The papers today are ganging up on poor injury-riddled Harry Kewell, who is about to leave Liverpool having played in just 18 games over the last two seasons. Diligent economists at the Telegraph calculate that he cost the club £157,554 per game, while the Daily Mail, rounding up on principle, says £160,000.
Lay off Harry Kewell, [...]

Woah! What the hell was that? Hey, guys? Can anyone hear me?
Man, I wish I knew what was going on. I was just taking it easy down in the swamp, using the water to support my enormous bulk—you know, the way we do—and munching on some of the tree-leaves I was able to reach thanks [...]

It’s a day of nostalgia here at The Run of Play. We’re reminiscing on a simpler time of the internet, back when it was all Winona Ryder mailing lists and intricate debates about whether David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson were married in real life. “IRL,” we called it back then, in our smug, efficient [...]

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 [...]

Malarial lowlands. Brown mountains rigid in the distance, like the bones of the corpse of the sky. Wind, like a disease, swelling on the fens: mixing the shadows, sifting the sedge, glimmering along the grassy pools. There is a moon in the bruise-colored air: so it must be twilight. It might have been any time [...]

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 don’t know anything about the genius of Rafa Benítez. I haven’t seen it, and I don’t know where you can find it. When I think of the genius of Rafa Benítez, I imagine a WWII-era cargo plane coming in too low over the jungle and blossoming out against the side of a [...]

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 [...]

FA CUP 5th-ROUND ACTION: Barnsley have stunned Liverpool at Anfield, winning 2-1 on Brian Howard’s 93nd-minute goal. It was a wild, inspired performance from Barnsley, who scored the 1-1 equalizer in the 59th minute and spent most of the rest of the match pinned in their own six-yard box, flinging themselves into [...]