The NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament starts today, and to mark the occasion, here’s a clip of some fantastic soccer highlights interspersed with thunderous slam dunks. I’m not sure what the point is, but it makes sense in a poetic way, and it’s not a bad way to spend 4:10. Which, come to think [...]

I don’t know how it works, physically, when the FA unveils a new plan. Is there an actual thunderclap, or just a guy standing in the wings rolling a 50p coin on a timpani? I’d like to imagine that the whole thing starts with Brian Barwick driving across a stage in a tiny [...]

I have splendid truths to tell about Yakubu Aiyegbeni, the thundering Toffee, who crushes parked cars with his fists, eats junkyards, and cracks bank vaults with his skull—not because he hits them so hard, but because he knows the combination. Maybe you’ve seen him on a fine afternoon, just walking down the street with [...]

Look, I know I haven’t been there for you. I know that. No one who leaves the house to buy cigarettes and doesn’t come back for six years is drinking his coffee out of a father of the year mug, believe me. It doesn’t matter now why I left or where I [...]

This morning I’m taking a trip to a town where the wind votes in elections and the taxis are driven by rain. Normal service to be resumed at the beginning of next week, or when I get back, or when I dry off, whichever comes last.

Posting will be light for the next several days, due to Eventualities. The Tuesday Portrait will appear as usual, but in a cursory and alternative form. An imagined post on Juande Ramos’s skillful use of the fullback position is, for the moment, only a cause for speculation and grief.

A REPORT BY DR. CHESAPEAKE MARCHPANE, SPECIAL TO THE RUN OF PLAY

In further chronicling the forces at play in the haunting of the Almunia house at Abbots Langley, it is necessary to take into account a local legend, widely repeated in the vicinity of Leavesden, that somewhere in the asylum graveyard lie the remains of [...]