New season, new things: extreme non-football actions and children on the pitch | Max Rushden

New season, new things: extreme non-football actions and children on the pitch | Max Rushden

The Premier League is only two games old but already we have wrestling penalties and golascoring teens invading our screens New season. New stuff. New camera angles. Director: “And cut to Ref Cam.” Suddenly we are transported from the gliding calm of a wide angle to GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64, except you are not James Bond, you are Simon Hooper peering up at a strange angle of Harvey Barnes. Stop looking around Simon, stand still Simon. As one correspondent to Guardian Football Weekly suggested, it’s the Professional Game Match Officials’ tribute to Uncut Gems. New season – wildly terrible predictions . My Premier League winners Manchester City won the title at Wolves on the opening weekend but are now sensationally out of the race after being outplayed by Spurs . Not sure anyone predicted Nuno Espírito Santo to be leading the sack race (nb: written before Grimsby ). Who had Ange to lead Nottingham Forest to Europa League glory? Continue reading...

Chess: Wesley So wins $350,000 Sinquefield Cup as world champion Gukesh fails again

Chess: Wesley So wins $350,000 Sinquefield Cup as world champion Gukesh fails again

Every game among the top seven finishers was halved, despite a regulation in the event forbidding agreed draws The $350,000 Sinquefield Cup is one of the most iconic annual events in the chess calendar. Part of the Grand Chess Tour and named after the St Louis billionaire Rex Sinquefield, who has been the most generous individual sponsor in all chess history, it will be remembered for Fabiano Caruana’s 7/7 start in 2014 and his record 3098 tournament performance, for Ding Liren’s victory ahead of Magnus Carlsen in 2019, and, most of all, for the controversial 2022 Carlsen-Hans Niemann alleged cheating scandal. For 2025, the organisers introduced a four-player Tour Final at São Paulo next month, and the jockeying for position for that dominated the action. At the end, Caruana and Wesley So (US) and Praggnanandhaa Rameshbabu (India) tied with 5.5/9, ahead of Levon Aronian (US) 5, Maxime Vachier-Lagrave (France), Jan-Krzysztof Duda (Poland) and Sam Sevian (US) 4.5, the world champion Gukesh Dommaraju (India) 4, Alireza Firouzja (France) 3.5, Nodirbek Abdusattorov (Uzbekistan) 2.5. The first three plus Vachier-Lagrave got the final qualification spots, but So missed out due to sub-par performances earlier in the Tour, while Gukesh again disappointed. Continue reading...

Lindberg & Aho: Clarinet Concertos album review – Julian Bliss’s performances are immaculate

Lindberg & Aho: Clarinet Concertos album review – Julian Bliss’s performances are immaculate

(Signum) With Taavi Oramo (also a clarinettist) conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony, Bliss is virtuosic in these two technically demanding but approachable concertos Composed just a few years apart, these impressive Finnish clarinet concertos were inspired by the playing of two of the finest clarinettists of our time, both Nordic. Magnus Lindberg’s concerto was composed in 2002 for his friend Kari Kriikku, while Kalevi Aho’s work was commissioned for the Swedish player Martin Fröst, who gave the first performance in London in 2006. In some respects, the two pieces are strikingly similar; both are cast in five movements, and both make enormous demands on the soloist, which include multiphonics, passage-work that requires fearsomely accurate articulation, and sustained passages in the highest, most treacherous register of their instruments. Both works are wonderfully approachable, though Aho’s work is the less adventurous, his orchestral writing more motoric, his gestures more rhetorical and fundamentally tonal than Lindberg’s, in which references to earlier clarinet solos, from Debussy to Gershwin, are cunningly secreted. Continue reading...