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Hi, everyone!
At the top today is midfielder/forward Rachel Williams, who joined the club this season from Birmingham.
Ramble of the Day
I come today with a dispatch from the world of MLS. Yesterday afternoon, The Athletic’s Sam Stejskal and Paul Tenorio reported that Inter Miami head coach Diego Alonso was fired after only one season. Very quickly, Tenorio deleted his tweet. I’d guessed at first there was a typo I missed, but it turns out the situation was evolving: it turns out the story was based on a misunderstanding, and it was Alonso himself who had the misunderstanding.
The misunderstanding stemmed from a meeting Alonso had with Miami higher-ups yesterday to go over the 2020 season. The Miami Herald’s Michelle Kaufman described the meeting as such in her report from yesterday:
What happened, they said, is that owners expressed their displeasure with how the season went during an emotional meeting, Alonso assumed he was fired.
Per both the Herald and The Athletic, Alonso then told some combination of players and staff that he got fired, and word got around to the point that The Athletic reported, for a very brief time, that he had been fired. People at the club clarified to both The Athletic and the Herald that Alonso hadn’t been fired, and reports were updated.
It doesn’t mean he won’t be fired, though. It just means that there was a very dramatic miscommunication, and that this only got corrected after word got out of Alonso’s great misunderstanding is so funny.
tl;dr: In a funny story out of MLS, Inter Miami coach Diego Alonso thought he got fired after a meeting and told a lot of people, only for the club to have to correct course after Alonso’s side of the story went public.
Stay informed, read this: John Caramanica on country music’s first Black superstar Charley Pride, who died from COVID-19 aged 86, and the few protections and little support the industry provided him for The New York Times
Links of the Day
Former Liverpool manager Gérard Houllier died aged 73.
Three New York City FC players tested positive for COVID-19.
Chelsea’s Petr Čech came out of retirement to play for the club’s Premier League 2 side.
Netflix will produce The Red Zone, a six-part comedy series about football, from writers Barney Ronay and Jonathan Liew and produced by Oscar winner Sam Mendes.
RB Leipzig’s Tyler Adams is part of an ownership group bringing non-league football to his native Hudson Valley in New York.
A longer read: Peter Mason’s obituary of Gérard Houllier, who had a large impact on English football during his time with Liverpool, for The Guardian
By the way: We’re still raising money ahead of Tottenham’s FA Cup tie at Marine AFC, and all proceeds are now going to charity. If you still want to donate, you can do se here.