Minus the Shooting 2010

When Mark and I decided to set up a football blog it was only going to be for the duration of South Africa 2010... and here we are. I've...

Normally commentators and pundits are desperate to stitch together any kind of narrative they can from the frequently random events of footb...

‘The intense immersion and heightened dissipate instantly once the tension of competition is over. As a World Cup watcher, I usually start t...

I was born in the age of the instant replay, but only just - if it was in fact in 1970 that they started using it, as I seem to recall havin...

Sporting events always end with a feeling of anti-climax, even when you've won them. The intense immersion and heightened dissipate inst...

Philosopher Robert Pfaller suggested that the anxiety displayed by onlookers of a football match (agitated, aggressive, mumbling, shouting c...

Well, after a comment here and now that Forlan has (deservedly, I think) won the Golden Ball, I'd better make my position clear... When...

Mark's recent post on technique raises lots of interesting questions, not least why the England team's is so poor. Is England's ...

When I said that Frank Lampard's disallowed goal against Germany was irrelevant, I didn't mean that it wouldn't have changed the...

The sinister FIFA Technical Study Group (sounds like something out of one of CS Lewis's alien paranoia novels) has come up with the Gold...

Long, long ago in the tournament - when England were still in, that long ago - Giovanni and I had a little disagreement about "techniq...

Jonathan Wilson's tactical survey of the World Cup focusses on Spain, while also reassuring me over my own sanity: There are those who ...

I’m loathe to mention him here, particularly in a vaguely positive light, but Nick Hornby once said something interesting a...

Haven't been able to comment on the various ghost posts below because I can't figure out how to do it on my phone but here's a f...

Only just watched the Spain/Germany Quarter Final, the highlights anyway. Must have been a difficult match to edit. Ought to be some kind of...

So I didn’t get up this morning for the Spain v. Germany semifinal. A series of very late nights at work counselled against getting up even ...

When I was a postgraduate student at Warwick, James Williams gave a paper on Spinoza and Henry Miller. I don't remember the main point o...

While the links have been quietly accumulating in the sidebar, I'd like to mention one site in particular, whose unflashy name, Must Rea...

I've been surprised to find so little support for Spain among the rest of the Minus contributors and other friends. Partly this comes do...

When I've talked to people about the World Cup, they often object to is the idea that the repeating patterns in the tournament mean anyt...