Inside Eze and Arteta’s plan that allowed Arsenal to finally click

In the week before Eberechi Eze took charge of the north London derby, and electrified the fixture, he was actually supposed to be taking it a bit easier. The 27-year-old had been given two days off after international duty with England, but insisted on getting back to Arsenal’s London Colney training ground after just one. “He wants to learn,” Mikel Arteta beamed.

The Arsenal staff have been hugely excited about Eze’s evolution, but the description from the training ground over the past few months has been that he’s been a bit “tight” in his play. In other words, that he hasn’t yet felt fully relaxed in his role.

That perhaps isn’t surprising since Arteta’s tactical instructions are known to be complex, involving a lot of messages, and Eze did not have a pre-season with the club. That’s a lot to register. Declan Rice similarly struggled in 2023, with staff believing he only went to another level after Christmas, when he had fully internalised his tactical demands. By contrast, one of many reasons that Arteta adores Jurrien Timber is because he got it all straight away. Max Dowman is said to be the same, but it’s understandably rare.

A further challenge for Eze was that, at Crystal Palace, he’d been accustomed to being able to indulge himself as a playmaker without the same level of restrictions. He was the man.

Here, the general stance of Arteta’s staff is that, at this level, you have to be absolutely efficient with attacking touches. Otherwise, needless giveaways “let down the team structure”.

It was revealed in The Independent’s Inside Football on Friday that Arsenal have also been trying to coach him through a new left-sided attacking position, from where they can best release his creativity.

They started to see the impact on Sunday. The excited belief in the camp throughout the game and afterwards was that this was when it clicked for Eze.

Staff even purred about the nature of the third goal as illustrating that in illustrious fashion. There was such a smooth manner to Eze’s movement as he curled the ball into the top corner. The “tightness” had gone. He’d “dropped his shoulders”.

He’s in the groove.

There was similarly a striking moment shortly before that, when the game was feasibly still in the balance at 3-1. Eze tried to dribble through the centre of the Spurs midfield, only to lose the ball for a counter-attack.

This is precisely what Arteta animatedly cautions against.

And yet even a coach as controlling as the Basque can surely appreciate the dual nature of this. It is the necessary risk of players who try something different, who elevate your game and give you greater reward.

Arteta certainly intimated this afterwards, even if it was amid the glow of victory. “At any moment he can win us a game, that’s the ability he has, and he wants to fulfil that talent.”

One obvious response some will have to that, especially amid current debates around Arsenal, is that Arteta is a coach who doesn’t necessarily facilitate talent in that way; that he is too restrained.

Arsenal figures were only too happy to say that all of the goals in this 4-1 win came from open play. And that came from a team that had a lot of signings in the summer finally starting to integrate.

They point to the nature of the first goal, by Leandro Trossard, the only one that Eze didn’t score. Tottenham had gone man-for-man in their 5-4-1, specifically to track Rice and the rest of Arsenal’s midfielders.

That worked for a time but there are two problems with it. One is that it is exhausting, both physically and mentally. Two is that it only works if the opposition can’t open you up.

Arsenal had actually been playing the ball around for 90 seconds before that, to purposely move Spurs out of their system. Merino then had the glimpse of an opening and maximised it.

Eze then finally maximised his own potential, to do something that has barely been done in the history of this fixture. The 27-year-old became just the fourth player to score a hat-trick in the north London derby. The other names are Ted Drake in 1934, Terry Dyson in 1961 and Alan Sunderland in 1978.

It’s astonishing to think given some of the expressive free-scorers that have played in this game, from Jimmy Greaves through Ian Wright and Jurgen Klinsmann to Thierry Henry and Harry Kane.

Eze – not for the first or last time – has done something special.

Boris Johnson had a four-day break before Covid pandemic struck

Official files have revealed that Boris Johnson took four days off during a crucial period in the run-up to locking down the UK when the Covid pandemic struck.

The revelation has come after the group campaigning for families of the Covid bereaved described the former prime minister as being “beyond contempt” for his attack on the damning report produced by the inquiry into his government’s handling of the pandemic.

Mr Johnson has refused to apologise for an estimated 23,000 extra deaths the inquiry stated he caused by delaying lockdown for a week.

Instead he used his column in a national newspaper to lambast the inquiry’s chair Baroness Heather Hallett and argue that Professor Neil Ferguson, whose estimates the figure was based on, was “hysterical”.

Official disclosure for February 2020, described by the inquiry report as a “lost month” in preparing to respond to the pandemic, shows that Mr Johnson took an extended break during the half-term holidays at Chevening, a governmental estate in Kent.

The former prime minister was questioned by the inquiry on what he had been doing between 14 and 24 February 2020 when he gave evidence in December 2023.

At the time he said: “There wasn’t a long holiday that I took. I was working throughout the period and the tempo did increase.”

But official activity logs appear to suggest evidence that Mr Johnson gave under oath may have been wrong.

The controversy has echoes of the parliamentary inquiry into his responses in the House on Partygate where he was found to have misled the Commons.

The official files suggest that Mr Johnson did no official government business on 15, 16, 17 and 21 February.

Instead, it suggests that he spent time walking his dog Dilyn in Chevening, riding a motorbike given to him by his wife Carrie, and hosting friends and family for lunches, dinners and overnight stays.

The Independent has approached Mr Johnson for comment.

The latest revelation comes as the group representing families of the Covid bereaved wants to ensure that Mr Johnson no longer plays any part in public life.

They have also suggested possible legal action against the former prime minister, possibly a private prosecution.

A spokesperson for the group said that this was “further evidence that he [Johnson] wasn’t taking Covid seriously, that he was ignoring the warnings he was getting and putting himself ahead of the country at that time. It vindicates further the report that came out on Thursday. It sounds like he has questions to answer about how truthful he was in front of the inquiry.”

They told The Independent: “It is beyond contempt that Boris Johnson has chosen to respond to the Covid Inquiry by attacking the Covid bereaved for ‘wrangling’ about the deaths of our loved one.

“Instead of showing regret, contrition or even apologising, Johnson is using a newspaper column to do what he couldn’t do under oath at the Covid Inquiry – twist the truth, promote debunked myths and ignore the facts.

“But the truth, which Mr Johnson has never had a close relationship with, is now clear. He was responsible for thousands of avoidable deaths. The one promise he delivered on was to ‘let the bodies pile high’. He has no place in public life and we are calling again for Boris Johnson to lose all of his ex-PM privileges following the inquiry report.”

Their response came after an astonishing rant by the former PM in his weekly Daily Mail column.

Mr Johnson blasted: “Some judge has just spent the thick end of £200m on an inquiry, and what is the upshot?

“She seems, if anything, to want more lockdowns. She seems to have laid into the previous Tory government for not locking down hard enough or fast enough – just when the rest of the world has been thinking that lockdowns were probably wildly overdone.”

He went on: “Bozhe moi, you say, wiping away tears of laughter. My goodness, these Britskis!”

F1 heads to Qatar after Norris and Piastri disqualified at Vegas GP

Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri were both disqualified from the Las Vegas Grand Prix in a dramatic incident that could have lasting ramifications for the 2025 F1 title race.

The post-race development means Max Verstappen, who won in Vegas, is now just 24 points behind championship leader Norris and moves level on points with Piastri with two rounds remaining. Norris had initially extended his lead to his McLaren teammate Piastri to 30 points after finishing second in Vegas, with the Australian only coming home in fourth place.

Yet post-race analysis of both McLaren cars from the FIA found excessive skid plank wear on both cars, with the minimum thickness falling below the 9mm threshold. As a result, the matter was referred to the stewards, who disqualified both cars from the race classification.

It means Norris now only has a 24-point advantage with two rounds – Qatar and Abu Dhabi – remaining and 58 points, courtesy of the sprint race in Qatar, still left to play for.

Follow all the latest news and reaction below:

AI could be changing our brains in ways we don’t even realise

Everyone is cheating. Earlier this year, research showed that almost every student was relying on AI tools such as ChatGPT for their work: 88 per cent of students polled had used it for assignments, up from 53 per cent last year. (The numbers are largely similar in the US.) Anecdotally, the vast number of people already using AI in their work becomes its own kind of justification: if everyone else is cheating, why wouldn’t you?

Because it is making you think less, and less well, the research shows, though it is still limited. Earlier this year, researchers divided participants into three groups and asked them to write an essay. Some were given help from a large language model (LLM), such as ChatGPT; some were allowed access to Google; some didn’t have any help at all. They then studied the three groups in a variety of ways.

As they wrote, their brains worked differently. The more help people got, the less active parts of their brains were. Those who had been given help by AI were less good at quoting their essays. Researchers cautioned that the work is early and relatively limited – and explicitly warned against using it to suggest that people were being made more stupid – but it at the very least suggested “the pressing matter of exploring a possible decrease in learning skills” from using large language models in education.

For thousands of years, thinkers have been worried that technology could undermine memory and understanding. The first of those technologies was writing itself. In The Phaedrus, Socrates warns that the written word could undermine memory and that text might only make people seem like they have knowledge, rather than actually having it.

Computers have only made those concerns more pressing. In a paper in 2011, researchers identified the “Google effect”, in which having information readily available at our fingertips seemed to make it less available inside our heads. Even 15 years ago, researchers were finding that people being asked to recall things were primed to think about computers, and having the expectation of that information being readily available meant they were less likely to actually remember it. “The internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” they wrote.

One big fear about the impact of AI on education is that it doesn’t feel like AI is making us stupid: using it feels like learning. In an article published in the summer, information systems researcher Aaron French noted that talking to AI “can artificially inflate one’s perceived intelligence while actually reducing cognitive effort”. He pointed to the Dunning-Kruger effect – which suggests that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, because you feel empowered with information but don’t yet have enough of it to be aware of what you don’t know – and warned that wrongly using AI can leave people sat in that dangerous spike of confidence, what researchers have called the “peak of Mount Stupid”.

Late last month, Anastasia Berg – who teaches philosophy at the University of California, Irvine – noted that many see a divide between “illicit uses of AI” such as having it write a whole essay, and “innocent auxiliary functions” such as helping with the outline of that essay. But, she noted, deciding what to write about is an indispensable skill. “No aspect of cognitive understanding is perfunctory,” she wrote.

Still, AI is arriving in universities, whether those running them like it or not. Earlier this year, Oxford became one of a number of universities to make an official deal with OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, after what it said was a “successful year-long pilot”. Students get access to a special version of ChatGPT that protects data and includes other safeguards; OpenAI gets to suggest that AI is becoming more central to learning.

Much of the discussion around Oxford’s embrace of AI was explicitly in the context of its students having done so already: the choice isn’t between essays being written with ChatGPT or not, but about whether the university officially recognises it. “‘We know that significant numbers of staff and students are already using generative AI tools,” noted Anne Trefethen, the University of Oxford’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor for Digital, when the project was announced. The use of AI has taken on its own force, and many academics suggest that it is better to teach students to use it well, rather than to teach them without using it.

“University-wide access to ChatGPT Edu will support the development of rigorous academic skills and digital literacy, so that we prepare our graduates to thrive and lead by example in an AI-enabled world,” said Freya Johnston, pro-vice-chancellor for education at Oxford University. “Generative AI is also helping us to explore new ways of engaging with students, alongside our renowned face-to-face teaching and tutorial model, which emphasises critical thinking and contextual analysis.”

Oxford’s own rules don’t rule out generative AI in research, but require that users “remain ultimately responsible for GenAI content used in research”. It tells them that they should keep “an awareness of the tools’ limitations, such as hallucinations, or social biases that may be embedded in training data, which could perpetuate misrepresentation of social categories, protected groups, or historical inaccuracies” as well as requiring them to be aware of other dangers and be transparent about their use of the tools.

Many universities have similar rules. Earlier this year, New York Magazine – in a piece headlined “everyone is cheating their way through college” and which claimed that the technology has “unravelled the entire academic project” – reported on a student who happily flouted Columbia University’s rules on not using AI without permission. Columbia too has a tie-up with OpenAI, it noted.

In that world, students might have to learn differently – and that might include learning how to relate to artificial intelligence. Kaitlyn Regehr, an associate professor in digital humanities at University College London, has warned that the growth of artificial intelligence should bring with it a specific kind of education about “how much of our thinking, or more specifically the development of our thinking, is acceptable to outsource”. “What is the responsibility to shift and to supplement through our education system, throughout parenting, in order to support young people?” she asked an event earlier this year.

That could mean a project similar to PE classes in schools. “With the advent of the car, and more sedentary vocations, a boom in research around physical health was born,” she said. “And because we were not moving, because the technology did that for us, we needed to start to artificially move.

“We saw gym culture emerge, and PE class. Because people weren’t moving, because technology was moving for us. I think a really helpful analogy I hope for parents […] is a gym for the AI age. A social, emotional gym. A social, emotional PE class. What do we now need to supplement, if AI is increasingly doing things for us, and children are not having to move their minds?”

Hundreds of tourists stranded on Machu Picchu

Machu Picchu’s position as Peru’s flagship tourist attraction is under strain amid a deepening dispute over control of the buses that carry visitors to the ancient Inca citadel.

The standoff recently stranded some 1,400 tourists and prompted authorities to deploy emergency evacuation trains.

For three decades, Consettur has operated the 20-minute bus route from Aguas Calientes, transporting roughly 4,500 people a day to the mountaintop site. The alternative – a steep two-hour hike – is unfeasible for most visitors. But Consettur’s long-held licence expired in September, opening the door to a rival operator, San Antonio de Torontoy, and igniting a fierce backlash from local groups who claimed the bidding process lacked transparency.

Cristian Alberto Caballero Chacon, Consettur’s head of operations, acknowledges recent tensions, saying “there have been some conflicts between people from different communities here”.

Protesters blocked the railway leading into Aguas Calientes, forcing officials to clear the tracks and evacuate stranded travellers.

Aguas Calientes is a remote, roadless town accessible mainly by train, making it the crucial transit point for visitors heading to Machu Picchu. Buses there help travellers avoid a steep, multi-mile uphill hike to the site. Recent protests disrupted this system by blocking the train tracks, the only practical link to Cusco and the Sacred Valley, even prompting a US travel alert.

The dispute erupted on 14 September, soon after the authorities revoked Consettur’s 30-year concession to run the Machu Picchu shuttle buses, and awarded it to San Antonio de Torontoy, the rival operator. The decision triggered clashes among local tourism businesses, leading to blockades and a suspension of services that stranded hundreds of international visitors in Aguas Calientes, the remote mountain town that serves as the gateway to the 15th-century Inca site.

Several locals argued that Consettur had enjoyed a de facto monopoly for years, and that power was simply shifting to another exclusive operator.

Tickets for the lucrative bus trip cost $24 for foreigners and $15 for Peruvians.

Amid ongoing legal challenges, Consettur continues to run its fleet while San Antonio de Torontoy awaits final approval.

“The owners of the business have been running the company for the past 30 years, and they are people who come from around here,” Mr Caballero was quoted as saying by the BBC. “This is not a monopoly.”

Consettur “is made up of 12 different companies with various partners”, including the district council, which holds a 38 per cent stake, he added.

The tensions unfolded against a backdrop of high visitor costs and uneven distribution of tourism revenue.

Travellers must first take a train to Aguas Calientes – a journey costing between $140 and $2,000 – before paying a $57 entrance fee to the site.

Nick Stanziano, the Lima-based CEO of tour operator SA Expeditions, which runs regular hiking trips to Machu Picchu, told Outside magazine that Peru “walks a fine line between respecting Indigenous forms of social organisation and balancing them with modern structures of municipal civil society and private industry”.

He added: “This tension has long shaped decision-making at Machu Picchu, but the latest conflict reveals a deeper issue. Overlapping local and regional interests continue to insert themselves into the management … without the technical expertise or long-term planning such a responsibility demands.”

Australian tourist Annalise Jaksic said: “We thought it was one train… and we thought if there was any more transport to get up there it would all be included.” Her friend Todd Carland added that securing entry tickets “was a nightmare for us”.

Local officials share these frustrations. Aguas Calientes mayor Elvis La Torre says only 10 per cent of entrance-ticket revenue stays in the region, arguing that more funding is needed for infrastructure and basic services.

Back in Aguas Calientes, Mr Caballero says Consettur is open to coexistence with San Antonio de Torontoy. “If they are given the final approval we don’t have a problem with working with them. We won’t stop them.”

Meanwhile, Jean-Paul de la Fuente, the director of the New 7 Wonders of the World organisation, earlier noted: “The situation at Machu Picchu has been brewing for many years, and we have been following it with concern.”

“Over the past five years, we have presented concrete proposals to the Peruvian authorities for a comprehensive solution… Unfortunately, nothing happened, and, as always, when you pretend a problem doesn’t exist, it only gets worse,” he told Outside magazine.

The bus turmoil unfolded the same week the New 7 Wonders of the World organisation warned that Machu Picchu risked losing its “credibility” as a world wonder. And Peru’s ministry of culture noted in a statement that “Unesco is the only competent body to promote, worldwide, the identification, protection, and preservation of cultural and natural heritage considered to be of outstanding universal value to humanity”.

EV owners: Earn £55 with this E.ON Next tariff deal now

Considering getting an electric vehicle or have driven one for a while? You may be searching for the right energy tariff to charge your car, and if so, we have just the deal to help. E.ON Next is offering The Independent readers £55 credit with its Drive Smart EV tariff.

With impressively low overnight rates of 6.5p/kWh, it’s worth noting that when you use E.ON Next smart charging, that same competitive price is also applied to the rest of your home. We’d say that makes this limited-time offer of £55 credit sound even more appealing.

This exclusive offer is only available until 30 November, so you better be speedy to snap it up. Keep reading to learn more about the E.ON Next Drive Smart EV tariff – including eligibility, charting your energy use with the Next Home app and getting a quote.

There are a few straightforward requirements to be eligible for the E.ON Next Drive Smart EV tariff. As well as needing to have a smart meter and EV charger already installed at home, you must own or lease an EV that is a model supported by this tariff. Finally, you can only charge and connect one vehicle with E.ON Next’s EV tariff. Sounds simple? Once you’re signed up with your new tariff, you can set up Smart Schedules by downloading the E.ON Next Home app to get started.

After signing up to E.ON Next’s EV tariff, you need to have the Next Home app. This is a convenient way of accessing all of your EV charging information in one place. From seeing your entire charging history to planning future charging stints, you can view all energy cost savings here too. The app enables you to stay informed about charging rates, as you can map any cost changes according to what time of day or night you’re using energy to power your car. This handy level of monitoring lets you take the wheel when charging.

To get £55 when signing up for the E.ON Next Drive Smart EV tariff and make the most of this exclusive deal, head over to the quotes page here. With the offer only available until 30 November, you’d better put your foot down.

Get £55 credit by signing up to the E.ON Next Drive Smart EV tariff now

Angela Rayner comeback still on the cards for prime minister

Sir Keir Starmer said he would like to see Angela Rayner back in his cabinet and can envisage a comeback for her following her resignation in September.

Ms Rayner stood down from her senior roles in government after failing to pay the right amount of stamp duty on a house in Hove.

The prime minister said that even at the time, he was sure she was “going to be a big voice in the Labour movement”.

He described her as “the best example ever in the United Kingdom of social mobility”, rising from a “challenging childhood” to deputy prime minister.

“I’ve always said I want Angela back,” he said, adding that they remain in regular contact. “I’m friends with Angie and I like Angie a lot and we talk a lot. We still do.”

Ms Rayner remains a backbench MP. Asked about a return to frontline politics earlier this month, she told the Daily Mirror that she had “not gone away”.

Allies of Ms Rayner were subsequently pressed to deny “silly” reports that she was eyeing the top role, assuring she was “focused on representing her local community”, not planning a coup.

Speaking to reporters, the prime minister said that he was “acutely aware” that woman in public roles “get much more abuse and criticism than men”.

He suggested that the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, gets more abuse because she is a woman, as she prepares to deliver the autumn budget on Wednesday.

Ms Reeves had hit out at critics “mansplaining” to her how to be Chancellor and blamed sexism for motivating at least some of the criticism levelled at her ahead of the Budget.

Asked whether he agreed with her, Sir Keir told reporters: “I strongly believe that women in public life get much more criticism and abuse than men, and I mean that is in politics, but it’s also across a number of other areas.

“I’d also say the media frankly … There’s abuse and criticism of all politicians, but I’m acutely aware that women get much more abuse and criticism than men do and I think it’s about time we acknowledge that.”

The Labour leader also pointed to Ms Reeves being the first woman to hold the office of chancellor in its more than 800-year history.

”I’m really proud that we’ve got a female Chancellor who’s doing a really good job,” he said.

Ms Reeves told The Times Magazine this week that she was “sick of people mansplaining how to be Chancellor to me”.

She complained about criticism from “boys who now write newspaper columns”, saying: “I recognise that I’ve got a target on me. You can see that in the media; they’re going for me all the time. It’s exhausting.”

‘Beast from the East’ weather phenomenon returning to UK this winter

The UK could be facing another cold snap as the weather phenomenon that brought in 2018’s Beast from the East looks set to have “significant implications” on the country’s weather.

The Met Office said “winter has arrived early across the UK, bringing cold Arctic air and a complex mix of weather hazards” after a week of ice and snow weather warnings across stretches of the UK.

More unsettled, Atlantic-driven weather moved in this weekend and brought milder, wetter conditions of cloud, rain and winds, but a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event in this week could see colder weather return in the next two weeks.

A SSW involves a rapid increase in temperature in the stratosphere above the North Pole, often leading to a reversal of the stratospheric polar vortex winds, involving the rapid descent of cold air south, potentially bringing cold weather to the country.

According to the forecaster, this increases the likelihood of colder weather in the UK 10 to 14 days later by roughly 70 per cent. While not guaranteed, meteorologists will be keeping a close eye on the weather phenomenon that can lead to a colder than average start to winter.

“From the clash of Arctic and North African air masses to the impacts of heavy rain, flooding, and significant snow, the country is experiencing a wide range of conditions”, the forecaster reported. “Regional differences are stark, with some areas facing substantial snow while others enjoy sunny skies and frosty nights. The outlook remains uncertain, with the potential for further cold spells and unsettled weather as the season progresses. “

A SSW was the same weather phenomenon that led to the brutal ‘Beast from the East’ in 2018, which transported cold air from Siberia to Europe and heavy snowfall to Great Britain and Ireland. Temperatures plummeted across the country with lows of -14.7C recorded in Faversham, Kent, and Storm Emma brought 50 cm of snow in some elevated areas.

Temperatures dropped well below average for this time of the year across the country this week with wind chill making it feel even colder with “feels like” temperatures widely at minus one or minus two degrees. The Met Office recorded lows of -11.7C at Loch Glascarnoch on Thursday night, the coldest night of the season so far.

The recent arctic air mass brought snow to the UK this week as schools were forced to close across the country, with yellow and amber ice and snow weather warnings issued for parts of the UK.

Showers and longer spell of rain will spread across eastern areas today where it will be largely cloudy. Turning drier in the west with some sunny spells, although a few showers too. Windy in the west and feeling chilly.

Showers continuing in the east overnight, but drier with clear spells elsewhere. Winds easing and turning frosty in the west.

Dry, cold and sunny for many. However, there will be a few coastal showers, particularly in the east where winds will be brisk.

Turning more unsettled through the middle part of the week with spells of rain and strong winds at times. A milder feel than of late.