Liverpool and Carlo Ancelotti share plenty of history, and they will meet again in club football’s biggest game on Saturday night for the #UCL final 🔴⚪ #LFC#RMCF
We’ve explored the shared destiny of the club and the manager 👇🧵
Ancelotti was always supposed to end up living in Liverpool. Once he did, he found that he loved the coastline 🏖️
‘There’s a beautiful beach,' he said. ‘You can walk all the way to Formby on the coastal path. There are the Gormley statues, 100 of them. I really like it.'
Since the final he lost with AC Milan in Istanbul when Liverpool came from 3-0 down to win on penalties, Ancelotti's fate had been to end up in Liverpool 🔴
That night his and the Reds' respective destinies became one, bound by the twisted metaphysics of football.
'It’s always been a club that excites me,' he said years later. 🇮🇹
'The You’ll Never Walk Alone they sing is incredible. Nobody sings an anthem like Liverpool fans. Sometimes I look for it on the internet and put it on for my friends. It’s something really unique, seriously.’
The thrill and beauty of football — and the fact it continues endlessly, constantly — means that so many players and coaches like Ancelotti become locked into shared histories with different places and people around the world 🌍
Ultimately Ancelotti ended up with an L postcode not because he was coaching Liverpool, finally taking the place in the Anfield dugout which seemed to be drawing him slowly in over the years like a magnet, but instead to unexpectedly be managing Everton 🔵
He had come relatively close to the Liverpool job previously, in 2015, when Jurgen Klopp decided to end his sabbatical early in order to replace the sacked Brendan Rodgers. Had Klopp opted to complete the year out he planned on, Ancelotti was second favourite and out of work 🇮🇹
Since Klopp took over at Anfield, he has not struggled against any adversary as much as Ancelotti.
The 62-year-old stifled Liverpool’s searing attack with Napoli, and took Everton’s first win at Anfield in over two decades 👏
Ancelotti is one of the most ubiquitous men in contemporary football, combining a world-class ability to coach elite level footballers with an elegant demeanour, understated sarcasm, and borderline sentient eyebrows for a rare air of both warmth and pristine professionalism 🤨
That so many of the defining moments of Ancelotti's career and Liverpool's modern history have dovetailed is in part pure luck, part down to the consistent sporting excellence of both, and part that sheer spiritual power football has to pull the same protagonists together ⚽
On Saturday night a new entry in the shared history of Liverpool and Ancelotti will be written. Regardless of who takes home the trophy, the glue that binds the two together will only set harder.
You can read the full feature from @_dan_austin here 👇
In Kyiv, Gareth Bale swivelled rearward, propelled his left leg at a right-angle towards the heavens, and hit a shot into the top corner so unerring, so perfectly timed, so wrought with wrath, that it could have burnt a searing hole through a literal iron curtain ⚽
As football analysis and punditry have evolved in the information age, elite-level players are increasingly judged on their data, the numbers they produce both in front of goal and in their season-long all-around play, rather than on their moments of brilliance 📈
Chelsea legend John Terry hits back at Rio Ferdinand after he named Virgil van Dijk and Jaap Stam ahead of him when ranking the best defenders in Premier League history ⚽️
Speaking to Van Dijk on his YouTube show ‘Between the Lines’, Ferdinand and the Dutchman discussed how the Liverpool star compares to the best centre-backs in the history of the league 🏆⚽️
Van Dijk put himself up there with the greats after transforming Liverpool’s fortunes since his £75million arrival from Southampton in 2018 ↗️
However, he has won just one Premier League, which pales into comparison to the likes of Ferdinand and Terry 🏆
Liverpool and Real Madrid will start the #UCL final with systems which look similar on paper, but which hide so much more beneath the surface 🔴⚪ #LFC#RMCF
We’ve analysed both sides' setups, to find out where the match could be won and lost 👇🧵
Both will ostensibly look the same, bar the colour of their kits — 22 men, each 11 arranged in a 4-3-3 in front of their respective goalkeeper.
But the differences between those 4-3-3s mean both sides are going to have plenty of opportunity to exploit one another's weaknesses ⚽
For Real, the key to their hybrid 4-3-3/4-4-2 is Federico Valverde 🇺🇾
He is asked to give width on the right wing when his team are in possession, while dropping deeper and narrower in defensive transitions to become an extra midfielder when Liverpool are have the ball.
Much will depend on the performance of the Ferrari engine Alfa Romeo runs, but the team has been consistently dropping backwards for the past few years and the faster times they set were likely done on low fuel.
9. Williams 🔵
Williams lost an entire day of testing due to the FW44 catching fire. Aside from that, the Williams seemed pretty reliable and Alex Albon in particular put in some solid long runs, but there was nothing to suggest especially strong pace from the FW44 in Bahrain.
Pierre Gasly, the French driver who will lead the Alpha Tauri team into the 2022 season when it begins in Bahrain on the weekend of 18 March, joined the F1 grid at 21 and has had to contend with significant strife in his time in the sport.
‘Over the last five years I think I’ve grown up a lot, from the different experiences I’ve had to go through, whether it was professionally or personally,’ Gasly exclusively told Metro.
Novak Djokovic has won his appeal against the Australian government's decision to cancel his visa 🎾🇷🇸
But how exactly did the Serb manage to stop his deportation? We took a look at the key issue the judge's decision hinged on 👇
The Serb’s visa was cancelled by the government upon arrival for this month’s Australian Open, after determining that the player’s recent Covid-19 infection did not sufficiently meet the requirements for him to be allowed to enter the country unvaccinated 💉
Djokovic spent the weekend in a hotel for visa detainees, while his lawyers put together a legal case designed to overturn the ruling and allow him to compete in the tournament which he has won on nine previous occasions.