What if the ball was ballooned, coming off a Keane penalty that he skied— hitting twenty parrots? and if the poor sick parrots got hold of it, if it took them over the moon, why they’d go up higher than stands and terraces and floodlights: go sailing away and away into a Keane city in […]

I see it this way: you flared up, got heated, boiled over. I tried to dampen, douse it, cool it. Your manager’s anger simply fuelled it. He erupted like Krakatoa. I was ice floe, hoar frost, glacier; pure refrigeration. He was Fahrenheit, I was Kelvin. You were molten throughout the palaver; hot as a solar […]

The stadium rose like a Starship to meet us, floodlit as a Hollywood filmset. We felt like extras in a Spielberg epic. Unrehearsed, but eager for action, we lifted, weightless, up flights of stairs, drawn to the high illumined rim. Stunned by sheer glamour, we bathed in the glow, swayed to the low cathedral chants. […]

the portugeezers and scolari left england weltmeisterschafted

What happened here today will turn into mythology, and in the melancholy air of some misty Saturday, the whistle now blowing will become a symbol of something precious lost. There will be an adjustment of hopes; folklore and old songs will fuse together, and be retold as dim recollections, bleak consolations for the dark days […]