Culture
Kylian Mbappe’s night to forget: That tackle, a missed penalty and attitude questions
Liverpool ran roughshod over Real Madrid in the Champions League on Wednesday, leaving Carlos Ancelotti’s side — particularly Kylian Mbappe — hurt.
At the club, the fans and the media agreed that, with Vinicius Junior absent through injury, this was Mbappe’s day to prove his worth to his new club after a mixed start to the season.
But he did not. Quite the opposite, as he missed the penalty that could have brought his team back into the game.
His plight was summed up at the final whistle, seconds after he had lost possession for the 15th time in a sequence that ended with an amazing Thibaut Courtois save to stop Luis Diaz from making it 3-0. The Frenchman stood for a few moments with his hands on his hips before being the first player to reach the dressing room, crestfallen and consoled on his way by team-mate Jesus Vallejo and assistant manager Davide Ancelotti.
Losing the battle with Bradley
Before his move to Real Madrid was announced, there was debate among fans and in the media about how Mbappe might fit in. The main concern is that his preferred position, on the left, is already occupied by Vinicius Jr, a player rated as the second-best in the world by the Ballon d’Or judges.
The Brazilian started the season on the wing but at Leganes on Sunday, in an attempt to improve the Frenchman’s fortunes, Ancelotti switched their positions.
With Vinicius Jr injured for the trip to Anfield, Mbappe’s area of greatest impact was cleared. And opposite him was Conor Bradley, who was playing just his fourth Champions League game and his first as a starter.
Although Bradley received help from his team-mates, Mbappe continually failed one-on-one with him and against other opponents.
In the opening four minutes, he had the first two losses, celebrated with jubilation by the home fans, who whistled at him throughout. The first mistake led to a Liverpool chance, too, with Raul Asencio clearing off the line.
One of the most significant images came in the 32nd minute, when he challenged Bradley in a race he would have been expected to win easily, but lost. Anfield celebrated it like a goal.
Mbappe finished with just one shot on target (the saved penalty) and another blocked, three successful dribbles (the most, along with Brahim Diaz) out of six, a 75 per cent passing success rate (the lowest outfielder), zero chances created, 15 possessions lost and three recoveries. His erratic display is illustrated in The Athletic’s player dashboard below.
The missed penalty
Mbappe was presented with an opportunity in the second half to change the script.
Eight minutes after going 1-0 down to Alexis Mac Allister’s goal, a combination between substitutes Dani Ceballos and Lucas Vazquez ended in a penalty for a foul on Vazquez. Without Vinicius Jr, there was no doubt the penalty taker would be Mbappe.
Antonio Rudiger stayed close to the ball and his team-mate during the VAR check, making sure no one disturbed him. But when Mbappe stepped up to face Caoimhin Kelleher, Liverpool’s academy goalkeeper came out on top.
Caoimhin Kelleher denies Kylian Mbappé from the spot! 😳
📺 @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/fr45wUF2Cj
— Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) November 27, 2024
Mbappe reacted by putting his hands to his head, though he was a little less expressive afterwards. Briefly, he thought he might have another chance, waiting to hear whether the penalty would be retaken if the goalkeeper had stepped off his line, only to be disappointed again.
A third of his goals this season — three out of nine — have come from penalties. But this was not his night.
Is Mbappe’s attitude an issue?
Body language can only tell us so much but Mbappe’s gestures have not been giving a good impression for some time.
He looked lacking in confidence as he went to the changing room at half-time. After those minutes inside, before returning to the pitch, the cameras caught him apart from a group of team-mates, as if distant, while Jude Bellingham was leading the way, giving directions and encouragement.
Mbappe’s frustration could be seen after Cody Gakpo’s goal made it 2-0 with 14 minutes remaining, protesting to the referee about a possible offside.
Just before that, there had been a moment that reflected his impotence, losing a ball from Luka Modric’s short corner and losing a race back to regain possession.
Many fans also criticised him for his attitude after the game, not going to greet the away stand. He also did not show his face in front of the media or the mixed zone, with Modric, Ceballos and Bellingham representing instead.
Ancelotti was asked about the Frenchman’s mood.
“It could be that he lacks a bit of confidence,” said the Italian. “When you have a moment when things aren’t going your way, the idea you have to have is to play simply and sometimes you complicate things a bit more. But this moment is missing. You can’t judge a player for a missed penalty.”
Support to overcome a difficult period
Mbappe is struggling and his numbers reflect that. He has produced nine goals and two assists in 18 games, at a rate of a goal involvement every 136.5 minutes.
How can he improve his situation?
Perhaps the first step is support from within, something he has been feeling.
Club representatives have gone out of their way to speak highly of him in private with the media, highlighting his high level in training sessions.
Ancelotti and his team-mates have been supportive in public, too.
“Kylian has been criticised in an exaggerated way, it has been very positive how he has contributed. I see him in training and it’s scary,” Bellingham told a press conference on Tuesday.
“The penalty (miss) is not the reason we lost,” said the Englishman on Wednesday.
“Work and keep fighting and keep going, because the moment will pass,” said Ancelotti. “(A situation like this) has happened to me many times in my career, especially with strikers when they struggle to score. There is a medicine: be patient. Everyone has to support him.”
Modric, in captain mode, also offered supportive words in the mixed zone: “It’s his first year and it’s never easy — at Madrid, the first years are complicated. He has our confidence and knows how to get out of this: not to lose confidence, to work day by day.”
Vazquez assured that his team-mates will “always support him, he is a world-class player and he will prove it. The team is always there to help him”.
Ceballos also gave him a nod. “He’s not scoring the goals he wants to score, but we know better than anyone how hard he’s working,” he explained. “It’s difficult to settle at a club like Madrid, but Kylian will do it. I’m sure he will.”
(Top photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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