You can’t fight it. You can criticize its style. You can complain about its sportsmanship. But the fire-bomb is coming. The roof of your house is going to be shattered, and your walls are going to light up. From far off it will look like a match being struck, then [...]

Who likes Chelsea? Help me figure this out. The club sociology that I am able to collect from the internet basically tells a story of how the cast of Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Blow-Up” accidentally kissed the Beatles one magical night under a rainbow of Richard Avedon portraits, until caring too much about who Julie [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]