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Casey Wiley

Read of the Day: The End of the Affair

Of all the intimacies of life, the intimacy of fanhood is perhaps the falsest, exposed for USMNT fans during this past World Cup by a single scene of authentic tenderness: Bob Bradley embracing Ricardo Clark after taking him out of the game that might define his career. “I allowed this game to be pressed to my face for a month, and this hug is finally something true and personal, the sweetest and realest glimpse into the lives of two people on my team. All those magazine interviews and Twitter feeds, the piles of second- and third-hand information, become suddenly foolish.” (Casey Wiley/This is American Soccer)

(Image credit: g55/Flickr through a Creative Commons license.)

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Out of Sheer Rage

A young American man dreams of playing soccer, a game he hasn’t played in ages, a game that — when he played and in his dreams — summons up plumes of anger. Now he follows the US men’s national team, with midfielders that also used to play angry, “a game played a long a cliff…not a ballet of threaded passes, scissor fakes; this is a team of hastily trained animals, cheetahs or leopards, or something less graceful than that.” But as the team matures, plays possession, it is leaving him behind, as he cannot. (Casey Wiley/The Run of Play)