This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at Fabio Capello’s imminent appointment as England manager and asks whether he’ll be able to give the England team an identity apart from its air of constant crisis:
Giving a team a personality is one of the least-well-defined skills in football management. You can talk about [...]

If dead-eyed, scrap-cheeked, hairless, sharp-toothed, chalk-skinned, thieving, bilious, idiot boys in England, bluely tattooed, lips sensually numbed and hypnotized by lager, set out to eat each other’s eyeballs at the behest of Hitler-loving middle-aged real-estate men drunk with the scent of their own sweat-soaked smirking desperate wife-killing mustaches, please, someone, tell me, what on Earth [...]

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 [...]

It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it. A man is walking along without thought or heed;—suddenly he throws himself down on the ground and a storm of fragments flies harmlessly over him;—yet he cannot remember either to have heard the shell [...]

For the 67th time since the Croatia match, it’s being reported that José Mourinho has taken himself out of the running to be the next England manager. This account seems to be more real than some of the others. And yet I’ve heard the story so many times that I can’t quite believe [...]

Well, that was fun! The first-ever Run of Play contest has run its course, and for a blog competition that wasn’t even organized around the publication of a vaguely cynical tie-in book (next time, guys) I think we did pretty well. You wanted to choose the player for tomorrow’s portrait, and you fought [...]

Middlesbrough 2 - 1 Arsenal — It’s hard to say what Arsenal missed more in this match, Cesc Fabregas or the goalmouth. Based on the number of free kicks that went skewing off to Jupiter, I’m going to say it was both.
Blackburn 0 - 1 West Ham — “An animated Mark Hughes” watched [...]

It’s never with a feeling of great moral comfort that you can get excited about a player’s injury, but at the same time, if Didier Drogba’s now-surgically-repaired knee broke away from Chelsea and founded its own three-ring circus, the only surprising thing about it would be the girth of the bearded lady. It’s got [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at the question, “What is the soul of football?”, and comes to the obvious conclusion that the answer is “transfer gossip.”
Like the soul, transfer gossip comes into the world—no one knows from where; passes through the world—no one knows how; and departs the world—no one [...]

After the reckless assault of one-liners that resulted in Tuesday’s Portrait of Peter Crouch, I thought it would be fun to get everyone in on the act, and to that end, I’m delighted to unveil the first-ever Run of Play Contest. Curious? Read on.
The Task: Describe Peter Crouch in one line. One [...]