At some point in the history of televised soccer, someone must have used a stranger phrase to describe a goal than “pure animal physics,” but no example springs instantly to mind. What does it mean? How could anyone say it in such a cheerful and satisfied voice, when it sounds euphemistic and horrifying, like some [...]

Maybe it happened in a charity game. Maybe Michael Schumacher is a racecar driver. Maybe Michael Schumacher played in the same charity game, and got three assists. Fine. Just watch this, and tell me it doesn’t count.
This is Ronaldo, playing the double-roulette one-two over-the-body back-heel with Raul, and this is your historical goal of [...]

Unless you’re a fan of Getafe fullbacks or inclined to keep a close eye on all suspect penalty non-calls involving Barcelona, you probably haven’t heard of Lucas Licht. But I don’t know. I have a feeling that after the next few minutes, you might just remember his name.
This is Lucas Licht, scoring the rare 9000-yard [...]

After Coventry City scored this goal in 1970, the FA put on its soberest gray suits and urgently convened in a very serious room where they changed the rules of the game to prevent anything like it from ever happening again. And it’s probably thanks to their diligence that football was not torn apart [...]

Tom and Daryl have both written nice posts about Paul Gascoigne, who was arrested and detained as a mental-health risk yesterday after a series of bizarre incidents in English hotels. The collapse of this great player has been covered with admirable sadness and tact by nearly everyone who’s written about it, and I’ll only [...]

This is a kind of purpose: to ask what these things mean. How is it that the story-craving and myth-making parts of our imaginations are able to see greatness and find joy in some arbitrary movements on a field? What does the rhythmic sidestep or the incisive pass echo in human experience? [...]

In keeping with the theme of this week’s Tuesday Portrait, here’s a video chronicling Iker Casillas’s long one-sided friendship with implosion and catastrophe. Sometimes, after yet another night of stifled humiliation, catastrophe tosses the remains of its cigarette angrily into a parking-lot puddle and contemplates walking away. But in every relationship there’s a gardener [...]

Everything I like and everything I don’t like about Cristiano Ronaldo’s style of play can be seen in this riveting video, which tracks him up close throughout the Man Utd-Portsmouth game this week. He’s a little bit talented, in case you had any doubt. Oh, and his 2-0 free-kick, which Alex Ferguson called [...]

This isn’t a “bicycle kick” or a “scissor kick.” This is a scorpion kick. There are creatures in Egyptian mythology who shattered kingdoms with strikes like this. This is Trevor Sinclair, eleven years ago today, scoring for Queens Park Rangers against Barnsley in the fourth round of the FA Cup, and this [...]

On a day when Newcastle fans are celebrating the return of Kevin Keegan, here’s a memory from an afternoon when they had nothing much to celebrate. In 1972 Hereford United were a non-league team drawn to be Newcastle’s sacrificial victim in the third round of the FA Cup. Somehow they forced a draw [...]