records that still stand to this day.
“Bubbles” against Lockdown
“I’m delighted the Prime Minister just announced the Government supports bubbles,” radio presenter, political commentator and West Ham blogger Iain Dale tweeted recently.
However Boris Johnson didn’t talk of West Ham’s song “Bubbles”, but of “social bubbles” that will be allowed from next Saturday. That’s going to be one week prior to the day when this tune will be heard again in London Stadium, when West Ham take on Wolves in their first game of the restart of the Premier League, albeit in an empty ground.
“Too many people are lonely and struggling,” the Prime Minister said and told the people that are in lockdown in the UK since March, that they can go to each other’s houses, stay the night and will not have to maintain two-metre social distancing. From Saturday 13 June, people living alone and single parent households can create a “social bubble” with one other household. This announcement was made by Boris Johnson who is also planning to change other Covid-19 rules. There are plans to scrap the UK’s two-meter-rule, possibly introducing the WHO’s 1 m standard.
The measures introduced since March 23 were some of the most draconian the UK has ever faced and resulted in a huge shift in how people behave. However it took the British government quite a long time until they accepted that the UK had to impose the same kind of measures that had already been in place in other countries.
Similar measures had been imposed in Austria by March 15, more than a week earlier than in the UK. In Austria the measures now have already been eased step by step, beginning from May 1 with the so-called “Lockerungsverordnung” (regulation on relaxing the Covid-19-measures). Now even travelling abroad to neighbouring countries is possible though Austrians will have to wait until June 16 to be able to make holiday in Italy. A stark contrast however to allowing “social bubbles” consisting of two households in the UK.
The initial UK lockdown rules were enacted by new legislation (PDF) that gave the government powers to impose upon people’s freedoms. At the start, lockdown rules said people could only go outside for four reasons (food shopping, exercising alone, medical issues, and providing care) and could not meet with other people. People who were vulnerable were asked to shelter for 12 weeks.
The changes were a stark escalation of the government’s response to the pandemic. On March 16, people had been told to avoid all non-essential contact with others and four days later, on March 20, all bars, pubs, cafes and restaurants were closed. Subsequently all schools and childcare facilities, except for the children of key workers, were closed.
The number of coronavirus deaths in the UK could have been halved if the government had introduced the lockdown a week earlier, according to Prof Neil Ferguson who claimed that an earlier introduction would have saved many lives.
On May 31 the government published new legislation that legally changed the lockdown – this arrived in the form of The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) (Amendment) (No. 3) Regulations 2020.
Last Monday meeting outside in groups of up to six people was allowed by the government provided they are socially distant, but gatherings indoors are still prohibited by the law. The “support bubbles” now allow two households to meet indoors and act as if they live in the same household, making it possible to meet grandparents and to combine single parents with another household. Also couples who did not live in the same household now can be reunited after almost three months of social distancing.
The UK’s lockdown rules, explained ▶️wired.co.uk/article/uk-lockdown
Noch eine Woche ohne Premier League
Nur noch eine Woche, bis auch in England, am 17. Juni, der Re-Start des Fußballs beginnt. Das letzte Match wurde am 9. März zwischen Leicester und Aston Villa gespielt. Die Foxes gewannen ihr Heimspiel an diesem Montag mit 4:0. Seither ruht die Liga “due to Coronavirus” und der Tabellenstand blieb unverändert:
Während der Titelkampf praktisch entschieden ist und Liverpool, das 25 Punkte Vorsprung auf Manchester City hat, nur noch einen Sieg im Stadtderby gegen Everton (am Sonntag, 21. Juni) braucht, um zum ersten Mal seit 1990 als Meister festzustehen, wird es in den verbleibenden neun Runden am Tabellenende noch sehr spannend zugehen.
Voraussichtlich werden es fünf Klubs sein, die im kommenden “relegation dogfight” den Absteiger unter sich ausmachen, denn dem aktuellen Tabellenletzten Norwich (21 Punkte) fehlen doch schon sechs Punkte auf den rettenden 17. Platz, und Southampton als Vierzehnter liegt immerhin fünf Punkte vor dem Fünfzehnten Brighton (29 Punkte).
Von Brighton abwärts liegen die Klubs eng beisammen: West Ham und Watford (27 Punkte) sind nur durch die Tordifferenz vom ersten Abstiegsplatz getrennt, den Bournemouth einnimmt. League Cup-Finalist Aston Villa (25 Punkte) ist Vorletzter, mit einem Spiel weniger liegt man nach Verlustpunkten aber noch vor WHU und Watford. Das Nachtragsspiel, mit dem die Liga am kommenden Mittwoch um 19:00 Uhr (MESZ) startet, bestreitet Villa gegen Sheffield Utd und könnte damit schon Boden gegenüber den anderen “relegation strugglers” gutmachen.
Das sind nun die Spiele der sechs Klubs im Tabellenkeller bis zum Saisonende (die Gegner aus den “top ten” sind im Folgenden in Blockbuchstaben geschrieben; Tabellenplatz und bisherige Punkte sind neben dem Klubnamen angegeben. Zur Einstimmung und Erinnerung an die Form der Klubs vor der Unterbrechung sind auch die Resultate der beiden letzten gespielten Runden “home” und “away” mit dem Ergebnis verzeichnet)
15. Brighton (29)
Home v Palace 0:1; ARSENAL; MAN UTD; LIVERPOOL; MAN CITY; Newcastle
Away v WOLVES 0:0; LEICESTER; Norwich; Southampton; BURNLEY
16. West Ham (27)
Home v Southampton 3:1; WOLVES; CHELSEA; BURNLEY; Watford; Villa
Away v ARSENAL 0:1; SPURS; Newcastle; Norwich, MAN UTD
17. Watford (27)
Home v LIVERPOOL 3:0; LEICESTER; S’hampton; Norwich; Newcastle; MAN CITY
Away v Palace 0:1; BURNLEY; CHELSEA; West Ham; ARSENAL
18. Bournemouth (27)
Home v CHELSEA 2:2; Palace; Newcastle; SPURS; LEICESTER; Southampton
Away v LIVERPOOL 1-2; WOLVES; MAN UTD; Everton; MAN CITY
19. Aston Villa (25)
Home v CHELSEA; WOLVES; MAN UTD; Palace; SHEFF UTD; ARSENAL
Away v LEICESTER 0:4; Newcastle; LIVERPOOL; Everton; West Ham
20. Norwich (21)
Home v LEICESTER 1:0; S’hampton; Everton; Brighton; West Ham; BURNLEY
Away v SHEFF UTD 0:1; ARSENAL; Watford; CHELSEA; MAN CITY
Music Is Back!
Daniel Barenboim und die Wiener Philharmoniker im Musikverein
Nicht nur der Fußball rollt wieder – auch die ersten klassischen Konzerte gibt es wieder in Wien! Im Musikverein dirigierte Daniel Barenboim Mozart und Beethovens Fünfte.
Endlich.
PL Restart Dates Confirmed
West Ham United confirmed the Club’s first three fixtures on the restart of the 2019/20 Premier League season. After two outstanding games involving League Cup finalists Aston Villa and Manchester City are played on Wednesday 17 June, the first full match round will begin on Friday 19 June. Due to COVID-19, games will take place without supporters present and all 92 remaining matches will be broadcasted live in the UK. BBC Radio 5 Live and talkSPORT will also provide live radio commentaries for all the remaining matches.
No players have tested positive for Coronavirus in the last round of testing in the Premier League. Therefore it seems to be no risk to resume playing games in the Premier League – suspended since 13 March – albeit behind closed doors on 17 June when Aston Villa host Sheffield United at 18:00 BST andManchester City entertain Arsenal at 20:15.
Liverpool are 25 points clear at the top of the table, while Bournemouth, Aston Villa and Norwich City are in the relegation zone.
There are 92 games remaining this season.
West Ham will return to action with the visit of Wolverhampton Wanderers to London Stadium on Saturday 20 June, with kick-off at 5.30pm.
David Moyes’ squad then will make the short trip to Tottenham Hotspur on Tuesday 23 June, with kick-off at 8.15pm.
Thirdly, Chelsea will visit London Stadium on Wednesday 1 July at 8.15pm. The Irons will not have a fixture over the weekend of 27/28 June due to Chelsea’s participation in the Emirates FA Cup quarter-finals.
All three fixtures will be broadcast live in the UK by Sky Sports and across the world by the Premier League’s international broadcast partners.
West Ham United ensured its fans of the huge disappointment that the supporters will not be able to give their passionate backing to the team in person at London Stadium and on their travels, but that they were at the heart of their thinking. Dates and kick-off times for West Ham’s final six fixtures of the 2019/20 Premier League season would be confirmed in due course.
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