The Run of Play is a blog about
the wonder and terror of soccer.

We left the window open during a match in October 2007 and a strange wind blew into the room.

Now we walk the forgotten byways of football with a lonely tread, searching for the beautiful, the bewildering, the haunting, and the absurd.

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The Question Without Raising It

I’m going to leave out everything I thought I might say about money and purity in football, about big clubs vs. small clubs, about moral high grounds and about the deep, unsettling ways in which the organization of the game is changing. The only point I’m going to make is the one I thought I would end with: that I watched the sun rise yesterday, and I watched Fernando Torres’s goal against Marseille, and maybe the Champions League is a cynical ploy that no one ought to care about, but I thought the goal was more beautiful.