This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks ahead to some of the stories the football media will be covering in 2008, and chooses five that you can safely ignore. There are only so many minutes in the day, and New Year’s is the perfect time to clear the clutter out of your [...]

Staring out a hotel window this morning onto a still-dark street—frail skirts of light clinging to the legs of the streetlamps; black-coated passers-by gliding along like ghosts from a dead commercial about the legroom in business class; every signpost sheathed in pine branches and with a floppy red bow around its neck, like someone’s country [...]

I
Dear Reader, on this morning of libation,
Fragrant with holly, redolent with peace,
I thought I’d post a poem—with trepidation,
The muse being passed out on a floor in Greece;
I’d hoped to share the season’s revelation,
But then I couldn’t quite afford the lease:
Take, then, this rhyme, my sub-Byronic way
To thank you all for reading Run of Play.
II
I read [...]

The Run of Play will be operating on a reduced holiday schedule for the next few days, which means there will be posts “every once in a while.” (That’s a direct quote from our operating handbook, which also contains the words “occasionally,” “inconsistently,” “when we feel like it,” and “Bolton.”) You’ll have to [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at the problem of communication in the globalized world of contemporary football, and asks how, with such a wide range of languages in use at any given moment, players, managers, fans and the media are ever able to understand one another.
When an average club contains [...]

Had this shot passed through a wheat field, the wheat would have fallen in its wake. It’s a long, slow, sickening curve, this goal, and following the flight of the ball too closely can give you a sensation of vertigo. But what a beautiful scythe it made. This is [...]

The Structure of His Face
Is in three layers, with each outer layer fitting slightly too largely over the layer it contains, so that the overall shape is one of sculptural creasing and drape, like the skirt of the Winged Victory. At the far-underneath level, the skeleton level, his head is fox-sleek and trim, but [...]

Arsenal 1 - 0 Chelsea — What a match! It had drama, it had desperation, it had wild attacking play, it even had one of those weird little off-balance tugging matches that passes for fighting in this rivalry. It’s the next logical step in the diving epidemic—players now feel like they’ve struck a [...]

We’re going to plan ahead, take it slow, and above all, respect the situation. The Dutch police have made it easier for us by forcing the postponement of the Ajax - PSV match, but we still have three consecutive games that would individually suffice to flutter the needle on a seismograph. You’re going [...]

What with the big news about Fabio Capello agreeing to manage a team that even he won’t be able to overload with Dutchmen, the revelation that Avram Grant signed a new four-year contract with Chelsea yesterday has sort of been swept under the rug. That’s too bad, because Grant’s success has been one of [...]