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Can Arne Slot revive this Frankenstein’s monster of a Liverpool side? | Barney Ronay

New players have come in, too many of them, and has meant a dilution of the collective will instilled by Klopp

Before this game Arne Slot had announced that he was “almost confused”. Which does at least raise some tantalising questions. Mainly, what is this Liverpool team going to look like when he gets there, when a state of full confusion is finally attained, when even Slot’s confusion stops being confusing and reveals its diamond-cut final form.

A 4-1 home defeat, Liverpool’s ninth in the past 12 games, felt like a step towards that promised end. Or at least confirmation their season has now reached the gallows humour phase – one of those periods where events haven’t just run away from you, but appear to be openly mocking your best efforts to catch up.

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© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

© Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters

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Molly McCann: ‘I’m a scouse female gay athlete who supports Everton – it’s like my cards are marked already’

Britain’s most successful female UFC fighter on knowing when to stand her ground, why she won’t box in Saudi Arabia and aiming to win a world title in the next year

“I give my hidings and I take my hidings and so they have seen me with snapped ligaments in my knee, broken feet, broken toes, broken hands, stitches, broken legs,” Molly McCann says of the damage she has endured as a fighter and the impact it has had on her mum and her partner, Fran Parman. “It’s traumatic for Fran and even more traumatic for my mum. I’m 35 and I’ve been in the gym since I was 12. I had my first fight at 16. I’ve spent most of my life fighting.”

McCann boxed as a teenager and she won an ABA title. But, at a time when women’s boxing was still undermined, she turned to mixed martial arts and eventually became the most successful female British fighter in the UFC. McCann retired in March after 14 savage UFC bouts; but, within days, she became a professional boxer. On Saturday night she will have her second contest in boxing’s paid ranks.

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© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

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England deserve a tide of goodwill, yet somehow Jude Bellingham is still a target | Jonathan Liew

It’s hard to disagree with Ian Wright when he suggests the midfielder has been subjected to a timeworn double standard

Sir Alex Ferguson was there. Bryan Robson was there. Eric Cantona was there. The manager Ole Gunnar Solskjær was there, and yet even as these four club legends sold the dream of Manchester United to a 17-year-old from the Midlands, they could sense the elusiveness, the coldness, the drop of the shoulder. The nagging suspicion that, like so many defenders Jude Bellingham would later encounter, they too were grasping at pure air.

“He had it planned out,” Solskjær would later remember. “He knew what he wanted. X amount of minutes in the first team. The most mature 17‑year‑old I’ve ever met in my life.” Though five years have passed since Bellingham turned down United for Borussia Dortmund, for me this is still the story that explains him best of all. The origin myth. This is what you all think I’m going to do. So I’m going to step that way instead.

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© Photograph: Eddie Keogh/The FA/Getty Images

© Photograph: Eddie Keogh/The FA/Getty Images

© Photograph: Eddie Keogh/The FA/Getty Images

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‘The whole journey was fantastic’: how Bob Houghton led Malmö to European Cup final

Englishman was not an obvious candidate to lead them but Swedes pushed Nottingham Forest all the way in 1979

Early in the 1979 European Cup final, Kenny Burns misjudged a long ball and ended up lobbing it up in the air for Jan-Olov Kindvall. He, in turn, attempted to knock the dropping ball over Peter Shilton but the goalkeeper was not as close as he had perhaps anticipated and Shilton ended up catching it simply. The chance was gone and, with it, Malmö’s hopes of beating Nottingham Forest.

“I had quite a good chance to score and then they were the better team,” says Kindvall. “But maybe if we had got the first goal, maybe we had a chance. We were very good when we didn’t have the ball ourselves. We had good organisation in the defence. And Forest were very good without the ball as well. It was more difficult for us to play against a team who were more like our team. We played the English way.”

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© Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Colorsport/Shutterstock

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Cuddling capybaras and ogling otters: the problem with animal cafes in Asia

A boom in places offering petting sessions is linked to a rise in the illegal movement of exotic and endangered species, say experts

The second floor of an unassuming office building in central Bangkok is a strange place to encounter the world’s largest rodent. Yet here, inside a small enclosure with a shallow pool, three capybaras are at the disposal of dozens of paying customers – all clamouring for a selfie. As people eagerly thrust leafy snacks toward the nonchalant-looking animals, few seem to consider the underlying peculiarity: how, exactly, did this South American rodent end up more than 10,000 miles from home, in a bustling Asian metropolis?

Capybara cafes have been cropping up across the continent in recent years, driven by the animal’s growing internet fame. The semi-aquatic animals feature in more than 600,000 TikTok posts. In Bangkok, cafe customers pay 400 baht (£9.40) for a 30-minute petting session with them, along with a few meerkats and Chinese bamboo rats. Doors are open 12 hours a day, seven days a week.

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© Photograph: Gloria Dickie

© Photograph: Gloria Dickie

© Photograph: Gloria Dickie

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Rachel Reeves’s budget has inflamed, not calmed, Britain’s febrile mood | Martin Kettle

The chancellor’s statement will be remembered for the many taxes it raised, rather than the big one – income tax – it did not

Rachel Reeves’s chancellorship was already balanced on a knife-edge, even before the 2025 budget. After she delivered her second budget statement, it still is. Even more than usual, Wednesday’s speech was full of significant fiscal changes, altered spending commitments and adjusted economic forecasts, most of them accidentally (and, for journalists, conveniently) released a short while in advance by the obviously misnamed Office for Budget Responsibility. Politically, however, almost nothing has changed at all.

Reeves arrived in the Treasury last year offering what she, like Keir Starmer, had promised as the Conservative years ebbed: competence, stability and, above all, a focus on economic growth. Her problem, despite her upbeat assessments, is that she has delivered none of them. Nothing about the 2025 budget guarantees any early change in that, however defiantly Reeves spoke about reversing the OBR’s reduced new growth and productivity forecasts.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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© Illustration: OPINION ILLUSTRATION Nate Kitch on Labour's first day of election campaigning/The Guardian

© Illustration: OPINION ILLUSTRATION Nate Kitch on Labour's first day of election campaigning/The Guardian

© Illustration: OPINION ILLUSTRATION Nate Kitch on Labour's first day of election campaigning/The Guardian

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‘Struggling to pay the bills’: Britons under pressure react to budget 2025

As they struggle with the cost of living, people weigh up whether Rachel Reeves’s measures will help them

For Brett and Maria MacDonald, the cost of living has been biting this year, from rising mortgage payments to childcare fees. Living in London with two young children and no extended family nearby, the pair are juggling work with parenting.

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© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

© Photograph: Graeme Robertson/The Guardian

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St Vincent prime minister seeks record sixth term in tight election

Ralph Gonsalves campaigns on strong economy in bid to retain office he has held since 2001

Voters in St Vincent and the Grenadines will go to the polls on Thursday with Ralph Gonsalves seeking a record sixth consecutive term as prime minister.

The elections are expected to be a tight contest between the ruling Unity Labour party, which has been in power since 2001, and the opposition New Democratic party. In the last election, ULP won nine of 15 seats, but the NDP won the popular vote.

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© Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

© Photograph: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

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Pope Leo to visit Turkey and Lebanon on first overseas trip as pontiff

Vatican says ‘demanding’ six-day mission will be packed with meetings with political and religious leaders

Pope Leo will make his debut overseas trip as leader of the Catholic church on Thursday, travelling on a six-day mission of peace and unity to Turkey and Lebanon in what the Vatican said was expected to be a “demanding” schedule packed with meetings with political and religious leaders amid heightened Middle East tensions.

In Turkey, a country with a Muslim majority and home to an estimated 36,000 Catholics, the Chicago-born pontiff, who was elected in May, will first meet President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Ankara.

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© Photograph: Evandro Inetti/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Evandro Inetti/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

© Photograph: Evandro Inetti/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock

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Inside the rise and fall of Podemos: ‘We believed we had a stake in the future’

The leftist party exploded out of Spain’s anti-austerity protests in 2011 and upended Spain’s entrenched two-party system. I was instantly captivated – and for the next decade, I worked for the party. But I ended up quitting politics in disappointment. What happened?

  • This article originally appeared in Equator, a new magazine of politics, culture and art

I never expected to retire in my 30s, but I suppose politics is the art of the impossible: what it promises, what it extracts. A decade at the heart of Spain’s boldest modern political experiment aged me in ways I’ve only just begun to fathom.

In May 2014, just four months after it was founded, the leftwing Spanish party Podemos (“We Can”) won five seats in the European parliament. As a recent university graduate who had been part of a local Podemos group (or círculo, as they were known) in Paris, I was hired to work for these MEPs. We arrived in Brussels as complete tyros and had to learn everything on the job. But we were motivated by the promise of doing what we used to call “real politics” – that is to say, not the internal power struggles and ideological weather patterns of the movement (which were always abundant), but the actual issues, such as gender discrimination and unemployment.

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© Photograph: Europa Press News/Europa Press/Getty Images

© Photograph: Europa Press News/Europa Press/Getty Images

© Photograph: Europa Press News/Europa Press/Getty Images

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‘It crushed my confidence. I’ve never got over it’: Karen Carney on online abuse – and how Strictly is rebuilding her

She’s the emerging star of this year’s dance show, wowing judges with her paso doble. The pundit and former footballer talks about gentleness, bullying, her love of the Lionesses and why she’s never been so happy

The qualities that made Karen Carney an unstoppable winger on the football pitch – her speed and attack, and the sheer relentlessness of both – are more of a hindrance in the ballroom, for some of the dances at least. As the emerging star of this year’s Strictly Come Dancing, she has had to learn to slow down, stand up straighter, to be softer, and it’s taken a lot of hard work. On week eight, she had just performed the American Smooth, and her pro partner Carlos Gu was tearfully describing Carney’s work ethic. Who could watch her trying to hold back her own tears, chewing on emotion like a particularly tough bit of gristle, and fail to see a woman who was giving it everything?

It was Carney’s dream to be on Strictly. The former England footballer, now TV pundit and podcaster, has just made it through week nine, performing an astonishing paso doble at the all-important Blackpool week, and something will have gone very wrong if she doesn’t reach the final. The show has been struggling this year – a man described as a Strictly “star” was reportedly arrested in October on suspicion of rape, and the announcement from its longtime hosts Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman that this will be their final series has been destabilising. But Carney says that for her, it has been an overwhelmingly positive time. “There’s a team spirit within the cast. Behind [the scenes], the team can’t do enough for you to have the best experience.”

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© Photograph: Lee Malone

© Photograph: Lee Malone

© Photograph: Lee Malone

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The rewriting of Australia’s nature laws comes as a relief, yet I can’t help feel a sense of foreboding | Georgina Woods

The minister says quick approvals can happen while protecting the environment, but my experience tells me that haste brings unintended consequences

I got a text from a biodiversity advocate around midday on Thursday asking me: are you glad, or sad?

I wasn’t sure how to reply.

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© Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket/Getty Images

© Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket/Getty Images

© Photograph: Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket/Getty Images

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Declan Rice cranks up volume to show he is Europe’s best player right now | Nick Ames

The driving force behind the continent’s standout team resembled four players in one as Arsenal put their old nemesis Bayern Munich to the sword

Shortly before the goal that left Arsenal’s supremacy in no doubt, Harry Kane embarked upon a lonely jaunt up their left flank. Much like the majority of Bayern Munich’s attacking endeavours, it ended almost as soon as it had begun. In common with a sizeable percentage it was terminated by Declan Rice, who thundered in and took the ball cleanly with a hooked right foot to a cheer that rivalled the night’s loudest.

The Emirates Stadium crowd was always going to enjoy that one, as Rice knew full well. He responded in kind with a roar and an exhortation to the gallery, perhaps to his teammates too: keep it going, crank up that volume, let’s see this thing through. Rice is the best player in Europe right now and, with that, there are standards to drive.

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© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

© Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

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