Closed books. We simply couldn’t read them. Open training sessions traced a line of logic across our columns. It was errant. Non-existent. The real plan was made behind the double doors behind the double doors and down the corridor. It was verbal and written on a whiteboard. It was whispered and scrawled in note form. […]

A tour of east coast marine towns and villages, flat Lincolnshire fields and The Wash yields easily-reached-for names: Mariners, Pilgrims, odd ways round to Southwold, grammatically shot to bits by Ipswich, destroyed verbally by the Thames Estuary before Southend and Canvey for Shrimpers and Gulls, an unlikely journey for the last of the crooners from […]

No fences are broken here where none exist in a suburb of Copenhagen where Astro-turfs open to everyone. No paradise, these gardens, and such high winds that goalposts lifted, moved with the stones that pelted us in the storm. Polystyrene was everywhere for a reason I’ve forgotten how to fathom. Metres walked with nonchalance became […]

Placed in the constellation Perseus, he angles a tethered, synthetic planet into the goal before an end of season cast of sombrero-wearing fans: Daggers to the last. Late witnesses observe a curious phenomenon of a man who plays for love of the game or until his body gives way in a still distant park: a […]

Lost, my ball in the crossflow winds. Collapse the tactics board now there’s only Route One. Let’s see where it falls. Hope the van won’t topple outside old Brentford dock, buffered by all those tower blocks we watch from the Chiswick Flyover. We like to keep it on the floor but modern pro zone analytics […]