Football: Man City make an ominous start
Coming only three weeks after the World Cup final, Sunday’s Community Shield felt “indecently early”, said Oliver Kay in The Times. “Yet Manchester City looked ready for it, even if Chelsea did not.” With a brace of goals from Sergio Agüero, the Premier League champions eased to a 2-0 victory. Most ominously for their rivals, City thrived despite missing many of their best players: such as Kevin De Bruyne, David Silva and Raheem Sterling. In the absence of those linchpins, two young midfielders, Bernardo Silva and Phil Foden, started the match, said Sami Mokbel in the Daily Mail. Both were superb – particularly Foden, an 18-year-old from Stockport. He dazzled with “killer” passes; he made a “piercing” run through Chelsea’s defence before setting up the first goal. Here is a central midfielder who can “retain possession under any circumstances” – exactly the kind of player England lacked at the World Cup.
This was the first big match for Chelsea’s new manager, Maurizio Sarri, said James Gheerbrant in The Times. The Italian is “wildly superstitious”: he has been known to scatter salt on the pitch. He is also something of a genius. Following a slow start to his career – he had a day job as a currency trader until he was 40 – he made Napoli “one of the most watchable teams in Europe”. Sarri’s possession-based football can appear “breathtakingly free-form”, but is actually based on endless training: he is nicknamed “Mister 33”, for his 33 set-piece routines. Yet the loss to City shows Sarri has his work cut out for him, said Sam Wallace in The Daily Telegraph. It wasn’t even clear this week if the club would hold on to two of its stars, Eden Hazard and Thibaut Courtois. And it doesn’t help that Sarri is Chelsea’s eighth manager in a decade. After so much upheaval, it’s uncertain how many players are “ready for another tactical regime change”.