Mark Cuban Says He Told Mavericks to Stop Playing Anthem

Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said Tuesday night that he had instructed the team to stop playing the national anthem before its home games this season.

“It was my decision, and I made it in November,” Cuban said. He declined to comment further.

The Mavericks did not announce the new policy, but Cuban was allowed to enact it because the N.B.A. has permitted teams “to run their pregame operations as they see fit” because of “the unique circumstances this season,” according to a league spokesman.

Nearly two-thirds of the league’s 30 teams are still not admitting fans to home games, as the N.B.A. grapples with the complexities of trying to stage a 72-game season in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.

Dallas is believed to be the only team in the league that has abandoned the anthem at home games, a decision that was first reported by The Athletic. Other teams have continued to play recorded versions of the anthem.

The league rule book has required players to stand during the national anthem since the 1980s, but Adam Silver, the N.B.A. commissioner, said in December that the rule would not be strictly enforced this season. The league also chose not to enforce the rule during its restarting of the 2019-20 season in a bubble environment at Walt Disney World in Florida, where many players opted to kneel during the anthem to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement and to demonstrate against systemic racism and social injustice in the United States.

“I recognize that this is a very emotional issue on both sides of the equation in America right now, and I think it calls for real engagement rather than rule enforcement,” Silver said in December.

The anthem has not been played at American Airlines Center in Dallas before any of the Mavericks’ 13 preseason or regular-season home games this season. In a victory on Monday night over Minnesota, Dallas became one of the 11 teams in the league that are admitting reduced crowds — 1,500 frontline workers in the health care and food-service industries, as well as police officers, firefighters and other emergency workers.

This, however, is not the first time in franchise history that the club has declined to play the national anthem before games. For the club’s first 16 years of existence, when it was owned by Donald Carter, “God Bless America” was sung instead before home games at the old Reunion Arena. The Mavericks began playing the national anthem after the team was purchased by Ross Perot Jr. on May 1, 1996. Cuban bought the Mavericks in January 2000.

In an interview on ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” last June, before the N.B.A. resumed the 2019-20 season, Cuban said he would support players who knelt during the anthem as a form of protest.

“If they were taking a knee and they were being respectful, I’d be proud of them,” Cuban said. “Hopefully I’d join them.”

Cuban did not accompany the Mavericks to the bubble at Disney World, but he said via Twitter shortly after his ESPN appearance: “The National Anthem Police in this country are out of control. If you want to complain, complain to your boss and ask why they don’t play the National Anthem every day before you start work.”

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Dianne Durham, Barrier-Breaking Gymnast, Dies at 52

Dianne Durham, the first Black woman to win the U.S.A. Gymnastics national championship, who was later denied a shot at the Olympics by an ill-timed injury, died on Feb. 4 in Chicago. She was 52.

Her sister, Alice Durham Woods, confirmed the death, at Swedish Hospital on the North Side, attributing it to an unspecified “brief illness.”

After winning the junior national champion in 1981 and 1982, Durham was considered among the best female vaulters in the world when she entered the 1983 senior championship.

She was known for rocketing her tiny frame — 4-foot-7 and 100 pounds at 15 years old — high into the air off a vaulting horse. Commentators also extolled her grace, as showcased by her balletic floor exercise in the 1983 championship.

On the uneven bars during that competition, she knocked her left foot against a bar, prompting a CBS Sports reporter to ask her whether the injury would hamper her in the events to come. “I’ll be having too much fun,” she answered.

As she went on to flip and spin her way to a dominant victory, a sportscaster announced, “It is Dianne Durham day.”

Durham became the top-ranked female gymnast in the country and a front-runner for the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics. Ebony magazine ran a glowing profile of her a few months after her win, noting that she had “a chance at not only becoming the first Black woman to make the Olympics gymnastic team, but the first Black to win a gold medal in the sport that has been dominated by Whites since it became an Olympic sport in 1896.”

“Comaneci is history,” the magazine said about the Romanian Nadia Comaneci, then the sport’s most famous athlete and a former pupil of Durham’s coach, Bela Karolyi. “It’s Dianne Durham’s turn for the spotlight.”

That dream crashed when, after a series of other injuries, Durham landed awkwardly during her vault in the 1984 Olympic trials and severely sprained an ankle. She still managed a score of 9.1 in the event, good enough to keep her in the running for the Olympics, but she was struggling to walk and withdrew from the rest of the competition.

The Washington Post calculated that she was .24 points shy of the final spot on the Olympic team. Durham said later that if the stakes had been clear to her, she would not have withdrawn from the trials and instead pushed through the pain. She added that the selection committee’s decision not to include her was never fully explained to her.

“This is a pretty big injustice to not have Durham on the Olympic team,” Karolyi told The Post. “The team needs her, the country needs her.”

A training partner of Durham’s, Mary Lou Retton, went on that year to become the first American to win an Olympic gold medal in gymnastics and a “folk heroine,” as The Times wrote in 1984.

But a profile of Durham on the ESPN website last year showed that many in gymnastics thought she had made her own lasting mark on the sport by proving that young Black women could reach its pinnacle.

“The young Black gymnasts could look up to her,” Luci Collins, a Black gymnast a generation older, told ESPN. “They could see her and relate.”

The lineage of female African-American gymnasts extending from Durham includes Betty Okino and Dominique Dawes, the first Black women to win Olympic gymnastic medals, in 1992; Gabby Douglas, the first Black Olympic champion in the all-around event; and the sport’s current star, Simone Biles.

In a speech she gave while being inducted into a U.S. gymnastics regional hall of fame in 2017, Durham said her 1983 victory had “showcased to the entire country that a little Black girl from Gary, Indiana, could be the best gymnast in the country.”

ImageCredit…Lisa Genesen/Associated Press

Dianne Patrice Durham was born in Gary on June 17, 1968. Her father, Ural, worked at Midwest Steel in labor relations, and her mother, Calvinita (Carter) Durham, taught elementary school.

Dianne took up gymnastics at age 3 and before long started winning competitions. After claiming the 1981 junior championship at 13, she moved to Houston to train with Karolyi. Her mother soon quit her job and moved there as well.

Durham retired from competition soon after the 1984 Olympic trials. In the early 1990s she was the assistant women’s gymnastics coach at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She found work doing choreographed gymnastic and dance routines and appeared in the closing ceremony of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona, Spain. She also performed at a theme park in Osaka, Japan.

From 1996 to 2013, Durham ran her own gym, Skyline Gymnastics, on Chicago’s North Side. Some gymnasts she had trained won state and regional competitions. She also served as a judge at gymnastics events, including the national championship.

She married Tom Drahozal, a school administrator and a girls’ basketball coach, in 1994. In addition to her sister, her husband and father survive her.

Reflecting on her 1983 championship victory in her hall of fame speech, Durham gave much credit to her family and friends. Relatives had chipped in to help pay for her training in Houston as a young teenager. For the competition in Chicago, buses drove in from Gary carrying hundreds of supporters, members of Trinity Missionary Baptist Church, where a great-grandfather of Durham’s was one of the earliest deacons in the 1920s.

At the meet, they held up a banner that read “We Love Dianne” and wore T-shirts with her name inscribed around a heart.

“That support helped give me the extra edge I needed to win,” she said.

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Behind the ‘Grind’ of the N.B.A. Team With the Next Big Thing

The buzzer sounded, signaling a Charlotte Hornets loss to the Indiana Pacers. Charlotte wouldn’t have to wait long to try to exact revenge.

This N.B.A. season is unusual in many ways because of the coronavirus pandemic, and one of its main scheduling wrinkles is that teams are playing each other in consecutive games to reduce travel and potential virus exposure.

For the Hornets (12-13), a young, rebuilding team that has turned heads with its star rookie LaMelo Ball, the two-game stands have become a time for learning. Charlotte provided behind-the-scenes access to The New York Times for 48 hours to see how its coaching staff — a team within a team — prepared for recent back-to-back home games against the Pacers. There was practice (practice?), film sessions together and apart, family time and a little bit of trash talk.

“I allow my coaches — I trust them — to put together a good game plan,” Hornets Coach James Borrego said. “I take in that information, I digest it, and obviously I make the final decisions. But I trust them to help me make those decisions.”

Three of the assistant coaches — Jay Triano, Ronald Nored and Nick Friedman — focus on the team’s offense, while the other three — Chad Iske, Dutch Gaitley and Nate Mitchell — prioritize defense.

“A big, overall philosophy for me is a developmental approach with our players, that they help our players grow and develop,” Borrego said. “And I want to have a culture as a head coach that our coaches are developing as well. They’re not just static.”

Another assistant, Jay Hernandez, recently departed to coach the Greensboro Swarm in the G League’s bubble at Walt Disney World near Orlando, Fla.

This season is the staff’s third as a group. Triano has head coaching experience, with the Toronto Raptors and the Phoenix Suns. Nored is young enough to have shared a backcourt with Charlotte’s marquee off-season acquisition, Gordon Hayward, when the pair played together at Butler.

“We blend well,” Nored said of the coaching staff. “We have a couple of 30-year-olds. Chad is in his 40s. Jay’s in his 60s, but he acts like he’s 25, so it all fits really well together.”

ImageCredit…Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

The coaches started filtering from the Spectrum Center following the loss to Indiana. Nored, 30, spoke to Hayward over the phone as the two drove home, dissecting the game. Indiana limited Hayward to just 16 points on 6-of-14 shooting in 40 minutes.

Getting home that night provided a short decompression window for most of the coaches before they dove back into work. Gaitley, 33, caught an episode of “The Real Housewives of Dallas” with his wife, Moraya. “Made sure that I was up on everything, so that whenever we have that conversation, she knows that I was listening,” he said.

At home, Nored tries to study film only after his 2-year-old daughter, Avery, is asleep. He caught up with his wife, Danielle, before plopping on his living room couch, close enough to attend to Avery or his month-old son, Kai, should they stir.

Indiana’s defense was Nored’s scout, meaning he was tasked with providing the rest of the coaching staff with a report on the Pacers’ defense so they could prep Charlotte’s offense. (Gaitley had to do the opposite.)

Nored watched the game again from his laptop. He jotted notes as he created the video edit that he would show the staff the next day, with clips no longer than three minutes highlighting key decisions and reads.

Jordan Surenkamp, Charlotte’s head video coordinator, wrapped up his evening at the arena. The video staff coded the game as it happened, breaking it into segments — for example, all of the team’s pick-and-rolls and how Indiana defended them.

When the game ended, Surenkamp reviewed the film, tightening the segments into digestible pieces before making them available to the coaches. The video staff also gathered film for the players, such as all their shots or assists, so that it would be available to them by the time they returned home. Surenkamp then moved on to his own duties, editing video and compiling statistical spreadsheets, then sending any noticeable trends to the coaching staff.

“It’s really the hub of my program, the video room,” Borrego said.

It’s also Borrego’s background. Long ago, he started his N.B.A. career in San Antonio’s film room under Coach Gregg Popovich. He sets high standards for Surenkamp, who tries to be the first into the arena and the last to leave.

“The expectation is there to be really, really good and prompt and available at what I do,” Surenkamp said. “But I think with that being said, he does understand that it’s a grind, it’s longer days, there’s a lot of responsibilities that I’m given.”

ImageCredit…Courtesy Charlotte HornetsImageCredit…Courtesy Charlotte Hornets

Surenkamp had already been at the arena for an hour by the time the assistant coaches returned and eased into their practice day. Friedman, 30, hopped on the treadmill while listening to the author Ben Greenfield’s fitness podcast. Nored had dropped Avery off at school en route to the Spectrum Center, then did some recreational reading before starting his day. Gaitley watched film on his next scout, the Miami Heat, whom the Hornets would play in four days. “You’re always working on one game ahead,” Triano, 62, said.

The defensive staff filed into a room for a coaches’ meeting, making small talk. George Rodman, Charlotte’s director of basketball analytics and strategy, opened by discussing the recent saga involving GameStop’s stock. “We’re talking about what happened the night before,” Gaitley said. “Who was talking trash or posted on Instagram? You’re joking about that, and keeping everybody up to date on everything that’s happening in the league and then you sort of organically jump into it.”

The group watched the video edit that Gaitley had compiled, discussing whether they adhered to their main principles of protecting the paint, grabbing defensive rebounds and contesting 3-point shots. Nored watched, looking for points to emphasize with Ball, one of his developmental priorities and an early leading candidate for the Rookie of the Year Award.

Pre-practice: The players who did not log many minutes in Wednesday’s game went through an extra workout session to maintain their cardio. Gaitley let the veteran Bismack Biyombo choose between playing pickup with the other players or working out individually.

While Biyombo chose to work out, Malik Monk and the twins Caleb and Cody Martin played three games of four-on-four with Gaitley and the assistant video coordinators. “When you’re playing with Gordon Hayward, you’re not going to get 25 shots,” Gaitley said. “But when you play against the video guys, that’s where you’re like: ‘All right, I’m going to get some shots. I’m going to get my game. Get into rhythm.’”

The moment afforded Gaitley a chance to connect with the players. He is the son of Stephanie Gaitley, the women’s basketball coach at Fordham University. As a child, he often accompanied her on recruiting visits. Occasionally, she handed him a binder that listed tidbits about the recruit and he’d quiz her on the drive about the name of the recruit’s boyfriend or favorite movie.

His mother’s attention to detail stayed with him.

“We don’t recruit at our level, but you are still showing the guys that you care every single day, because if you don’t build a personal relationship with them, then it’s going to be hard to coach them hard,” Gaitley said.

Practice: “You want to give them two or three things that they’re going to be able to remember and translate,” Triano said.

In previous stops, Triano would list the team’s principles on the whiteboard with an addendum stating that any player who read the board could come into his office to collect $50. Few ever did.

Homework: Some coaches stayed in the building throughout the afternoon, working with players and watching film on upcoming opponents. Others resumed their personal lives, like picking up their children from school. Still, they would often text one another through the night.

“I think it happens a lot in our culture where it’s just, ‘I’m going to spend every waking moment thinking about basketball and watching every drop of film,’ ” Nored said. “And I could do that, but my daughter would be missing out on time with her dad, my wife would be missing out on time with her husband. And so they’re my priorities as well. And so I try to be efficient in everything that I do.”

ImageCredit…Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images

The defensive scout meeting was shorter than the previous day’s, a reinforcement of the principles heading into the rematch. “It’s the battle of the adjustments to a degree and what can win out,” said Iske, 44. “Can you prepare for their adjustments, and on the other side of it, what they might do ahead of time? I think it’s always a good chess match to a degree, and exciting because it reminds you of the playoffs.”

Afterward, the offensive coaches’ meeting included a 20-clip edit of how Indiana would most likely guard Charlotte on key plays, from screen-and-rolls to pin downs and dribble handoffs.

To limit potential exposure to the virus, the Hornets bypass traditional team morning shootarounds in favor of individual sessions with coaches, called vitamins. “A big thing for us is our player development,” Triano said. “How are we going to get these guys better?”

Mitchell, 34, started his day working with Hayward on his ball-handling and finishing at the rim. Later, he would also work with Biyombo, P.J. Washington and Devonte’ Graham. The goal was for Hayward not to settle for midrange shots when there was a path to the basket.

Mitchell hopes Hayward’s free-throw attempts will soon rival his career high of 6.1 during the 2014-15 season. He’s averaging 4.8 per game this season.

“It’s almost to the point now where he’s pointing out the opportunities more than it is me,” Mitchell said.

The coaches filled the middle of the game day as they saw fit. Iske played a shooting game with Surenkamp before finishing his scout of the Milwaukee Bucks, Charlotte’s opponent the following evening. Some, like Triano and Mitchell, took a brief nap, after having watched film late the previous night.

Friedman squeezed in another workout before preparing for his next scout. “It’s hard for me to nap on game days,” he said. “I just like to cram some work in. It’s basketball at the end of the day, so you’re not really overworking yourself.”

Walk-through: The players and coaches gathered on the practice court for a walk-through of the night’s matchup. The session included an offensive breakdown, defensive scout and a review of plays. Then the assistants worked on the court with players, pulling some aside to watch quick video clips.

Friedman played a short montage for guard Terry Rozier of his first start of the 2017-18 season, when he was with Boston. It was a triple-double effort against the Knicks. “It’s more for helping him envision the best version of himself right before we play,” Friedman said.

The Hornets won the rematch, 108-105. “We made more plays down the stretch than we did the night before,” Borrego said, adding: “And I love this setup. I love playing two games against the same team in such a short period. This is a great way to teach.”

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UConn’s Paige Bueckers Has Three Straight 30-Point Games

With the shot clock about to expire and her team ahead by a single point in overtime, Paige Bueckers threw up a long 3-pointer that hit the back of the rim and bounced high into the air.

There was no doubt in Bueckers’s mind that the ball would come down through the net.

UConn’s freshman star scored 31 points, including her team’s final 13, to lead the No. 2 Huskies to a 63-59 overtime victory Monday night over top-ranked South Carolina.

Bueckers scored all of the Huskies’ 9 points in overtime, including that improbable 3-pointer with just over 10 seconds left. There were 13 seconds on the clock when it left her hand.

“It bounced straight up, so I was like, ‘Man, it’s got to go in,’” she said. “It looked good. It felt good, but, yeah, I would say that was a really nice bounce.”

Bueckers has scored 30 or more points in each of her last three games, and has 142 points over her last five games.

“It’s been a long time since one player has had to carry a team as much as she’s had to in some of these games,” Auriemma said.

The overtime thriller came just hours after the Gamecocks and Huskies earned the top two spots in The Associated Press Top 25 women’s college basketball poll.

Aliyah Boston had 17 points and 15 rebounds for South Carolina (15-2), which overcame a seven-point deficit in the fourth quarter. Zia Cooke and Destanni Henderson missed 3-pointers in the final seconds.

A layup by Aubrey Griffin had given the Huskies (14-1) a 50-43 lead with just over 8 minutes left, before South Carolina turned up the defense and went on an 11-0 run.

Victaria Saxton’s layup over Olivia Nelson-Ododa gave the Gamecocks a 52-50 lead, and Boston’s jumper extended that to 54-50 with just under 2½ minutes to play.

But Bueckers, who also had six steals and five assists, hit two straight jumpers to tie the game at 54 with 46 seconds left in regulation.

“She’s that player,” UConn coach Geno Auriemma said. “She’s that player that comes along that people talk about — ‘Hey did you see that kid from Connecticut?’ She’s that kid.”

Henderson missed a fall-away jumper with 4 seconds left and the Gamecocks missed three chances to tip-in a game winner.

The loss ended a 12-game winning streak for South Carolina.

“We’ll learn from it,” South Carolina coach Dawn Staley said. “I told our players that everything we want is still in front of us.”

This was the first overtime win for the Huskies since December of 2004, when they needed extra time to beat South Florida. They had lost seven straight overtime games since then.

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2021 Australian Open: What to Watch on Wednesday Night

How to watch: 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Eastern on the Tennis Channel, 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. on ESPNEWS and 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. on ESPN2 in the United States; streaming on the ESPN+ and ESPN3 apps.

Jessica Pegula of the United States upset the 12th seed, Victoria Azarenka, in the opening round for her first match victory at a major tournament, and she will now face the Australian veteran Samantha Stosur. Although Stosur has focused on playing doubles over the past few years, she is still a force in singles, especially with a home-court advantage.

Her fellow Australian Alexei Popyrin certainly benefited from that advantage in his first-round upset of the 13th seed, David Goffin, and he will now meet Lloyd Harris. A win would put Popyrin, who is ranked 113th in the world, into the third round for a third straight year.

Because of the number of matches cycling through courts, the times for individual matchups are best guesses and are certain to fluctuate based on when earlier play is completed. All times are Eastern.

Rod Laver Arena | 9 p.m. Wednesday

As the world of professional sports slowly reopened amid the coronavirus pandemic, Ashleigh Barty, the world No. 1, decided not to travel to tournaments and stayed in Australia. That decision, which she attributed to concerns about bringing the virus back to her home country, kept her out of the U.S. Open and prevented her from trying to defend her French Open title.

Questions about the level of Barty’s preparations were quashed as she won the Yarra Valley Classic last week and then defeated her first-round opponent in the Open without dropping a game.

ImageCredit…David Gray/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Daria Gavrilova, a former Russian national who now represents Australia, received a wild-card entry into the main draw of the Australian Open. Struggling with chronic foot injuries, she took a year away from tennis after the 2019 U.S. Open. She returned in time for the rescheduled French Open in October, defeating Dayana Yastremska in the first round. However, she has not been playing at her peak, and she will certainly struggle against the overpowering, aggressive brand of tennis that Barty has mastered.

Court 13 | 9 p.m. Wednesday

Casper Ruud, the 24th seed, last year became the first Norwegian to win an ATP title and became the highest-ranking Norwegian in tour history, surpassing the mark set by his father, Christian Ruud, who reached No. 39 in 1995. Now Ruud is aiming to reach the third round for a third consecutive time at a major, solidifying his place in the top 25. In his way is a familiar opponent. Ruud defeated Tommy Paul in the second round of the French Open in October.

Paul, the world No. 53, had his best result at a Grand Slam last year, reaching the third round of the Australian Open by upsetting Grigor Dimitrov in a thrilling five-set match. Paul followed that up with an impressive win over Alexander Zverev in Mexico just a month later but was unable to carry that momentum into the second half of the season. Now he must be hoping that the quicker surface in Australia will favor him against Ruud, who tends to prefer playing out longer, more strategic points.

Rod Laver Arena | 3 a.m. Thursday

Coco Gauff seemed fully in control of her first-round match, easily beating Jil Teichmann. Just a week before, in a tuneup tournament, Gauff had needed three sets to defeat Teichmann. On Tuesday, Gauff increased her intensity, choosing to dictate as many points as possible rather than giving Teichmann the time to settle into craftier exchanges.

ImageCredit…Jason O’Brien/EPA, via Shutterstock

Elina Svitolina, the fifth seed, is a gifted defensive player who tends to soak up pressure, coaxing unforced errors out of offensively minded opponents. Svitolina’s consistency allows her to await the proper moment to unleash a counterattack, usually in relatively low-risk situations. For Gauff, this will present a particularly tough challenge. Although Gauff has shown from her breakthrough at Wimbledon in 2019 that she is mentally tough, being worn down by a defensive veteran can be unusually disheartening.

Rod Laver Arena | 5 A.m. Thursday

When he secured his 13th French Open title in October, Rafael Nadal tied Roger Federer for the most Grand Slam singles titles among men. Of Nadal’s 20 Grand Slam titles, only one was captured at the Australian Open, in 2009. Nadal, 34, has been the runner-up in Melbourne four times, losing in memorable matches to Federer, Novak Djokovic and Stan Wawrinka. Now, as he seeks to surpass Federer’s total, he will need to hold off some rising stars.

ImageCredit…David Gray/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Nadal’s opponent tonight, the 23-year-old Michael Mmoh, has never been past the second round at a Grand Slam tournament. Now ranked 177th in the world, he had to play in the qualifying draws to make it into the Australian Open, and he struggled through a grinding five-set match against a fellow qualifier, Viktor Troicki, in the first round. Mmoh’s quick, aggressive style can put an opponent on his back foot, but that will be tough to do against Nadal, whose defensive skills, while often overlooked, are just as exceptional as his offensive prowess.

Rod Laver Arena | 3 a.m. Thursday

Coco Gauff seemed fully in control of her first-round match, easily beating Jil Teichmann. Just a week before, in a tuneup tournament, Gauff had needed three sets to defeat Teichmann. On Tuesday, Gauff increased her intensity, choosing to dictate as many points as possible rather than giving Teichmann the time to settle into craftier exchanges.

ImageCredit…Jason O’Brien/EPA, via Shutterstock

Elina Svitolina, the fifth seed, is a gifted defensive player who tends to soak up pressure, coaxing unforced errors out of offensively minded opponents. Svitolina’s consistency allows her to await the proper moment to unleash a counterattack, usually in relatively low-risk situations. For Gauff, this will present a particularly tough challenge. Although Gauff has shown from her breakthrough at Wimbledon in 2019 that she is mentally tough, being worn down by a defensive veteran can be unusually disheartening.

Feliciano López vs. Lorenzo Sonego — 7 p.m.

Mackenzie McDonald vs. Borna Coric — 11 p.m.

Jessica Pegula vs. Sam Stosur — 6 a.m.

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The ‘Next Rafa’: Nadal’s Heir Apparent Is 17 and Playing in the Australian Open

MELBOURNE, Australia — There are two Rafael Nadal story lines swirling about during this first week of the Australian Open.

One involves the 20-time Grand Slam winner’s lower back, which, in his words, is not great, though it did not get in the way of his efficient, straight-sets win over Laslo Djere of Serbia in the first round Tuesday.

The second story line involves a 17-year-old Spaniard named Carlos Alcaraz who has suddenly become known as “the next Rafa.” Nadal’s decision to practice with Alcaraz last week, in the final days leading up to the year’s first Grand Slam, raised the volume of the hype surrounding the teenage prodigy.

And as Nadal was preparing for his first-round match, Alcaraz was pumping his fist to celebrate his first win in a Grand Slam tournament, over Botic Van de Zandschulp of the Netherlands, a solid 6-1, 6-4, 6-4 beating.

“He has intensity, he has the passion, he has the shots,” Nadal said of Alcaraz. “Then it’s all about how much you are able to improve during the next couple of years. It depends on how much you will be able to improve that will make the difference of whether he’s going to be very good, or if you’re going to be an amazing champion.”

Prematurely declaring a teenager a future legend is as much a part of tennis as fuzzy yellow balls. For several years Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria was called “Baby Fed” because his precocious creativity and all-around game resembled that of the Swiss great Roger Federer. That was nearly a decade ago. Dimitrov is now 29, ranked 21st and still looking for his first Grand Slam title.

There is always a yearning for the next big thing, and so the buzz around Alcaraz persists.

ImageCredit…Jason O’Brien/EPA, via Shutterstock

“It’s been a while since we had a young Spaniard came along like this with the promise he is showing at his age,” said Jim Courier, the former world No. 1 and a two-time champion in Australia, referring to when Nadal announced himself with a win over Federer at 17. The expectations are indeed a lot for Alcaraz to shoulder, Courier said, but Nadal once felt that pressure, and so have others. “I suspect Carlos will keep the blinders on pretty tight,” Courier said.

Alcaraz is hardly a Nadal clone. He does not hit with Nadal’s next-level topspin, and his coach, Juan Carlos Ferrero, said hardcourts would probably be his best surface rather than clay. Alcaraz shares none of Nadal’s on-court compulsions, such as making sure the labels of his water bottles face a certain way during matches or following a specific pattern as he walks to his chair on a changeover. But a Spanish player breaking out at 17 has implications.

Alcaraz beat David Goffin of Belgium, ranked No. 13, last week during a warm-up event in Australia, which kick-started the “next Rafa” buzz at Melbourne Park. Then he drew the ideal first-round opponent — Van de Zandschulp, a 25-year-old who has never sniffed the top 100 and looked the part as Alcaraz ran him around the court and pressured him into 73 errors.

Ferrero, the former world No. 1 who has been working with Alcaraz the past three years, said Alcaraz’s time practicing last week with Nadal and Andrey Rublev of Russia, the No. 7 seed, was a key to his success in the first round.

“He got to see what great players do,” Ferrero said.

That did not start out so well. Late last week, Alcaraz walked onto the court at John Cain Arena for a hitting session with Nadal, who immediately began pelting him with forehands and backhands, because Nadal practices as if he is playing a Grand Slam final, even when he has a sore back.

“He hits the ball very hard,” Alcaraz said of Nadal. “He tries to hit harder on every ball.”

Alcaraz struggled at first to keep the rallies going more than a few shots. Nadal did not relent. Alcaraz took a while to adapt to the pace.

There is no shame in that, since 17-year-olds are not supposed to be able to compete at this level of men’s tennis in 2021. The game is supposed to be too physically demanding for a teenager who is balancing professional tennis with his final year of online high school. But Alcaraz is already 6-foot-1 (the same height as Nadal), with broad shoulders and thick quadriceps muscles.

But Tuesday’s win was his first best-three-of-five-sets match. He still has the complexion of a high school senior, and he prefers Instagram to TikTok. He worships the soccer team Real Madrid (Nadal does, too), though he gave up organized soccer when he was 10 to focus exclusively on tennis. He lives mostly at Ferrero’s tennis academy in Villena, near Spain’s southeastern coast, roughly an hour by car from Alcaraz’s home in El Palmar, where he returns every other weekend.

Spain’s top men’s players, who dominated the top 50 not long ago and are still a force, have for years been a very close-knit group. They show up at one another’s matches and gather on the road to share meals and watch soccer.

As Alcaraz battled Van de Zandschulp on Tuesday, he kept looking over and pumping his fist in the direction of Ferrero and Pablo Carreño Busta, the No. 15 seed at the Australian Open. Carreño Busta is 12 years older than Alcaraz and has become something of a big brother to him at Ferrero’s academy.

Alcaraz played on Court 17, which is tucked in near a construction site, a busy railroad junction and the backsides of John Cain Arena and the Melbourne Cricket Ground. There are just a few hundred seats. It is Melbourne Park’s version of the boonies.

Alcaraz does not figure to have many more matches there, but just before he headed onto the court, Carreño Busta reminded him to take a minute to savor the start of his Grand Slam career.

“I was a little nervous,” Alcaraz said. “He told me to enjoy the moment.”

He did. He won the first set in 25 minutes, tormenting Van de Zandschulp with nasty overheads, endless hustle and timely breaks of serve, often when Van de Zandschulp seemed to have the game in hand.

“He’s very good, he’s very young,” Nadal said. “I really believe that he will have a great future because he’s a good guy, humble, a hard worker.”

Nadal, with his questionable lower back, will face Michael Mmoh of the United States in the second round Thursday. Alcaraz will play Mikael Ymer of Sweden. Both Mmoh and Ymer, neither of whom has made the third round of a Grand Slam, needed five sets to survive their first-round matches, not exactly ideal preparation for facing off against the real Rafael Nadal and the player considered his heir.

“It’s been a very fast progression for him, not that we are in a rush,” Ferrero said of Alcaraz. “This year I think he is going to make a really big step.”

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Marty Schottenheimer, 77, Winning N.F.L. Coach With Four Teams, Dies

Marty Schottenheimer, who won 200 regular-season games as an N.F.L. head coach, the eighth-highest total in league history, and took teams to the playoffs in 13 of his 21 seasons but never made it to the Super Bowl, died on Monday in Charlotte, N.C. He was 77.

The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said Bob Moore, a spokesman for the family. Schottenheimer died at a hospice facility near his home in Charlotte after being in its care since Jan. 30. He was first given a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s in 2014.

Coaching four franchises with an often headstrong manner, Schottenheimer gained acclaim for turning around floundering teams, often emphasizing a power-running offense known as Martyball.

At first, the tag was emblematic of his winning ways, at least in the regular season. But as the years passed, and Schottenheimer’s teams reached a conference final only three times and then lost all three games on that final rung toward the Super Bowl, Martyball became a term of derision, branding his offense as too conservative.

Schottenheimer coached the original Cleveland Browns from midway through the 1984 season to 1988, the Kansas City Chiefs from 1989 to 1998, the Washington Redskins in 2001 (the team dropped that name last July) and the San Diego Chargers from 2002 to 2006.

His teams went 200-126-1 over all, and he was named the 2004 N.F.L. coach of the year by The Associated Press when his Chargers went 12-4 after finishing the previous season at 4-12. But they were upset by the Jets in the first round of the playoffs.

Schottenheimer’s squads had a 5-13 record in playoff games.

In the run-up to the Chargers-Jets playoff game, Lee Jenkins of The New York Times, reflecting on Schottenheimer’s intensity, wrote how “anyone who watches Schottenheimer standing on the sideline Saturday night against the Jets, arms crossed and feet shoulder-width apart, will recognize him as that angry professor from Kansas City and Cleveland.”

“He still wears his gold spectacles,” Jenkins wrote, “and sets his square jaw and roars his favorite football platitudes in a hoarse baritone that makes him sound as if he has been screaming for three and a half quarters.”

ImageCredit…Mike Blake/Reuters

Hue Jackson, an assistant to Schottenheimer with the Redskins and a future head coach of the Oakland Raiders and the second Cleveland Browns franchise, was struck by Schottenheimer’s football smarts coupled with an insistence on control.

“My time with him, I watched one of the most passionate football coaches I had ever been around,” Jackson told ESPN in 2016. “I know everybody has the stories about Marty crying.”

“He taught me a ton about the running game, being tough, just what it meant to be a part of a team,” Jackson recalled, adding, “Marty does not back down from anybody.”

Martin Edward Schottenheimer was born on Sept. 23, 1943, in Canonsburg, Pa., near Pittsburgh, and grew up in nearby McDonald, a coal town, where his grandfather Frank, a German immigrant, had worked in the mines. His father, Edward, worked for a grocery chain, and his mother, Catherine (Dunbar) Schottenheimer, was a homemaker.

Schottenheimer was considered one of the best high school defensive linemen in western Pennsylvania. He went on to the University of Pittsburgh, playing at linebacker from 1962 to 1964, and was named a second-team All-American by The Associated Press for his senior season.

He was selected in the fourth round of the N.F.L.’s 1965 draft by the Baltimore Colts and in the seventh round of the American Football League draft by the Buffalo Bills.

Schottenheimer, 6 feet 3 inches and 225 pounds, spent four seasons with the Bills and another two with the Boston Patriots.

After working in real estate following his retirement as a player, he turned to coaching in the N.F.L. He spent two years as the Giants’ linebacker coach and then was their defensive coordinator in 1977. He coached the Detroit Lions’ linebackers for two seasons after that before becoming the Browns’ defensive coordinator. He succeeded Sam Rutigliano as the Browns’ head coach midway through the 1984 season, when they were 1-7.

Relying on a power ground game featuring Earnest Bynar and Kevin Mack and the passing of Bernie Kosar, Schottenheimer took the Browns to the American Football Conference final following the 1986 and 1987 seasons, but they lost to the Denver Broncos each time in their bid to reach the Super Bowl.

The first time, the quarterback John Elway led the Broncos to a tying touchdown after they took over on their 2-yard line late in the fourth quarter, the sequence that became known as “the drive.” The Browns were then beaten on a field goal in overtime.

The next year, in a play that became known as “the fumble,” Bynar was stripped of the football just as he was about to cross the goal line for a potential game-tying touchdown with about a minute left. The Broncos took a safety and ran out the clock for a 38-33 victory.

Schottenheimer’s 1988 Browns team went 10-6 and lost in the first round of the playoffs. At the time, his brother, Kurt, was the team’s defensive coordinator, and when the owner, Art Modell, insisted that he reassign his brother, Schottenheimer quit. He had also resisted Modell’s demand that he hire a new offensive coordinator, having filled that role himself when it become vacant that year.

Schottenheimer was the first to admit that he was strong-willed.

“Maybe I thought there was a pot of gold somewhere else to be found,” he said in his memoir, “Martyball!” (2012), written with Jeff Flanagan. “But I was stubborn, very stubborn back then. I’ve always been stubborn but much more so when I decided to leave Cleveland.”

He then began a 10-season run as coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, taking them to the playoffs seven times.

Before the 1993 season, the Chiefs obtained two of the N.F.L.’s marquee names, quarterback Joe Montana, in a trade, and running back Marcus Allen as a free agent. The team then went 11-5 and reached the A.F.C. final against the Bills. But Schottenheimer once again missed out on the Super Bowl. Montana left the game early in the second half with an injury, and the Bills rolled to a 30-13 victory.

ImageCredit…Jed Jacobsohn/Allsport

The Chiefs were 13-3 in the 1997 regular season, only to lose to the Broncos in the playoffs’ first round. Schottenheimer was fired after the Chiefs went 7-9 in 1998, the only time one of his Kansas City teams finished below .500.

After two years as an analyst for ESPN, Schottenheimer was hired as the Washington coach in 2001. He took the Redskins to an 8-8 record, then was fired once more.

His last N.F.L. stop came in San Diego, where he twice lost in the playoffs’ first round, the second time following the Chargers’ 14-2 season in 2006 behind their brilliant running back LaDainian Tomlinson. In firing Schottenheimer after that season, the Chargers cited his feuding with the general manager, A.J. Smith, over control of roster decisions.

Schottenheimer was coach and general manager of the Virginia Destroyers of the United Football League in 2011, taking them to the league title.

He is survived by his wife, Pat (Hoeltgen) Schottenheimer; a son, Brian, who was a quarterback coach under him; a daughter, Kristen; his brothers Bill and Kurt; a sister, Lisa; and four grandchildren.

Schottenheimer refused to second-guess decisions he had made in the playoffs or at any other time.

“I’ve made calls that, by all reason, were perfect, and got nothing,” he once told The Boston Globe. “And I’ve made calls that were inappropriate to the situation and they’ve worked. So go figure. Pro football is a strange game.”

Alex Traub contributed reporting.

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Super Bowl Viewership Drop in Line With Wider Decrease for N.F.L. and Sports

Sunday’s Super Bowl was watched by just 91.6 million people on CBS, the lowest number of viewers for the game on traditional broadcast television since 2006. A total of 96.4 million people watched when other platforms — like the CBS All Access streaming service and mobile phone apps — were counted, the lowest number of total viewers since 2007.

Still, the Super Bowl will surely be the most watched television program of 2021, and the N.F.L. is expected to see a huge increase in television rights fees when it signs several new television distribution agreements over the next year.

After peaking at 114 million television viewers in 2015, television ratings for the Super Bowl have declined in five of the past six years. The 9 percent decline in television viewership from last year’s Super Bowl is roughly in line with season-long trends. N.F.L. games were watched this season by 7 percent fewer people than the season before.

Many of the necessary ingredients for a bonanza Super Bowl were present. The game featured an intriguing matchup between the two most popular quarterbacks in football, Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs. The weather Sunday was freezing across much of the country, which traditionally drives people inside to be entertained by their televisions.

But the game itself failed to deliver, all but ending by the third quarter when the Buccaneers led, 31-9, with no fourth-quarter scoring or hint of a competitive game. Viewership is measured as the average of the audience watching at each minute of the game; the longer a game is competitive and viewers stay tuned in, the better.

The N.F.L. joins almost every other sport in seeing viewership declines over the past year. The pandemic shut down the sporting world for months in the spring, and when games resumed they frequently lacked energy with few or no fans in the stands. Games were often played on unusual days or at unusual times, disrupting the traditional sports viewership calendar.

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Lamoureux Twins Have One Last Act Before Retiring From Hockey

After years of orchestrating some of the biggest triumphs in American women’s hockey, Jocelyne Lamoureux-Davidson and Monique Lamoureux-Morando announced their retirements Tuesday.

The Lamoureuxs, who scored the decisive goals in the gold medal game of the 2018 Olympics, originally intended to help the United States defend its title at the 2022 Games in Beijing.

In an interview this month, the Lamoureux twins, 31, said they had prioritized spending time with their families and cited the loss of three elderly relatives in recent years and the coronavirus pandemic as factors in their decisions. Both sisters became mothers within the past two years, and Lamoureux-Morando is expecting another child in a few weeks.

The sisters’ retirements come four months after that of Meghan Duggan, the captain of the 2018 team. But the three players will continue to have an impact on the national team from off the ice.

Duggan sits on USA Hockey’s board of directors, serving as an important female voice within the national governing body, an organization that has historically lacked diversity. She and the Lamoureuxs were leaders four years ago in pushing USA Hockey to provide the women’s team contracts that ensured livable salaries, about $70,000 per year.

With the 2017 deal set to expire in one month, Lamoureux-Morando and Lamoureux-Davidson are helping to reach a new deal as members of the players’ negotiating committee.

“That will kind of be our last stamp on the program as players.” Lamoureux-Morando said.

The retirements leave the team with a leadership void, said Hilary Knight, who debuted with the Lamoureuxs on the national team in 2006.

“Honestly, I don’t think anyone will ever replace them,” Knight said. “The three of them set an extraordinary example, not only what it’s like to be a member of this team, but in ambassadorship and social components off the ice.”

Lamoureux-Morando said the negotiations were “definitely at a more positive place” than they were at this point in 2017, praising USA Hockey for creating more “open dialogue” with the women’s team.

In March 2017, just two weeks before the start of a world championship tournament, the national team announced plans to boycott the event if players didn’t receive a fair contract from USA Hockey.

Duggan and the Lamoureuxs not only ensured that every member of their team was fully on board with the boycott; they also called hundreds of female players through all levels of the sport, gaining their allegiance and promises that they would not accept offers to compete in the world championship as replacement players.

When a new deal was announced three days before the world championship tournament started, the four-year contract included benefits like maternity leave, which the Lamoureuxs and Duggan were the first to use.

“We’re definitely building off the previous contract instead of working from ground zero,” Lamoureux-Morando said, adding that players were cognizant that the pandemic had affected operations throughout sports, including the 2020 women’s hockey world championship and other events. “The players’ perception is: How do we make the next contract better, what can be fixed?”

When asked in early February where negotiations stood with the women’s national team, a spokeswoman for USA Hockey said there was “nothing on that front.”

Duggan and the Lamoureuxs said that creating more opportunities in American hockey for underrepresented groups was a priority.

According to USA Hockey’s most recent diversity scorecard report, from 2019, about 19 percent of the 91 voting members on its board of directors were women — about half of the desired benchmark set by the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee. (USA Hockey reported zero people of color on its board, even though Julie Chu, who is Asian-American, is a longtime member.)

The lack of women with powerful positions in USA Hockey makes Duggan’s presence notable. In 2017, Chu, a four-time medal-winner, was a vocal proponent of the women’s national team’s fight and pushed the board to reconsider talks when negotiations were falling apart.

“It gives us a voice to be able to advocate and bring forth certain things” Duggan said.

ImageCredit…Annie Tritt for The New York Times

Completing negotiations for the 2017 contract did not immediately mend the relationship between the governing body and the women’s team.

In a forthcoming book by Lamoureux-Morando and Lamoureux-Davidson, of which a New York Times reporter reviewed an advance copy, the players describe puzzling treatment from USA Hockey leading up to the 2018 Olympics.

This included coaches instituting mandatory weigh-ins and comments about players being out of shape, which created “unhealthy stress” for members of the team, Lamoureux-Davidson wrote.

She added that when the veteran forward Kelli Stack was left off the roster before the Olympics, Coach Robb Stauber seemed to use Stack’s omission as a threat that the Lamoureuxs’ spots could be at risk as well. Stauber did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Before the pandemic, USA Hockey began securing more women’s games in bigger arenas and with more national television coverage. In 2017, USA Hockey heralded the creation of a Women’s High Performance Advisory Group, a collection of former and current national team players and staff members that was to help USA Hockey’s promotion, marketing and fund-raising efforts for girls’ and women’s hockey. But the group only began regular meetings in 2019.

As Duggan and the Lamoureuxs step away from playing, they listed several players who could emerge as leaders alongside Knight and Kacey Bellamy, two veterans who were also at the forefront of the 2017 negotiations.

Kendall Coyne Schofield, Lee Stecklein, Brianna Decker and Megan Keller were all mentioned as possible heirs as locker room leaders.

“We know that we’re on our way out and other players need to start coming in and filling our roles,” Lamoureux-Morando said. “This upcoming contract and being a part of securing more for those players is really important to us.”

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City’s Revival, Liverpool’s Fade and the Flaw in Overthinking Them

Sometimes, the easy explanation tells the whole story. Or near enough, anyway. Why Liverpool’s crown as reigning Premier League champion has slipped before the first blooms of spring is no great mystery. There is little need to sift through performances, searching for some failure of character or imagination or ability, to understand how it came to this.

Virgil van Dijk tore a knee ligament on October 17, in the early minutes of the Merseyside derby. Not quite four weeks later, on November 11, his regular defensive partner Joe Gomez blew out a tendon while away on international duty with England. And that, to a large extent, was that. Liverpool’s aspirations, at that point, had to be downgraded.

Soccer has a dispiriting tendency to scorn mitigating circumstances — in the lexicon of sports, explanation is too often seen as a synonym of excuse — as Roy Keane, the hard-boiled former Manchester United captain, rather neatly encapsulated in the aftermath of Liverpool’s humiliation by Manchester City on Sunday. “They’ve been bad champions,” Keane said. To be a “big club,” he said, is to cope with whatever setbacks are thrown your way.

There is truth in that, but it carries with it an air of brutal, gleeful oversimplification. Liverpool cannot, of course, escape blame for the collapse of its title defense. The club chose not to add a central defender to its squad last summer, recruiting instead a reserve left back who made his first and only Premier League appearance in the dying minutes on Sunday. That seemed a risk even without the benefit of hindsight.

At the same time, Jürgen Klopp, the club’s manager, has cut an increasingly waspish figure as the season has unfurled. He also must shoulder some responsibility, though. He has leaned too heavily on a handful of players, rather than sharing the burden more evenly. Even he has admitted that his squad is as mentally and physically drained as it looks.

More important, Klopp has overseen a team that has become grinding and predictable, reliant on the methods that brought a Champions League triumph in 2019 and the Premier League last year, even as Liverpool’s high-energy, high-intensity press has tuned down and his raiding fullbacks have found their edge dulled.

Liverpool’s opponents have learned — both Burnley and Brighton have won at Anfield in recent weeks, shutting down the champion using essentially the same playbook — but Klopp’s team has not, the manager apparently insistent on doing the same things over and over again in the desperate, vain hope that the outcome might be different next time.

ImageCredit…Pool photo by Jon Super

And yet all of that is inseparable from the fact that Liverpool has been playing for months without its first-choice central defense, and that its first reserve, Joel Matip, managed to start only nine Premier League games before his season, too, was ended by injury.

To cope, Klopp has deconstructed his midfield, drafting first Fabinho and then Jordan Henderson into the back line. The team has lost its rhythm. A swarm of other injuries — Thiago Alcantara and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain missing the first third of the season, Diogo Jota and Naby Keita the middle third, the usual wear-and-tear of a long, hard campaign — has left him with little choice but to play those members of his squad who were left standing.

In those circumstances, trying to inculcate a new style of play is hardly realistic. Liverpool does need to evolve; with its resources, it should not be in a position where it is fretting about whether it can fend off West Ham, Everton and, possibly most pertinently, a surging Chelsea to finish in the top four. But in terms of retaining the title, it did not so much meet a setback as run into a roadblock.

There is a useful contrast, here, with its most recent conqueror and its heir apparent. So entwined have been the fortunes of Liverpool and Manchester City over the last three years that there is now a temptation to see them as being somehow inextricably linked, the success of one taken as a direct indictment of the other’s failure.

This season only seems to reinforce the parallel. Liverpool’s struggles this year do not perfectly match those City faced in the last one: Where City was volatile, scoring great rafts of goals only to freeze completely every few weeks, Liverpool’s fade has been a slow-burn demise, set in motion even before the title was won, the team sputtering through the autumn and only stalling completely at Christmas.

But at first glance, the cause and the effect are the same: the lack of defensive cover, the oxygen debt to be paid after two seasons at the most rarefied heights, the sense of a wall being hit, all of it coalescing as Manchester City ran rampant at Anfield on Sunday, the pendulum swinging irrevocably back toward Pep Guardiola’s team.

There is an easy explanation for that, too. Last summer, Guardiola and his employers knew their team needed more steel. City had lost nine games the previous season, its efforts to win a third straight title undone not only by Liverpool’s relentlessness but by its own glass jaw.

So as much of European soccer fretted about the economic impact of the coronavirus and the subsequent shutdown, Manchester City went and spent $140 million on two defenders: Ruben Días and Nathan Aké. And that, to a large extent, was that. Días has, in the months since, emerged as the cornerstone on which Guardiola has built a new, parsimonious, indomitable version of City, one that is now set to reclaim the championship.

In this case, though, the easy explanation only scratches the surface. Guardiola has not simply slotted a new central defender into his team and pressed play. He has, instead, retuned his approach. His team has been a touch less expansive, a touch more controlled, built on a more conservative midfield. He has overseen this shift in the space of a few months, on the back of a summer in which he did not have a preseason, during a campaign in which there is scarcely any time for training.

ImageCredit…Pool photo by Jon Super

Partly, Guardiola has hinted, he took that risk — and it was, ultimately, a risk — to suit the realities of this most congested season. But partly, too, it was driven by the same impulse that made him recruit Días and Aké: an awareness that City needed to evolve once more if it was to outwit opponents who knew what to expect.

What has enabled him to do that is the one element that has eluded Klopp. City has not been free of injury this season — Sergio Agüero has barely played, and both Gabriel Jesus and Kevin de Bruyne have missed considerable stretches — but its burden has been undeniably lighter than Liverpool’s.

Nine of Klopp’s players have started 17 of Liverpool’s 23 Premier League games. Nine have already racked up 1,500 minutes in the league. At City, by contrast, only four players have reached those figures. Or, to put it another way, 13 of Guardiola’s players have started 10 games or more.

It is to his credit that he has rotated that heavily. Guardiola has more readily understood the contingencies of this season than almost all of his peers; he spoke, around Christmas, of urging his team to run less, not more, in the early weeks of the campaign.

But it does not immediately follow that it is to Klopp’s detriment that he has not had the same realization, that he has not altered Liverpool’s approach sufficiently to enable his players to cope with the test in front of them. It may be tempting to see Liverpool and City as counterweights — the rise of one a comment on the fall of the other — but the circumstances and the contexts are different. Klopp might have followed Guardiola’s lead, had he had the opportunity. Or not. It is impossible to know. Sometimes the easy explanation tells the whole story. And sometimes it does not.

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