“As I read this stirring conclusion to a nigh-on Scargillian tract railing against football tactics websites, I got to my feet, punched the air in an unquestionably heterosexual way and yelled, such that Bobby Moore himself might hear, ‘GET IN!'” Run of Play

“The keeper has this odd habit—it could be strategic, it could be a mind-game—of setting himself up not in the middle of the goal mouth but to his left. Standing in this peculiarly off-centered position, he turns towards the gap he has created, readying himself to leap across. He seems to be daring me to strike the penalty hard enough and accurately enough to beat his spring towards the vast opening.” Run of Play

“I’ve found the problem with trying to draw connections between two distinct, unrelated professions is that it’s almost always a zero-sum affair. Comparing apples and oranges in the end still leaves you with nothing but apples and oranges. If I were to tell you for example that sometimes watching Barcelona is like watching an improvised fugue, with contrapuntal subjects weaving in and out of each other over the cantus firmus of the holding midfielder, it might sound profound but it doesn’t tell you anything new about either music or football. This kind of synesthesia is useful only when trying to craft especially pretentious metaphors.” Run of Play

“After Arsenal’s loss in the Carling Cup final, I decided to open the second canister in that mysterious stack of dusty old D.W. Griffith films that were apparently never released in the 1910s and ’20s. I don’t know what this means, but I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to feel safe keeping these in the basement. I wonder whether that renegade antiques dealer is still doing business in Chinatown, and whether he’d take them back.” Run of Play

“In classical literature the anti-hero is an evil misfit. In cinema he is a violent loose cannon. Yet we perpetually root for the bastard. From Milton’s Satan in Paradise Lost to Schwarzenegger as the profoundly conflicted Terminator, cheering on the bad guy has never felt so delightful. And in football the anti-hero is Eric Cantona. The controversial Frenchman has just landed the job of Director of Soccer at New York Cosmos, but as far as I can see, America is blissfully unaware of Cantona—the footballing assassin sent from the past to wreak havoc on the Land of the Free. Let me explain: I’m an Englishman marooned in Hollywood, so it’s now my raison d’être to think of football as a beautiful narrative rather than a beautiful game. And Monsieur Cantona is an anti-hero straight from Central Casting.” Run of Play

“But of course you already knew that. The fireworks displays and speeches at Buckingham Palace would have been hard to miss, and even outside London and Birmingham the TV coverage was relentless. Here in America, the usually reserved and modest Colin Firth interrupted his six hundred and forty-seventh Oscars interview to cry a little and hum the first two verses of ‘The Roast Beef of Old England”.” Run of Play

“1990* : The philosophical inquirer Francis FUKUYAMA appropriates and reconceives the defunct notional entity known variously as The New York Cosmos, The Cosmos, and Pele’s Studio 54 Fantasia. As an actual football team, this construct played its final match in 1985, but Fukuyama—working in clandestine concert with the business operative Peppe PINTON, whom rumours nominate as a fugitive from international justice—reinvents the Cosmos as the world’s first post-historical soccer club.” Run of Play

“Sometimes I find myself walking home from work around the time the local elementary school dismisses its charges for the day. When this happens my daily journey becomes a little more interesting and a little more complicated, because children don’t walk the way adults do. Children will run past you, then stop and squat to look at a slug on the sidewalk, then run past you. Even when no stimulus, sluggish or otherwise, presents itself, they’ll slow down and dawdle for a while before hoofing it again.” Run of Play