“I have always been an early riser, but for a long time that meant only, or mostly, work: wake up, shower and dress, ingest the life-giving caffeinated fluids, and get some writing done before the rest of the world can start plucking at my sleeve. It’s an M.O. that has served me well. The more I get done in the rising day, the earlier I can ease off the gas pedal, and the more completely I can relax in the evenings: sit back with a drink and watch some basketball or baseball—whatever sport happens to be on—with a wholly vacuous, nearly flatlining brain.” Run of Play

“How can I persuade you that Franz Beckenbauer is the greatest player of all time? I could begin with his defensive abilities. As Rob Smyth has written, “when his side were 1-0 down in the World Cup final of 1974 and he was the only man defending against Johan Cruyff and Johnny Rep, he ran gently along in front of them like a man leading a morning jog.” Few would argue that he is anything less than one of the great defenders of all time, though. Dwelling on it is unlikely to convert anyone.” Run of Play

“The vast conceptual morass of modernism, modernity, and the modern subsumes many different strands. Christopher Mann, in an earlier piece for this site, articulates one such strand quite nicely, ultimately lamenting global soccer’s inexorable march toward “materialistic modernity.” For Mann, the modern robs soccer of its spontaneity, its naïveté, its inner Romanticism. For me, the modern strips soccer down to its most raw and most beautiful form.” Run of Play

“Every goal ends an old match and begins a new one. That’s the hardest thing to recreate, after the fact, when you read about heroic comebacks: the sheer tremendousness of the goals, the way whatever happened took place in a reality that was totally conditioned by what had gone before, and not conditioned at all by the (still-unforeseeable) events to come, which to us are the most famous, and hence most inevitable-seeming, part of the story. 1-0 is a completely different universe, psychologically, from 0-0, or from 2-0. And by the time you reach the improbable airless heights of 3-0 or 4-0, you know the match is over, it would be crazy to expect anything else, the competitive game has been definitively killed off by the last goal or by the goal before that, and what you’re now watching is a kind of limp exhibition whose sole function is to fill a quotient of remaining time.” Run of Play