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 [...]

Portsmouth have beaten West Brom 1-0 to reach their first FA Cup final since 1939. I had planned to write a detailed match summary, but I think a minute-by-minute report might be a better way to relate the experience of watching football from a far-off country in this internet age…

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’ve written a post for Pitch Invasion about the association of Bristol Rovers and the old American suicide ballad “Goodnight, Irene.” It’s a kind of parallel history of Bristol Rovers and the American musician Leadbelly, who popularized the song in the 1930s and ’40s before Rovers fans took it as their anthem:
Black [...]

One takes something so difficult that a practiced adult can’t do it reliably and makes it so easy that we see it done dozens of times, acrobatically, in a game. The other takes something so simple that my two-year-old niece can do it and makes it so hard that seeing it done once in [...]

Athletes, most of them, aren’t moral paragons, just people who are good at playing games. Morally, some of them are better than others, just as with anyone, and it makes no sense to treat them, as a class, as though they were exemplars of the virtuous life. We know this; we aren’t naive. [...]

I know about as much about the MLS as I do about Spanish basketball, but it looked like a nice scene in Washington today as the Houston Dynamo beat the New England Revolution 2-1 to win their second consecutive championship. The crowd seemed to be having fun. You didn’t get the sense that the match [...]

Loving a sport from another continent leads to a lot of interesting consequences, one of which is that, assuming you also follow sports closer to home, you’re taking in media and tracking story lines in vastly different contexts. It can be like having a different song playing on either side of your headphones; one minute [...]

For American fans of the Premier League, seeing matches means waking up early, sometimes to make the cold walk to some local bar or self-styled Irish pub to share a euthanasia breakfast with a plasma screen and a handful of European exiles, sometimes to wage a sleepy war with Chinese streaming software in the hope [...]