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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Newcastle 0 – 0 Bolton, As Reported by W.B. Yeats

Is Kevin Keegan’s return to Newcastle the second coming? We sent Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet William Butler Yeats to find out. Hover your mouse on the highlighted text for commentary on his match report.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
The poet William YeatsThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Newcastle 0 – 0 Bolton, As Reported by W.B. Yeats

by Brian Phillips · January 19, 2008

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