“GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala — A weathered, eight-lane track rings the field at Estadio Mateo Flores, site of the 2011 CONCACAF U20 Championship. Far from the pitch, on a narrow strip of real estate between lane eight and the near-empty stands, six young Americans juggle a single Nike ball. As I observe from the press box that doubles as a VIP area and triples as general admission seating, United States substitutes Cody Cropper, Eder Arreola, Moises Hernandez, Omar Salgado, Sacir Hot, and Sebastien Ibeagha stay loose.” Run of Play

“I still remember the first time I heard a Nico solo track from the post-Velvet Underground, post-Chelsea Girl era. It was ‘My Only Child’ off Desertshore, Nico singing largely a capella in her unique voice, with occasional trumpet notes. It was like nothing else I had heard. I was stunned to find it was a song she had written herself. It was on a German anthology of ‘death songs’ that my girlfriend gave me for Christmas in the far-off days of my unremembered youth (a.k.a. 2003).” Run of Play

“There are several major reasons why a player disappoints: 1. He or she—I’ll use just “he” from here on, but these points apply equally to female athletes—gets injured and has difficulty recovering. 2. He turns out to be older than many people had thought, that is, on the decline at an age when some other players are able to maintain peak performance. 3. He is not, and never was, as good as some people thought he was…” Run of Play

“Fulham-Blackpool—the encounter I watched last Saturday with real attentiveness—is, in a weird sort of way, my kind of match. Not that I don’t enjoy the big clubs with their expensive workforces: especially when they play one another there’s an entertaining Clash of the Titans feel to the enterprise.” Run of Play

“So the world is now a place in which LeBron James can own a stake in Liverpool. On Twitter yesterday, the news was greeted first breathlessly and then, by People Who Know Things, with derision. Ives Galarcep pointed out that athletes buy small stakes in teams all the time. Jen Chang declared that this was no different than if David Beckham bought 0.1% of the L.A. Dodgers. (But wouldn’t it sort of be a story if David Beckham bought a share of an American baseball team?) Calm down, was the general cognoscenti idea. This isn’t real. It’s just a marketing stunt.” Run Of Play

“April Fools’ Day is one of my favorite holidays, probably because it’s the one day of the year when I don’t have to apologize for deviousness and petty cruelty. In football, the first day of April is traditionally a time for pranks and hoaxes (see: La Liga and the 39th game), and over the years there have been some pretty elaborate stunts. Some of my favorites include…” Run of Play

“As personality clashes go, Phil Scolari’s at Chelsea aren’t the most earth-rivening imaginable, largely because Phil Scolari’s personality at Chelsea seemed to exist in a weirdly crumpled state of defeatedness and timidity. Sure, he was Big Phil; yes, he was the manager who slugged players in their pampered jaws right in the middle of games; absolutely, he was hired to bring fear to an unruly dressing-room and blast away years of accumulated ego-grievances with the dynamite in his head. In practice, though? He sort of showed up blinking like a freaked-out grandfather, looked both ways before crossing the street, and gently patted the zipper of his windbreaker while respectfully answering questions. England made Mourinho bigger; it made Scolari, all of a sudden, very small.” Run of Play

“Hey there! Long time no write soccer blog posts for your fleeting amusement, huh? Sorry I sort of abandoned and forgot about you there. Trust me when I say that there’s a good explanation. No, I’m not ‘moonlighting for the LA Galaxy and increasingly unable to handle the pressure of my life as an international icon in the twilight of his career’ (funny, you at the back). What’s happening is that, at the moment, the entire editorial staff of the site is stuck in a small town in Pennsylvania trying to buy a house.” Run of Play

“Did you know that Sir Alex Ferguson still doubts his tactical nous? The headline leaves no room for doubt: “Sir Alex Ferguson: I still doubt my tactical nous”. I find this sad. Sir Alex would seem to have it all: a long record of championships, a range of expensive outerwear, a ruddy Glaswegian complexion, a knighthood—but if you can’t trust in your own nous, what is it all worth, really?” Run of Play

“Being left-handed helps athletes in one of two ways. If you are a left-handed batter in baseball, most of the pitches you see, because most pitchers are righties, start away from your body and come towards you. The angle works in your favor: you don’t have to turn your head as far, you get a better and longer look at the ball. That’s the less common kind of advantage, and perhaps confined to baseball and (maybe?) cricket: the more common one is simple unfamiliarity.” Run of Play

“There are several things to do in a city at night. Sleep is typically the most judicious, but in a culture that disproportionately rewards crime, overtime and dance parties, it takes a conscious effort to honour your dreaming life.” Run of Play

“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

2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa FINAL Game
“Television is not ruining the game of soccer. That said, it is important to understand the effect that watching a soccer match on a television has on a spectator’s cognition, as a match on a screen is fundamentally different from a match taking place in front of the spectator’s eyes. At worst, the effect can create an unbearable narrative that is pressed upon the viewers against their will (Favre, Beckham). At best, TV can allow the audience a much more nuanced look at the game, complete with close-ups of players that leave no emotion neglected.” Run of Play

“Those of you who’ve been wise to this site since the early days, or who just really like reading mastheads, will be aware that for lo these many years I’ve been running RoP in conjunction with two colleagues, Dr. Chesapeake Marchpane and Vandal-prone. And sure, they may not have been around too consistently, or seemed to have anything to do with the daily operations of the enterprise, but one thing’s for sure: They definitely do exist.” Run of Play

“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

“It’s Super Bowl weekend here in the United States and football is on my mind. I grew up in Los Angeles, a city without an NFL team. In fact I’ve never lived in a city with an NFL team. When I’m asked what team I support I run through a brief flow chart, and this year I’m backing the Pack. I’ve based my chart predominantly on geography, and the Packers come out on top because I lived in Wisconsin for three years. You could say this makes me a disingenuous fan or some kind of fake or a bandwagoner, but nobody ever has. People just shrug and nod their head. It’s not that controversial.” Run of Play

“In his introduction to the fiftieth anniversary edition of The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer engages in an uncharacteristically tender retrospective of the manner in which he originally wrote the book. Looking back at his twenty-four year-old self through the uncompromising mists of time, Mailer highlights the frailties that were present in his early writing and discusses both the strengths and weaknesses of what was his first major work.” Run of Play

“Britannia, AD 600. Ferguson is king of Britannia, lord of all he surveys. A firebrand Celt, his armies have marched as far south as Barcino in Hispania and towards the rising sun as far as the banks of the Volga. Old in body and yet nimble of mind, Ferguson seeks the affirmation of his kin, weighing the devotion of his sons in a ceremony at Trafford Castle. Shall a successor be determined?” Run of Play

“LeBron James was going to sign with the Clippers. I was sure of it. Living in a city that prided itself on its basketball knowledge, I could not have been happier to defend my foolhardy (and completely non-researched) claim. I filled the microbreweries with my pomp and unbridled opinion, joyfully educating any local who dared to question my theory. Well-versed in the art of bullshit, I welcomed all challengers to my claim, eventually even digging up some token statistics that seemed to weigh in my favor.” Run of Play

“First, three non-technical updates. Yes, this is a house of contradiction. I realized this morning that I never linked to my Deadspin piece on Football Manager 2011 from a few days back. It’s about reality, and Uruguay, and things that happened in a hard rain that didn’t exist. Check it out. This Rentistas game would have made a tremendous Pro Vercelli-like series if we hadn’t already been through that maze already. …” Run of Play

“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

“It might not be obvious every time we watch a game of soccer, but there’s a tacit contract between players and observers of the sport. In it, we the viewer expect nothing less than maximum effort, maximum fun, and we can never see that soccer is not the be-all and end-all for our heroes. Blood, sweat, tears, and none of the complaining that comes from living a more ordinary life. In exchange, our offering is simple. Love. Worship. Respect.” (Run of Play)

“Some say Harry Redknapp’s tactics are simplistic. Others are like, ‘no they’re not.’ Still others are barely even paying attention. When your mere presence is food and light to the players who follow you, you don’t just blunder into a room and start garrumphing about wingers who cut inside in the 4-3-3.” (Run of Play)