Marcus Rashford: the making of a food superhero

Coaches, charity workers – and the footballer himself – reveal what drives the man who twice tackled Boris Johnson on child hunger and won

Show me the child at seven and I will show you the man, the old wisdom says. But in football terms, you never know, not really, which kids are going to make it as players at that age and which are not. Still, looking back at his memories of Marcus Rashford, Dave Horrocks, his first football coach, does remember one thing about him very clearly.

Rashford had first come along to Horrocks’s community club, Fletcher Moss Rangers, as a scrawny five-year-old. From the beginning, Horrocks recalls, he was the kid who left absolutely every atom of energy out on the pitch. Whenever the coach gave him a lift home from training, Rashford would get in the back of the car and – unlike other livewire boys – immediately fall into a deep sleep. When the car pulled up outside his house, Rashford would then jump out, refreshed, pick up a ball, and start practising some more on the patch of grass outside.

Continue reading...

Festivals, holidays, Euro 2020… will summer’s big events still go ahead?

Burgeoning hopes for a normal sporting and cultural calendar are now in question again as infections increase

As Covid-19 cases rise across the world, hopes that life could get back to some semblance of normality by summer are fading. What chance do we have of going to a festival, flying off for a holiday or attending a major sporting event?

Continue reading...

Maradona lifts the World Cup: David Yarrow’s best photograph

‘I bribed a stadium guard with whisky and got dead close just as he was lifted on to another player’s shoulders. It was like a biblical scene. He looked magnificent’

On the final day of exams at Edinburgh University in the summer of 1986, most students partied, but I flew directly to Mexico City. I was 20 years old and studying business and economics while taking photos on the side. I’d never been to the Americas before, and I wasn’t at all a good photographer; in fact, I was incredibly average.

I arrived at the 1986 World Cup under the guise of being a freelance photojournalist, but I was a Scotland fan first and foremost – they always used to say that Scottish journalists are just fans with typewriters. I did have a press pass that I’d managed to blag off the Times, which granted me access to the media pen, but I was much more interested in watching football than taking photographs of it. There was a moment in the first round of a match with Uruguay when Scotland missed an open goal. Back at the Times they were watching the TV coverage of the game and could see the striker with his head in his hands, and in the background me with my head in my hands and with my camera nowhere near the moment. And they thought: “Well this guy, Yarrow, he’s not focused on the task at all.”

Continue reading...

How You’ll Never Walk Alone came to define Liverpool FC’s spirit

The Rodgers and Hammerstein number became a football anthem via the late Gerry Marsden, bringing euphoric determination to every era of Liverpool FC from Shankly to Klopp

“It never stops creating goosebumps,” is how Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp describes it. “It never stops feeling really special.”

Our team’s anthem – Gerry and the Pacemakers’ You’ll Never Walk Alone – was not the reason Klopp came to Liverpool, but he’s talked about the moment he first heard it ringing out around the ground, and how that reassured him that he’d made the right choice to move to Merseyside. Indeed, if you could condense Klopp’s entire philosophy into one song – sticking together when times get tough, trust in the abilities of others, a conviction that better days are ahead – it would be You’ll Never Walk Alone. It’s been the club’s anthem since it topped the UK charts in 1963, providing joy and comfort during the triumphs and tragedies of the decades that have followed. Fans are now mourning the death, at 78, of the man who sang it – Gerry Marsden.

Continue reading...

The Guardian Footballer of the Year Marcus Rashford: ‘My mum is everything’

The Manchester United forward reflects on an extraordinary year where he improved the lives of millions of people – all, he says, inspired by his mother, Mel

The Guardian Footballer of the Year is an award given to a player who has done something remarkable, whether by overcoming adversity, helping others or setting a sporting example by acting with exceptional honesty.

Marcus Rashford is mulling over a quite extraordinary 2020 when his words and deeds have made him the only choice to be named as the Guardian’s Footballer of the Year. The Manchester United and England forward has excelled on the pitch, as usual, but the day job no longer defines him. How can it do so when he has done more than anyone to look after the poorest and most vulnerable children in the United Kingdom?

Continue reading...

Football, flights and food: how the EU reshaped Britain

As Brexit’s tangible effects kick in, we look at the impact the EU’s most far-reaching project has had on British society

Historians of the future will judge the politics of the half century before the Brexit transition ended on 1 January 2021. What, though, of social and cultural historians, those who study how we live?

Perhaps the most symbolic cultural artefacts of the last 50 years will turn out not to be a blue flag but a bottle of Blue Nun, a block of mozzarella, a Ryanair boarding printout or a ticket to a Bayern Munich v Manchester City football game.

Continue reading...

Far-right Israeli football fans rebel over Beitar Jerusalem’s new Arab owner

Hardcore group threaten boycott and hold protest at training session after Abu Dhabi sheikh buys 50% stake in top team

An Israeli premier league football team whose most hardcore fans chant “Death to Arabs” faces a crisis of introspection following a landmark deal that saw the club part-sold to an unlikely new owner: an Arab sheikh.

Beitar Jerusalem – the only Israeli team never to have fielded an Arab player – has been grappling with the news that, as of this month, a member of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Nahyan, now owns 50% of the club.

Continue reading...

Maradonaland: Naples plans statues and museum to honour ‘Saint Diego’

City’s murals of Maradona have become pilgrimage sites since footballer’s death in November

A month since the death of Diego Armando Maradona and the southern Italian city of Naples is looking more like a Maradonaland each day.

After renaming Napoli football club’s San Paolo Stadium and a train station in his honour this month, local authorities are planning a large museum, commissioning statues and dedicating an entire square to the Argentinian who took the city’s football team to glory and is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time.

Continue reading...

Gérard Houllier, former Liverpool and France manager, dies aged 73

  • Houllier had undergone heart surgery in Paris before his death
  • Michael Owen leads tributes to treble-winning manager

Liverpool have paid tribute to their former manager Gérard Houllier after his death was confirmed at the age of 73.

RMC sport and the sports daily L’Equipe confirmed that he had died after having a heart operation in Paris, with Liverpool issuing a statement in recognition of the manager who led them to the FA Cup, League Cup and Uefa Cup treble in 2000-01.

Continue reading...

The Maradona and child: Naples honours its hero with nativity figurine

A new addition to the Christmas scene in artisan shops shows city’s love for footballer

The southern Italian city of Naples usually enjoys a fervent lead-up to Christmas, with one street in particular – Via San Gregorio Armeno – buzzing with people buying handcrafted cribs and terracotta figurines for their nativity scenes at home.

There is also much anticipation each year over which new figurine they can buy. Traditionally, it was a shepherd or an animal that would join baby Jesus, Mary and Joseph, but now it is usually a figurine of a personality of that year. Recently crafted statuettes include tributes to doctors and nurses who have worked throughout the pandemic as well as ones of the US president-elect Joe Biden and his deputy, Kamala Harris.

Continue reading...

‘Now it’s the girls’ dream’: Mara Gómez on becoming Argentina’s first trans footballer

Gómez made her professional debut this month, and wants to break barriers in a place where football and identity are entwined

To get a call up to your club’s first team is every Argentinian boy’s dream. Or so the traditional tango goes.

“Now it’s the girls’ dream … too,” Mara Gómez, who became the first trans footballer to play in a top-flight Argentinian league earlier this week, tells the Guardian. Gómez signed a contract with Villa San Carlos in the recently professionalized women’s Primera División, after years of journeying through the amateur leagues.

Continue reading...

Paolo Rossi: Italy’s World Cup hero whose quick feet earned redemption | Nicky Bandini

The forward’s goals made him a national hero in 1982 after a two-year ban threatened to destroy his playing career

Paolo Rossi scored more than 150 goals in his career but if you wanted to understand the brilliance of a player whose death at the age of 64 sent Italy into mourning on Thursday, it may be enough to watch the one he grabbed in the 1982 World Cup final.

Or, more realistically, perhaps a slow-motion replay. The Italy striker does not appear to have position on his West Germany opponent Karlheinz Förster as Claudio Gentile prepares to send in a cross from the right. Only with repeat viewings does it become clear Rossi has started his run a frame or two sooner, building velocity, anticipating the delivery before it has even been dispatched. He beats Förster, and his own team-mate Antonio Cabrini, to the ball by a fraction, heading in from close range.

Continue reading...

Against all odds: South Sudan’s daring drive on women’s football

The country’s FA is launching an ambitious strategy for a sport that has been considered a taboo for girls

South Sudan gained independence in 2011 and its history is so short that it is a regular low-scoring answer on the popular quiz show Pointless. Much less trivially, for a majority of its existence the country has been in civil war, with peace and a new national unity government in place only from February of this year.

For a country clawing its way back from the devastating effects of a conflict that has seen hundreds of thousands killed and 1.5 million internally displaced, where nearly half of girls are married by 18, child marriages are increasing and sexual violence was used tactically during the war , it would be easy to assume that football, let alone women’s football, would be nonexistent.

Continue reading...

‘Singing and dancing to their deaths’: football’s forgotten tragedy

In 1971, an Old Firm derby at Ibrox ended with the death of 66 fans as they celebrated a late goal. John Hodgman survived the terrifying crush and, 50 years on, asks how Rangers avoided taking responsibility

Rangers and Celtic, the dominant Glasgow football clubs, go back a long way in their sectarian hatred. The deep and violent rivalry between the traditionally Protestant Rangers and Celtic’s overwhelmingly Catholic support continues today, with total segregation at clashes between the two sides, known as the “Old Firm”.

Born a Protestant in 1947 and raised by Catholics in Glasgow, I had something of a conflicted childhood. Catholic kids had chapel and a separate education, while my birthright decreed I that was sent to Sunday School and got to wear my blue scarf to see “the Gers” at Ibrox Park every fortnight.

Continue reading...

Papa Bouba Diop, Senegal’s World Cup hero and FA Cup winner, dies aged 42

  • Former midfielder dies after reportedly suffering long illness
  • Diop played for Fulham and Portsmouth after 2002 heroics

Papa Bouba Diop, the former Senegal midfielder who scored the first goal of the 2002 World Cup against France, has died at the age of 42.

World football’s governing body posted a tribute to Diop on Twitter. “Fifa is saddened to learn of the passing of Senegal legend Papa Bouba Diop,” Sunday’s statement read. “Once a World Cup hero, always a World Cup hero.”

Continue reading...

Diego Maradona’s personal doctor denies responsibility for death

Leopoldo Luque in tears after officials search his home and office in Buenos Aires

Diego Maradona’s personal physician has denied responsibility for the former footballer’s death after police raided his home and surgery on Sunday, seizing laptops, medical records and mobile devices.

Argentinian media reported that police were trying to establish if there was negligence in Maradona’s treatment and that searches of premises belonging to the neurosurgeon Leopoldo Luque were carried out as part of an investigation into involuntary manslaughter.

Continue reading...