It was never supposed to be this way. Things like this aren’t supposed to happen in football. An exciting day—that’s what we thought we would see. A contest. A game! Now the sole remaining question—the final, terrifying, all-important question—is how can we go on? How can we placate the wrath of a God who may no longer be willing to forgive us? How can we purify ourselves? How can we ever be safe? More»

Hey, so I didn’t know what kind of links you wanted, so I just grabbed a bunch of different kinds. No, yeah, from that new place over on 8th Street. I know. There’s just no reason for anyone to go over there. I guess rents must get high once you start moving over toward 12th. We should definitely open a restaurant.

• Who needs Mourinho when you can have…Pep Guardiola? (Reuters)
• ESPN to show Euro 2008 games in the United States. (The Offside)
• Cristiano Ronaldo struggles to think of his idols. (Treasons, Stratagems & Spoils)
• Sing it loud for Peter Crouch. (Dave’s Football Blog)
• The EU votes against Blatter’s foreign quota rule… (The Guardian)
• …but non-EU players will have to pass a language exam to play in England. (The Beautiful Game)
• You can’t stop the Arsenal Ladies. You can only hope to contain them. And you can’t. (Pitch Invasion)
• Big Phil to replace Sven at Man City? (The Telegraph)

Probably not. You know how these things go. But it can’t be warming the cockles of Brian Barwick’s Mr. Belvedere-sized heart to know that the England coach, already under investigation for tax evasion in Italy, is now being investigated for perjury in connection with yet another sensational legal case involving corruption in Italian football. More»

I am picturing the human brain as a map of lights in the dark, lights that flare up, in complex patterns, when we see something we recognize, when we make a decision, when we think of a word. In the apartment building across from mine, American Idol comes on, and a hundred tiny televisions start to flicker in perfect sync. Celebrities are all constellations of themselves, made up of every instance in which we have come across their likeness: in a bus kiosk, on a table in the dentist’s waiting room. The sight of a very beautiful person makes colors light up in the mind that look like Tokyo at night. Celebrities seem to exist in more than one place at a time. A speed boat and the alley behind a nightclub and a sidewalk down which they are walking in complete isolation with a single shopping bag all seem to be happening at the same time everywhere they go. These things seem to occupy nodes on a mysterious network of vital parts whose connections we are powerless to see. More»

The papers today are ganging up on poor injury-riddled Harry Kewell, who is about to leave Liverpool having played in just 18 games over the last two seasons. Diligent economists at the Telegraph calculate that he cost the club £157,554 per game, while the Daily Mail, rounding up on principle, says £160,000.

Lay off Harry Kewell, I say. He’s a good player who’s had some bad luck. It’s not like he knew he was going to come down with the gout!

At some point in the history of televised soccer, someone must have used a stranger phrase to describe a goal than “pure animal physics,” but no example springs instantly to mind. What does it mean? How could anyone say it in such a cheerful and satisfied voice, when it sounds euphemistic and horrifying, like some sinister scheme to power a light bulb with a horse? I guess the goal is legendary enough to excuse any amount of bizarre language: so this is Johnny Metgod, smoking angular moonshine for Nottingham Forest against West Ham in 1986, and this is your historical goal of the week.

The Tuesday Portrait will be a day or two late this week. I’m writing on David Beckham. It’s time.

Since we took the time to criticize Buzz Bissinger for his comments about sports blogs last week, I want to take time now to give him some credit for his interview with the Big Lead today, in which he responds to the controversy and apologizes for his remarks. I’m not going to say that it “took a lot of courage” (it will, I assure you, be said), but for Bissinger to work out his reaction on a popular sports blog at least demonstrates a desire to talk to the right audience, and a basic willingness to see blogs as a diverse medium. It will undoubtedly be suggested that his apology was an act of self-preservation forced by the vehemence of the outcry, but I don’t believe that either; his thoughts in the interview don’t seem at all cynical, and are too complex to be politic. More»

The art of being an elite club in European football is the art of forgetting how to be happy. The competitions you don’t win have to sit like a stone in the middle of your consciousness of the competitions you do.

Stoke City (“not an elite club”) were ecstatic this weekend after a 0-0 draw with Leicester City secured their promotion to the top flight in England for the first time in 23 years. Elsewhere in Europe, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich were clinching top-flight league championships by commanding margins, but feeling a bit poignant, on the whole, that they didn’t win their European tournaments. Oh, there were celebrations, songs, and dousings with Weißbier in the gray continental rain, but a faint philosophical melancholy ran through both teams. Together they’ve won 52 league titles, so it takes something special to keep ennui from creeping into the experience. More»

See? See? What have we been saying all this time? You should never mess with Harry Redknapp!

What’s that? Oh, you do want to mess with him? Fine! Why don’t you try charging him with suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting? Does that sound good to you, “City of London Police”? Well, then, issue a warrant, raid his house, arrest him, and detain him for seven hours—feel free. Just don’t get too comfortable, because this is a man who will absolutely initiate a judicial review hearing in which the legality of the warrant as issued by the City of London Court is challenged on technical grounds that if upheld would render its subsequent execution by the City of London Police totally and completely bogus.

Okay, so the court threw out Harry’s charge that the police tipped off the media before raiding his house. (Sure, because those Sun photographers are always set up on that corner.) Makes no difference. Harry Redknapp will tear you down.

Woah! What the hell was that? Hey, guys? Can anyone hear me?

Man, I wish I knew what was going on. I was just taking it easy down in the swamp, using the water to support my enormous bulk—you know, the way we do—and munching on some of the tree-leaves I was able to reach thanks to my long, dorsoventrally flexible neck. Suddenly, I heard this incredible roar, like a million tons of rock screaming down from the sky and plowing right into the mountains! I guess the shock must have been too much for my fist-sized brain, because the last thing I remember is feeling relieved that my nasal openings were located at the apex of my cranium, so that I wouldn’t drown if I passed out in the water. More»