When Port Vale, a club whose last major silverware predates the fall of the Berlin Wall, lines up against Arsenal—a team currently valued somewhere between a medium-sized sovereign wealth fund and a modest moon colony—the planet tilts, ever so slightly, on its axis. On paper the fixture is an FA Cup third-round mismatch; in the…
Huddersfield vs Manchester City: A Parable of Empire, Disappointment, and the Global Gluttony for Spectacle By our man in the cheap seats, somewhere between Brexit and bankruptcy Let us begin with the obvious: Huddersfield Town, population roughly equivalent to a mid-tier Indonesian shopping mall on Singles’ Day, were never meant to be here. They are…
Tottenham Hotspur versus Doncaster Rovers is, on paper, the sort of fixture the footballing gods schedule after a long lunch and three bottles of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. One club recently renovated its stadium to the tune of a small nation-state’s GDP; the other rents its training cones by the hour. Yet when the FA Cup third-round draw…
Fulham vs Cambridge United: When the World Stops to Watch a Game Nobody Really Wanted to Watch Craven Cottage, that quaint, riverside dollhouse of a stadium, will briefly become the gravitational center of the known universe tonight as Fulham—flush with parachute-payment pocket change and the existential dread of mid-table obscurity—host Cambridge United, a club whose…
London, England – Somewhere between a rain-soaked betting shop in Manchester and a diplomatic cable marked “Urgent” in Abu Dhabi, ninety-two numbered balls tumbled around a perspex drum like anxious hamsters auditioning for Shakespeare. The occasion was the FA Cup Fourth-Round draw, an event the English still call “quaint tradition” and the rest of the…
