In addition to being one of the best football bloggers on the internet, Tom Dunmore of Pitch Invasion is also a generous soul, and he has kindly invited me to write a weekly feature for his site. This week’s post is a field guide to the recent whirl of corruption investigations in English football: [...]

Harry Redknapp has been released on bail—as if a jail could hold Harry—and has spoken out about his run-in with Johnny Law this morning. He’s innocent, of course. But his defense goes beyond mere protestations of righteousness and into a realm of counter-intuitive logic so breathtaking that it would probably take 60 more police officers [...]

Harry Redknapp has been arrested “on suspicion of conspiracy to defraud and false accounting,” as part of an ongoing investigation into corruption in football, according to this report from the Evening Standard. Also arrested were Portsmouth chief executive Peter Storrie, Rangers midfielder Amdy Faye, prominent agent Willie McKay, and Leicester City chairman Milan Mandaric. If [...]

I’m not sure if anyone will be able to see this message, but The Run of Play is (UPDATE: was) experiencing catastrophic technical failure on all fronts as a result of, I don’t know, some engineer accidentally leaning back on the “kill blog” switch while taking a sip of piping-hot Google©-brand coffee as he chats [...]

I’ve never seen a highlight video about Andrea Pirlo that didn’t feel wrong somehow. Mostly compilations of free kicks and penalties, mostly set to soundtracks that suggest a lack of confidence in the compiler (“Kiss from a Rose”? Really?), they seem to present not so much Pirlo as the environment of a football match, a [...]

We follow sports because we want someone to win. This follows from our involvement in sports at the level of tribal loyalty and from our fascination with sports as a vehicle for stories: identifying with the team of our nation, city, town, neighborhood, or simply of our own free choice, we want a particular [...]

Fulham 2 - 2 Blackburn — The hot stat of the week is that if you counted only the first halves of matches, Fulham would be first in the league. What no one’s pointed out is that if you counted only the second halves of matches, they would be dead behind a Superquinn in Leinster.
Bolton [...]

Two feet: that’s what finished England. Had Scott Carson been standing two feet to his left when Mladen Petrić tried that impertinent 25-yard shot, he would have stopped it, and England would almost certainly have held on for the draw that would have taken them to the European Championship. It wouldn’t have been a strange [...]

Of all the football players who inexplicably moonlight as newspaper columnists, David James is the only one I consistently enjoy reading for unironic reasons. His opinions on the game are often genuinely interesting, and his personality on the page has more life than what you find in the usual one-sentence-per-paragraph fluff. Maybe he has a [...]

I think it’s officially time to give Steve McClaren a break. The man has been hounded by the press, endured professional humiliation the likes of which most of us can’t even imagine, and seen his most cherished dream go up like a West Ham chorus. Plus, the perforation was really hard to tear on that [...]