Le Journal

Relentless 5-1 comeback win was ominous and made one wonder how many goals champions could score this season Vincent Kompany had warned after their completion of a record-pace Hinrunde of the Bundesliga season that Bayern would have to “start completely from scratch” for the campaign’s second half. The message clearly got across. Poor RB Leipzig could not have known that his players would interpret that quite so literally.On Wednesday Bayern had done the job in Köln; on Saturday in Leipzig, they gave the full manifestation of their brilliance as the evening went on. This became the numbers of the season’s first half made flesh. It is difficult to know what their hosts could have done much differently. Leipzig had been “clearly the better team” in the first 45, as Kompany had admitted. “It felt like they were twice as good as us.” His opposite number, Ole Werner, described his team’s first half as “the almost perfect performance”, and it was difficult to argue. Had Antonio Nusa, part of the excellent collective movement that led to Rômulo’s opener, taken one of the two good chances he missed in that time, then perhaps the discussion would be different. Continue reading...

As punishing wellness challenges proliferate online, I’ve decided the only sensible response is to invent a kinder – and more lucrative – alternativeI have a masochistic interest in catchily named social media self-improvement challenges, so I already knew about “75 hard” – 75 days of drinking eight pints of water, doing two 45-minute workouts, eating clean and, endearingly, reading 10 pages of nonfiction – before it made its recent comeback. Paddy McGuinness has reignited interest, crediting the regime started in 2019 by podcaster Andy Frisella for his transformation from a normal soft-bodied human into an uncanny mass of bronzed abs and pecs.It’s inspired me to make my own changes, but not by doing 75 hard or its ilk. I’ve realised what I actually want to do is devise my own devilish self-improvement challenge. After all, I enjoy telling people what to do, and goodness knows, I could use another revenue stream. But what should mine involve? I debated an intellectual 75 hard, to transform your brain into as finely honed a machine as McGuinness’s body. Participants would pack the library like a gym in January, every table crowded with locked-in bros hyping each other up, as they struggle through Gravity’s Rainbow or Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. “I can’t, it makes no sense! I’ve read this paragraph 12 times!” “That’s quitter’s talk. I know you’ve got another page in you, bruh – MAN UP!” Additional requirements would include sonnet composition, calculus, learning a new language and listening to In Our Time episodes on very occasional “cheat” days. Continue reading...