This fantastic video was making the rounds of the footy interwebs last week–animator Richard Swarbrick (@RikkiLeaks) with an dreamlike impressionistic rendering of Gareth Bale’s Champions League performances vs Inter Milan:

This blew up especially after it was listed at #1 among “Our Favourite Things This Week” by Guardian Football–they specifically linked to the Run of Play’s post of it, titled “Bones Like Ghost” (“If there were a channel that showed live matches in this style, I might forget what living people looked like”).

For those of you that somehow haven’t seen the “IRL” version of Bale v Inter, see here. Though that video clip, like most of the hundreds of soccer highlight videos on YouTube, has a jarring soundtrack–which is a regrettable phenomenon that Run of Play addressed in an earlier post: “On Soundtracks“:

It’s a universal in football that the only people who take the time to find every single Dennis Bergkamp goal on film and then edit them together into an attractive looking YouTube-length clip listen to either emocore, pop schlock, or trance/house music.

Finally, whenever we revisit Bale v Inter, we’re reminded of Gazzetta dello Sport’s line–still the best of 2010 by our estimation.  Translated from the Italian by the Daily Mail: “‘He is devastating. How else can you describe him ? He doesn’t have one extra gear but three. This time he didn’t score but he assisted. He is a force of nature.”