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 [...]

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 [...]

Every so often, on my perambulations around the footballing part of the internet, I come across a discussion of the Beatles and football: they were Scousers, in their sly way, after all. Were they Liverpool fans? Old Evertonians? Was the Walrus really Dave Hickson? Etc.
The story that usually emerges is that none of the Beatles [...]

…damned if it doesn’t close up shop right when it starts to get interesting.
Here’s how this works: I’m going to walk you through all four Champions League quarter-final matches this week. I’m not going to make predictions, because fuck my predictions. That’s what Alan Hansen’s for. If you want a prediction, Alan Hansen can [...]

I have it on good authority that Nick Hornby knows what arugula is, so it probably makes sense that the only thing anyone ever says about Arsenal is that they’re cultivated and weak. I have no idea whether Nick Hornby, from his “house right next to the Arsenal ground,” has ever included a tiny [...]

The endgame phase has arrived for the Barclays Premier League season. Dormant hierarchies are reasserting themselves, and short-term hopes are dashed. With seven games left, Everton are now the only club with a chance of breaking into the traditional top four, and the big-club intramurals last weekend saw Man Utd, Chelsea, Arsenal and [...]

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 [...]

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

ST. ALBANS AND ABBOTS LANGLEY
On a gray, overcast day in 251 A.D., St. Alban, the first English martyr, was decapitated by Roman soldiers on a hill overlooking the settlement of Verulamium. According to the legend preserved, nearly 500 years later, in the Historia [...]

I’m just going to come out and say this, as simply as I know how. Arsenal goalkeeper Manuel Almunia moved into a house that was built on the site of an abandoned psychiatric hospital, and now his wife is being haunted by the ghost of “a monk-like figure with a candle in his hand.” [...]