FA CUP 5th-ROUND ACTION: Barnsley have stunned Liverpool at Anfield, winning 2-1 on Brian Howard’s 93nd-minute goal. It was a wild, inspired performance from Barnsley, who scored the 1-1 equalizer in the 59th minute and spent most of the rest of the match pinned in their own six-yard box, flinging themselves into [...]

This is a kind of purpose: to ask what these things mean. How is it that the story-craving and myth-making parts of our imaginations are able to see greatness and find joy in some arbitrary movements on a field? What does the rhythmic sidestep or the incisive pass echo in human experience? [...]

Things keep getting stranger on the email autoreply front. After a fairly straightforward message from Blackburn yesterday (text: “Thank you for contacting Blackburn Rovers Football Club. Please be advised that due to the large number of messages we receive, we will kick your filthy teeth in. If you would like to speak [...]

In myth and in the funny pages, tiny wiseguys with magic somewhere in them baffle and humiliate the sergeants and leashed bulldogs of the world. They find an ally and representative in Joe Cole, the Puck, Peter Pan, Bugs Bunny and Odysseus of Chelsea, the Artful Dodger, the Puss in Boots, the handful of [...]

You might have been worried, after the touching memorial to the victims of the 1958 Munich air crash at the Manchester derby yesterday, that the open market would never offer you, the wealthy obsessive, the chance to buy macabre memorabilia of the disaster online. After all, human sentiments being the inconvenient sticky things they [...]

Yesterday, because I am a man who takes action whenever the cause is just and the lead-in includes the words “under 30 seconds,” “automatic,” and “online,” I signed the “No to Game 39″ petition from the Football Supporters’ Federation. I felt a moment’s pride as honest union men, their faces streaked with soot, [...]

Man Utd 1 - 2 Man City — The Man City supporters impeccably observed the minute of silence in honor of the victims of the ‘58 Munich air crash. Not to be outdone, the Man Utd supporters then impeccably observed ninety-four consecutive minutes of silence that lasted until the end of the match.
Derby 0 - [...]

It’s Friday, which means it’s time to look out across the brooding river toward the lights on the far shore, and wonder where the current will take us when we cross through the matches ahead. I’ll be testing the waters at…

In keeping with the theme of this week’s Tuesday Portrait, here’s a video chronicling Iker Casillas’s long one-sided friendship with implosion and catastrophe. Sometimes, after yet another night of stifled humiliation, catastrophe tosses the remains of its cigarette angrily into a parking-lot puddle and contemplates walking away. But in every relationship there’s a gardener [...]

This week’s Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at the way Fabio Capello has been portrayed by fans and the media in England, and wonders about a style of characterization that relentlessly depicts him as a mob boss or a bloodthirsty dictator—but in a good way:
There’s a fascinating process at work here, because [...]