I recently picked up David Goldblatt’s The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer from my local book shop, and I cannot recommend it more. Hulking out at over 1000 pgs, the tome represents three years of intensive study of the worldwide phenomenon of the beautiful game–presenting one of the best surveys of the sport I’ve yet to find. I recently stumbled across John Turnbull’s excellent review of the book as well as accompanying interview with Mr Goldblatt over at The Global Game and figured it’d be of interest to some of you lot. In other footie news…there’s been quite the uproar about Toronto FC 2500+ supporters showing up at a Columbus Crew match recently. For those who don’t know, it’s quite the bizarre turn of events for opposing supporters to show up at an MLS match let alone a couple thousand to drive seven plus hours, raising a ruckus, ave’n a laugh an ave’n a say. Sure they pissed on a church, but who hasn’t? Certainly worse things have happened in the über college town that is Columbus, Ohio. A quick survey of the blogs reveal so much hand wringing and whining over a minutia of rowdiness, it makes me sick. TFC have some of best and most passionate supporters in a league sullied by a drive at family friendly atmosphere and teddy bear cuddliness. Toronto, along with DC United represent the greatest hope of MLS of creating a match atmosphere that is truly exciting and electric–certainly more so than a certain one man media machine’s playing on an over-hyped, over-payed second rate team… (two words: golden balls) enough ranting and more of this: