“Defensive domination in soccer differs radically from defensive domination in, say, American football. In football a great defensive team (think of the Baltimore Ravens from a few years back, or the ’85 Bears) overwhelms the offense, drives quarterbacks into panic, makes people hurt. But when soccer teams defend exceptionally well, the experience—for the opposing team and for observers also—is more like a subtle but accretive disorientation, a cumulative frustration. It’s “negative football” not in the Mark van Bommel you-never-know-when-I’ll-go-for-your-knees sense, but in a mathematical way: an iterative algorithm of subtraction, as the opponent’s offensive opportunities are reduced and reduced until their each possession seems to occur under a minus sign.” Run of Play

“I do not remember whether the thought occurred to me during the first or second game when Gareth Bale carved up Inter Milan. At some point while watching the Welshman sprint past yet another defender (probably Maicon), I thought, for the first time in my life, ‘he is younger than me.’” Run of Play

“It’s a day in the Premier League, and a lot of players are having thoughts about events! To you, that may sound like a joke, but to these grim warriors, whose wills are ruthlessly fixed on the next match, whose eyes scan a horizon more threatening than you or I could imagine, whose minds, if we could see inside them, would look like a slow camera-pan up a desolate mountainside, climbing higher and higher, past walls of rock, razor-sharp outcroppings, and windswept, snow-covered goats, past the bones of forgotten adventurers, past the shattered faces of cliffs, into a bleak, snowy nowhere a stone’s throw from the sky, where a lone castle rises like a spire, eternally vigilant, eternally armed against the encroachment of any imaginable foe—these proud champions understand that sometimes the best way to prepare for an epic battle is to engage in an absolutely piss-tacular slapfight.” Run of Play

“These days, Diego Tristán would be hard to find. It’s tough work to watch him on television: The games he played last year for Cádiz, in Spain’s second league, weren’t nationally or internationally televised, and this year, with Cádiz in the third division, it’s hard to prove that he’s on the team at all. It’s much harder to go in person, even if you are in Spain. Good luck looking through the papers. He can assume a caustic, detached air in interviews—if he’s even interviewed—and is already referred to as a has- (or could have-) been.” Run of Play

“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.” Run of Play

“Second item: My latest Slate column addresses the World Cup bids. It’s more about the crazy theater of the bid presentations than the actual decision, which means that it’s as much about surfing kangaroos as common sense told me it could be. Keep in mind that it was written before caring about FIFA corruption made you a tool of sinister neoliberalism.” Run of Play