Avram Grant’s eccentric press conference after Chelsea’s 1-0 win against Everton this week prompted many observers to compare Grant’s curt, uncommunicative responses to the beloved monologues of his predecessor, José Mourinho. Wondering how Mourinho would have handled the questions the media put to Grant? Wonder no more.

Q: A deserved win José?
Mourinho: Yes. No. No, it [...]

Q. Was Avram Grant’s bizarre monosyllabic press conference yesterday a devastating piece of conceptual criticism designed to expose the vapidity of the football media by giving reporters’ banal questions the answers they would actually deserve in intelligent conversation?
A. I don’t know.

THE LEAGUE THAT DEVOURS
The recent success of English teams in the UEFA Champions League competition has led to considerable anxiety among football writers and administrators and to fears that the English Premier League is “eating the rest of football.” This curiously gruesome but nevertheless oft-employed expression, which depicts the Premier League as a predatory [...]

Unless you’re a fan of Getafe fullbacks or inclined to keep a close eye on all suspect penalty non-calls involving Barcelona, you probably haven’t heard of Lucas Licht. But I don’t know. I have a feeling that after the next few minutes, you might just remember his name.
This is Lucas Licht, scoring the rare 9000-yard [...]

There’s a certain quality that comes into the facial expressions of men who, somewhat battered and chastened by life, somewhat rumpled by it, somewhat the worse for wear, nevertheless retain an unusually clear sense of the virtue that guides their actions. Disillusioned more by the world’s failure to endorse their illusions than by any realization [...]

If you don’t want to read them, you don’t have to. I guess I just thought…I guess I just thought you were interested in the things I cared about. Remember when you got so excited about astronomy, and I went out to the dunes with you all those times in the middle of [...]

Look, I feel bad, okay? I should have realized I was going too far. I should have realized that spamming pictures of freshly killed animals with crude anti-hunting captions wasn’t the best way to introduce myself. I see that now. I mean, it’s only natural. After a hard day of thinking seriously about the Darfur [...]

Malarial lowlands. Brown mountains rigid in the distance, like the bones of the corpse of the sky. Wind, like a disease, swelling on the fens: mixing the shadows, sifting the sedge, glimmering along the grassy pools. There is a moon in the bruise-colored air: so it must be twilight. It might have been any time [...]

As anyone can tell you, managing a Premiership football club is very much like running a successful paper merchant. David Brent explores the similarities. The audio sync is terrible, but the wisdom sync is just about perfect.
Do you think that Alan Hansen or Mark Lawrenson would have had the careers they had if they’d have [...]

Tom sent along this great video of reaction shots from the New England players as they go down 4-0 to Chicago in the first half. (Apparently Tom is a Chicago fan or something? You learn something new every day.) The game is a few days old, but the haunting disappointment is timeless.
The Tuesday Portrait will [...]