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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Wigan 1 – 2 Manchester United: The Gaunt Pursuit

It’s been 17 hours, but I’m still struggling to come up with anything to say about this slumped haystack of a match. I watched it grimly, out of a sense of duty to what’s turning out to be a maddeningly incremental historic moment—Manchester United are now “all but guaranteed” to win the title they’d “essentially sewed up” a few weeks ago and “basically won” in March—but as it turned out I wasn’t the grimmest thing in the room. Has any team ever endured its way to a championship with as much dogged moroseness as Manchester United this year? Wigan were great, apart from being Wigan, but watching Man Utd at the moment is like watching an old man cut the grass with an antique lawnmower. The grass can’t do anything about it, but it takes forever, and no one has any fun.

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Wigan 1 – 2 Manchester United: The Gaunt Pursuit

by Brian Phillips · May 14, 2009

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