Man city

With Manchester City lagging eight points behind Liverpool, a visit to Selhurst Park represents an awkward test as Pep Guardiola’s side seek to return to winning ways. A City team tripped up by Norwich also came unstuck against Wolves last time out and on Saturday they face a Palace side with form for making life difficult. Across the past three seasons under Guardiola, only Chelsea, Leicester and Liverpool have taken more league points off City than the four Palace have mustered. Other teams have tried and failed miserably: Arsenal have eked out a single point from the past six meetings, while West Ham and Watford remain pointless against Guardiola over the same period. Last season Palace won 3-2 at City in December, with Andros Townsend’s stunning 30-yard volley the lasting snapshot, as Guardiola’s side slipped to a first defeat of the season. Luka Milivojevic, the dependable Palace captain, scored his team’s third with a penalty and, but for a rare miss from … [Read more...] about Crystal Palace and the knack: how the Eagles became Man City’s bogey team

The Carrow Road crowd will cherish this memory for years to come. Echoes of ’93 and all that bounded across the stadium as Norwich City – newly promoted, short of money and with eight first-team players out injured - took on, outplayed and beat the celebrated champions of England. The Canaries might just have put a cat among the pigeons in the title race. Manchester City are now five points behind Liverpool at the top of the Premier League table and given the tightest margin by which the title was decided last year – 11.7mm of ball by one account – that is not a meaningless total. On the other hand it is still September and there are many games to go but, beyond the points, Pep Guardiola will have seen enough in this match to worry him. City were not at their attacking best but their defending left a lot more to be desired. Norwich led from the 19th minute when Kenny McLean exploited a City weakness, getting across to the near post to score with a header from a … [Read more...] about Teemu Pukki strikes again to seal Norwich’s shock win over Man City

If you propose a high-rise public housing project in America, your opponents will almost certainly use Pruitt-Igoe as a rhetorical weapon against you – and defeat you with it. The Captain WO Pruitt Homes and William L Igoe Apartments, a racially segregated, middle-class complex of 33 11-storey towers, opened to great fanfare on the north side of St Louis between 1954 and 1956. But within a decade, it would become a decrepit warehouse exclusively inhabited by poor, black residents. Within two decades, it would undergo complete demolition. Whether you call Pruitt-Igoe’s short, troubled existence a failure of architecture, a failure of policy, or a failure of society, its fate remains bound up with, and reflective of, the fate of many American cities in the mid-20th century. Even before the dust settled from the infamous, widely televised 1972 implosion of one of Pruitt-Igoe’s buildings (the last of which wouldn’t fall until 1976), the argument that the design had … [Read more...] about Pruitt-Igoe: the troubled high-rise that came to define urban America – a history of cities in 50 buildings, day 21

“Now I know subjective opinions can vary,” the journalist Adam Raphael wrote in the Guardian in 1968, “but personally I reckon LA as the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States. In short, a stinking sewer ...” Three years later, Raphael’s words appeared in print again as an epigraph of Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies – the most exuberantly pro-Los Angeles book ever written. Ever since publication, it has shown up on lists of great books about modern cities – even those drawn up by people who consider Los Angeles anything but a great American city. Somehow, this book that drew so much of its initial publicity with shock value (“In Praise (!) of Los Angeles”, sneered the New York Times review’s headline) has kept its relevance through the decades, such that newly arrived Angelenos still read it to orient themselves. But what can it … [Read more...] about A ‘radical alternative’: how one man changed the perception of Los Angeles

What perfect timing for The Third Man to step back out of the shadows. Often hailed as the finest film Britain ever made, a 70th anniversary re-release will see it return to cinemas with the government much in the market for symbols of national grandeur. While Boris Johnson has named his favourite film as Dodgeball – for once, eerily believable – as the great British breakdown goes on it is easy to imagine him waving a tiny Union Jack at Carol Reed’s majestic noir. It is true, of course, that there could be no better moment for The Third Man to reappear – just not as a cosy patriotic treat. Rather, it is a cold premonition of no-deal Britain. In that, there is a certain poetry. We are where we are in no small part due to endless British war films convincing a generation born in the 1950s that they had lived through the Blitz and could only be happy back in it. But The Third Man is a postwar movie. American hack writer Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten) arrives in … [Read more...] about Why The Third Man is an essential primer for no-deal Brexit