Football

Poland’s manager, Michael Probierz, wore a shapeless tweed-ish suit with bulging waistcoat and, when the Dutch scored their winner, had about him the demeanour of a dispossessed country squire who has just seen Angela Rayner walking up the drive with her canvassing team. He had a right to be disappointed. The Poles have been written off by everybody, as they usually are, but perhaps deserved a point from a Dutch side which combined the familiar flair going forward with the familiar frailties in defence. Poland took the lead, conceded, but for much of the second half ran the Dutch ragged, until Wout Weghorst found space inside the Free Polish Corridor

The provisional England squad for the Euros unveiled by manager Gareth Southgate contains one notable omission: Jordan Henderson. That’s a big surprise, not because the midfielder deserves to be on the plane to Germany this summer, but for what it says about the thinking of the normally ultra-loyal Southgate, who is often accused of picking his personal favourites for the squad, regardless of club form. His decision to omit Henderson and some other under-performing England stalwarts sends a strong message to all the players. The England manager had this to say about why he left Henderson out: ‘The determining factor was the injury he picked up in the last camp.

I blame Thierry Henry and I never blame Thierry for anything. He’s funny, charming and was a majestic footballer. But it was his outrageous handball assist for a France goal against the Republic of Ireland in 2009 that ushered in VAR – Video Assistant Referee – technology to rescue on-field refs from ‘clear and obvious’ errors. VAR was meant to end debates over refereeing decisions. Yet this form of VAR, usually a man in a ref’s outfit sitting behind a bank of screens in an industrial unit near Heathrow, has caused carnage in the Premier League. Some decisions take five minutes while fans chant obscenities. Football’s many Luddites blame the

A kiss is just a kiss, no? But when it’s Jenni Hermoso, the forward of the victorious Spanish women’s football team, on the receiving end, and the president of the Spanish football federation, Luis Rubiales, doing the kissing, and it’s during the official post-match ceremony in front of an interested global audience… it’s different.  Immediately afterwards, Miss Hermoso declared that she ‘didn’t like it’. Rubiales was defiant. ‘It was a kiss between two friends celebrating something,’ he declared, calling his critics ‘idiots and stupid people’. He may have had in mind the minister of equality in Spain’s caretaker government, Irene Montero, who described the kiss as ‘a form of sexual

Wild abandon Sir: As upsetting and pointless as is the National Trust’s cancelling of the fishing lease on the River Test at Mottisfont Abbey (Letters, 19 August), it is all of a piece with the way the National Trust is going. On the 13,000-acre Wallington Estate in Northumberland, the Trust has recently spent a small fortune elaborately fencing off 50 acres to release beavers on one of the two farms they have recently taken out of agricultural production. They trumpet their intention to create ‘Wild Wallington’ by abandoning it to nature and planting trees on as much of the estate’s farmland as they can. The farms at Wallington were wrested

Well, that’s the end of that. Football, like an unrepentant runaway, stubbornly refuses to come home. Spain, deservedly probably, edged the thrilling, almost unbearably tense final and England will return to a warm, if not ecstatic, reception. England’s first football World Cup final in 57 years was undoubtedly that rarest of phenomena these days: a truly national event, with a TV audience likely to set a record for any female sports broadcast. It will also open a conversation about the importance of and future of women’s football. What should that conversation be like? I have a few suggestions and a few appeals.  For a start, can we stop comparing the

Oxford City vs Rochdale at Court Place Farm doesn’t have quite the same ring as Chelsea vs Liverpool at Stamford Bridge, but last Saturday’s match was important all the same. At this level, you feel part of the match, which never happens in an executive box at the Emirates ‘The Hoops’, Oxford’s oldest football club, founded in 1882 when Gladstone was prime minister and Old Etonians won the FA Cup, were playing their first ever home game in the fifth tier of English football. Rochdale, whose 102-year membership of the Football League ended in May, were playing their first away game in the Vanarama National League. Seven hundred and eighty-one