Have I been over this before? How the National Football League leaves me, oh, sleepy with non-anticipation? And here we go, with the rest of the season — after that thrilling (yes, sarcasm) 13-10 overtime game in Pittsburgh on Thursday night. Wow. That was a thrill an hour. I watched the end of that because […]

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On the surface, USC’s game at Ohio State on Saturday looks like big trouble for USC. The Trojans will start a freshman quarterback who was playing for Mater Dei High School a year ago, nearly their entire defense from 2008 is gone, and it’s on the road against the nation’s eighth-ranked team, in a particularly […]

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I am a marching band wonk. I conceded this long ago, and have written about marching bands several times. I played in a high school marching band, before I got to the varsity football team, and I was distinctive in that I like to believe I played the loudest clarinet in the history of American […]

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Winning ugly. (Already used that? Oh, yeah.) Better lucky than good. (Been there, done that, I fear.) Stop me if you’ve heard this one. (You’ve heard that one?) Not really an inventive way to put this. The United States national soccer team was, again, thoroughly unimpressive against a lesser CONCACAF opponent … yet after another […]

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Landon Donovan has been the point man for U.S. soccer, in the eyes of fans, certainly, for most of a decade now. Arguably since the 2002 World Cup. Unlike the country’s several prominent goalkeepers (Kasey Keller, Brad Friedel, Tim Howard, for starters) … Donovan has excelled as a field player. And distinguished himself over a […]

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Bisous are what the French call that double-kiss thing they do in greeting. This side of the face, that side of the face, and often just an air kiss, and not between men if one of them is a foreigner … Anyway, this very French kiss-kiss thing struck me as weird the first time I […]

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This may have occurred to every Trojan and Trojan wannabe in the country, and been written here, there and everywhere, but hey I’m in Paris, and I haven’t spent much time thinking about college football. But this one thought has crossed my mind, and it’s not a pretty one for the cardinal-and-gold folks. USC can’t […]

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OK, I saw about 80 percent of the United States qualifying match with El Salvador. I had to watch it in the middle of the French night on some streaming video that may have been pirated. Or had to be? I’ll let you know if my machine comes down with a batch of viruses or […]

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This wasn’t how this was supposed to play out for les bleus, as the French team is known. As noted in a couple of posts (below), I went out to Stade de France tonight, just north of Paris, to see France in its Group 7 qualifier against Romania. France has been struggling to score, but […]

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You know we’re talking soccer, don’t you? Baseball puts up some zeroes, but halfway through a baseball game the odds are really high that someone will have scored. In soccer? Not necessarily. Especially when you are France. Yes, France. World Cup champion in 1998. World Cup runner-up in 2006. Tied 0-0 with Romania at halftime […]

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