Cricket: Stokes steals the show
Leeds are a big club with a big history, said Luke Edwards in The Daily Telegraph. As recently as 2001, they were playing in the Champions League semi-finals. But they were “ambitious, too ambitious”. Having borrowed heavily, their debt grew “out of control” – and after they were relegated, in 2004, they had to sell their best players, their stadium and their training ground. One irresponsible owner followed another, and in 2007 the club went into administration and was relegated again, to League One. Even when Leeds returned to the Championship, in 2010, they found it hard going, said David Conn in The Guardian. They went through nine managers in five years. But when Andrea
Few men in modern cricket have won as much acclaim as Ben Stokes, said Mike Atherton in The Times. And England’s victory against West Indies in the second Test offered yet another demonstration of the all-rounder’s “talent, versatility and extraordinary drive”. As a bowler, he took two important wickets. But it was his batting that stole the show. He started slowly, grinding out 176 runs in the first innings, his second-highest score in Test cricket. But in the second innings, he shifted gears, smashing 78 runs from just 57 balls. We already knew that Stokes was England’s best all-rounder; in his current form, he might just be “England’s best batsman”.
Equally encouraging was the performance of Dom Sibley, England’s 24-year-old opener, said Andy Bull in The Guardian. For too long, England’s top order have “squandered their wickets like sailors on leave do their wages”. But in his eighth Test, “Sibley batted. And batted. And batted.”
Even the most ardent Formula One fan may be grateful that Covid-19 has made this year’s championship “a much-shortened affair”, said Alasdair Reid in The Times. After Lewis Hamilton’s storming victory in the Hungarian
Grand Prix, the third race of the year, this season “already looks worryingly short of dramatic potential”: it is “devilishly difficult” to see how the British driver can be beaten.
It’s no surprise that Hamilton and his Mercedes teammate, Valtteri Bottas, are dominating the competition. But it is surprising that Red Bull and
Ferrari – the other two members of the sport’s “big three” – are failing to give them “any sort of run for their money”. Red Bull‘s cars have been known for their grip, so they should have thrived at the twisty Hungaroring. Yet their drivers, Max Verstappen and Alex Albon, seemed to be “wrestling” with their vehicles.
Approaching Bielsa was a very long shot indeed, said Adam Pope on BBC Sport. After all, the Argentinian – an Olympic gold medal winner with Argentina – was one of the most “revered” managers in the world. But he came on board, and the Leeds fans quickly fell in love with “Bielsa ball”: fast, direct-attacking football, with an emphasis on high pressing. And they warmed to Bielsa himself, said Phil Hay on The Athletic. A fiery character, “El Loco” is famously eccentric: his attention to detail is almost insane. Before his first match, a pre-season friendly against a lowly non-league side, he demanded to see videos of his opponents’ matches against other non-league teams. Bielsa asks a lot from his players, said Louise Taylor in The Observer. He sets each of them a weight target; if they weigh any more, they don’t play. He now has a group of footballers who “relentlessly impose their game”. Ben White, on loan from Brighton, “commands” the defence; Pablo Hernández, a Spanish attacking midfielder, is the side’s “creative talisman” The big question now is how Bielsa will fare in the Premier League. Newly promoted teams tend to play cautiously, but this season, Chris Wilder’s “ultra-audacious” Sheffield United have blazed a different path. “As Bielsa would surely agree, fortune sometimes really does favour the brave.”
His century came off a whopping 312 balls; by the time he was bowled out, for 120 runs, he had been batting for more than nine hours – having faced more balls than “five of his recent predecessors did in their entire careers as opening batsmen”. Sibley isn’t an elegant cricketer; in fact, his technique is “one of the ugliest” in recent memory. But he has “a clear sense of what he wants to do and how he plans to do it”.
That makes him a perfect fit for this England side, said Tim Wigmore in The Sunday Telegraph. Under the previous head coach, Trevor Bayliss, a premium was placed on the kind of aggressive batting seen in white-ball cricket. But Chris Silverwood, who took over last autumn, is encouraging his side to score more slowly. That doesn’t make them boring: in Bayliss’s final 22 Tests, they didn’t once score 400 runs in their first innings; under Silverwood, they’ve done so four times in eight Tests. His approach is producing far more consistent cricket.
Formula One: whatever happened to Ferrari?
But the big let-down is Ferrari, said Giles Richards in The Guardian. They are really off the pace. Currently they sit in fifth place in the constructors’ standings – their worst start to a season since 2009. For a team with their glittering history, “struggling in the midfield is underperforming on an epic scale”.
Last year, Ferrari could at least boast the fastest car on the grid. But there were suspicions that the team’s engine was breaking the rules – and ever since they’ve amended it, in order to avoid any accusations that they were bending the rules, that “speed advantage has disappeared” and their drivers, Sebastian Vettel and Charles Leclerc, are clearly finding their current car “tricky to handle”. In recent seasons, Ferrari’s challenge was to “take the fight to Mercedes at the front”. This year, “it is to merely catch the front-runners”.