Wait…what? Where am I? How long has the match been over? I watched the whole thing…I think; I know I turned it on in time for the national anthems at Wembley; only just now I sort of came back to myself and noticed that the TV was showing a commercial for discount mufflers. How long [...]

#5 David Beckham is England's best player.
This seemed so obvious tonight that I couldn't remember why he'd ever been dropped from the squad in the first place. It had to be some combination of politics and petty resentment, right? But how could anyone be that short-sighted? Around that time, I remembered the [...]

I don't know how it works, physically, when the FA unveils a new plan. Is there an actual thunderclap, or just a guy standing in the wings rolling a 50p coin on a timpani? I'd like to imagine that the whole thing starts with Brian Barwick driving across a stage in a tiny [...]

This week's Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at the way Fabio Capello has been portrayed by fans and the media in England, and wonders about a style of characterization that relentlessly depicts him as a mob boss or a bloodthirsty dictator—but in a good way:
There’s a fascinating process at work here, because [...]

I don't know much about rifle terminology. Can a bore be off? Is that something that could happen to a rifle? I think Wayne Rooney's bore was off tonight, because he essentially played the game of an assassin who brilliantly scales the ivy outside the bell-tower, swirls his black cape over his [...]

This week's Run of Play at Pitch Invasion feature looks at Fabio Capello's imminent appointment as England manager and asks whether he'll be able to give the England team an identity apart from its air of constant crisis:
Giving a team a personality is one of the least-well-defined skills in football management. You can talk about [...]

For the 67th time since the Croatia match, it's being reported that José Mourinho has taken himself out of the running to be the next England manager. This account seems to be more real than some of the others. And yet I've heard the story so many times that I can't quite believe [...]

Two feet: that's what finished England. Had Scott Carson been standing two feet to his left when Mladen Petrić tried that impertinent 25-yard shot, he would have stopped it, and England would almost certainly have held on for the draw that would have taken them to the European Championship. It wouldn't have been a strange [...]

Of all the football players who inexplicably moonlight as newspaper columnists, David James is the only one I consistently enjoy reading for unironic reasons. His opinions on the game are often genuinely interesting, and his personality on the page has more life than what you find in the usual one-sentence-per-paragraph fluff. Maybe he has a [...]