But I'm struggling to have one about the news that Premier League teams have voted to explore a proposal to extend the season to 39 games and have each team play one match a year abroad. Actually, it's easy to have an opinion: it's a stupid proposal, it would slightly upset the competitive [...]

I don't know much about rifle terminology. Can a bore be off? Is that something that could happen to a rifle? I think Wayne Rooney's bore was off tonight, because he essentially played the game of an assassin who brilliantly scales the ivy outside the bell-tower, swirls his black cape over his [...]

I'm a bit late posting about this, because I couldn't decide whether to take a modest tone (hey, lot of great blogs out there) or let myself go a little (the hammer of vengeance shall fall upon those who dismay us), but The Run of Play has been nominated for two Soccerlens Blog Awards. [...]

After three months of letting you figure things out for yourselves, and trusting that the odd sharp-eyed prospector who followed the rumors and the secret maps to this site would manage to discover what was here, I've decided to add an About page. You can find it in the sidebar to your right. [...]

As a figure of ineluctable anxiety the goalkeeper is arguably the most modern player in football, the one who both emotionally and as a potential subject for iconography echoes the feeling of the woman with something in her briefcase as she descends the subway stairs. Do you pause for a long moment, hand lingering [...]

Man City 1 - 3 Arsenal — If you can imagine this match as a symphony, and imagine that the harmonic range and expressiveness of the music were contained in the style and spirit of play, then you will know what I mean when I picture the concert-mistress in her black dress, striding out before [...]

It's Friday, which means it's time to open the mysterious parcel you found in the mail three weeks after your grandfather's disappearance, and try to decipher his clues to the weekend of football ahead. I'll be setting out to find the truth in…

Now that the January transfer window has closed, and the cold wind has stopped coming into the parlor (and has resumed, as if from far off, its low desolate moaning on the moors), it's time for the writers and bloggers who follow English football to weigh in and assess each team's results. That's [...]

Everything I like and everything I don't like about Cristiano Ronaldo's style of play can be seen in this riveting video, which tracks him up close throughout the Man Utd-Portsmouth game this week. He's a little bit talented, in case you had any doubt. Oh, and his 2-0 free-kick, which Alex Ferguson called [...]

This week's Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature asks whether an American-style revenue-sharing system would be better for European football leagues than the current laissez-faire approach. Two fairly obvious potential benefits:
1. Smaller clubs would be able to compete in the transfer market and, as a result, to challenge for trophies. This would [...]