I’m going to leave out everything I thought I might say about money and purity in football, about big clubs vs. small clubs, about moral high grounds and about the deep, unsettling ways in which the organization of the game is changing. The only point I’m going to make is the one I thought [...]

Well, that was fun! The first-ever Run of Play contest has run its course, and for a blog competition that wasn’t even organized around the publication of a vaguely cynical tie-in book (next time, guys) I think we did pretty well. You wanted to choose the player for tomorrow’s portrait, and you fought [...]

After the reckless assault of one-liners that resulted in Tuesday’s Portrait of Peter Crouch, I thought it would be fun to get everyone in on the act, and to that end, I’m delighted to unveil the first-ever Run of Play Contest. Curious? Read on.
The Task: Describe Peter Crouch in one line. One [...]

The trouble with Peter Crouch isn’t how to describe him, it’s how not to describe him, how to stop describing him. You could go on forever. He plays like two paperclips locked in a fight to the death. He has the shoulders of a kangaroo and the head of a quarter-teaspoon. [...]

What is it about the way he plays? He plays like a beautiful lie. From his slumped shoulders and his loosely rounded back, you take the idea of a studious deliberateness, a determined, jealous, misaligned and ruminating patience; he has the air of a player who, when he finds the ball, hunches over it and [...]

But it was a fine performance nonetheless, as Liverpool coped with the stress of re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere by recording a pedestrian 2-0 win. Rafa Benitez named an unchanged side for the first time since 1967, but Liverpool supporters will be clamoring for a return to the rotation policy after Fernando Torres and [...]

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 [...]

Liverpool have just beaten Besiktas 8-0 at Anfield to record the largest win in the history of the Champions League. The Liverpool players’ own shadows on the pitch did more to stop them than the Besiktas defense, but regardless of the opponent this Liverpool performance was a work of art—fluid passing, precision and power in [...]

It’s been a bad, weird, confusing, drifting season for Liverpool so far, a season in which the team have frequently looked like eleven adjectives playing without a verb. How can adjectives play football, you ask, and the answer apparently is: by drawing most of their games and taking one point out of their first three [...]