The art of being an elite club in European football is the art of forgetting how to be happy. The competitions you don’t win have to sit like a stone in the middle of your consciousness of the competitions you do.
Stoke City (“not an elite club”) were ecstatic this weekend after a 0-0 draw with [...]

Birmingham City Chairman David Gold on Carson Yeung’s failed takeover bid and the departure of Steve Bruce…
“dark days”…“extraordinary circumstances came together at the same time”
“it was all out of our control”
“out of our hands”…“couldn’t do anything”…“the club was in limbo”
“headlines of turmoil and crisis”
“black storm clouds came down on us”
“no man is an island”

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 [...]

“DINAMO’S SILVER JUBILEE DULLED BY DEATH AND INDIFFERENCE”
“official apathy”…“tragic absence”…“the passing of the glories of this world”
“we’ll just have to go to the pub and drink like we’ve been thirsty for [a] quarter of a century”
“[H]e could not live. There was something too intense about him and about his genius.”
“the urge died in him, the [...]

Today’s award for most alarming newspaper headline goes to the Guardian, which sends its boilerplate McClaren-before-the-match filler into the realm of existential paradox by giving it the title “WE MUST FEAR THE UNTHINKABLE, WARNS MCCLAREN.” No Sartre himself, McClaren doesn’t actually issue this warning in the piece, nor does the piece explain how we could [...]