As we all look around and agree that the “rapture” a silly old guy in the U.S. had predicted for today … has not happened, it strikes me that predicting the future is a perilous business. Or maybe just a foolhardy one. I just read the “Foundation” series for maybe the seventh or eighth time, […]

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I love relegation. I knew about it, of course, long before I got off the plane in Abu Dhabi in the heavily Euro-influenced UAE. But seeing it in action … brings home what fun it is and how the NBA, the NFL, MLB could all be improved. Not that I expect this ever could happen. […]

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The next coach of Al Wasl played in a charity game in Grozny, Chechnya, last weekend. Which seems a scary thing, for a guy who has had a heart attack or two in the past decade. Anyway, you want to know what he looks like in a football shirt?

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For my weekly commentary that runs with the two-page “Pro League package” in The National … I had decided to do a roundup of “what others said about Diego Maradona coming to the UAE.” I expected that the most famous footballer of the past two generations would get all sorts of special attention. I was […]

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I hate driving traffic to commercial sites, but this is an amusing slide show, and a bit of silliness seems like a good idea on a 115-degree Abu Dhabi day. I’m also not a cat person. The world is divided into two halves, right? Dog people and cat people. The whole of the UAE are […]

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This was the big story today, and The National was all over it. Diego Maradona, “El Jefe Loco,” as I preferred to refer to him while I was writing the countdown to South Africa blog, has signed a two-year deal to coach the UAE Pro League club Al Wasl, starting with the 2011/12 season. First, […]

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This may be the most specific “gag reflex” story I have involved with in … oh, a very, very long time. So consider that before going forward. You will say “oh, no … ewww!”

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In about a three-hour span today, Manchester United clinched its record 19th English top-flight league championship … and Manchester City secured its first significant trophy in 35 years by winning the FA Cup final. And how does any of this make it a big day in Abu Dhabi? Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, brother of the […]

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We at The National did a story on this today … acknowledging that Friday the 13th is often considered to be an unlucky day in the Western world … noting that it doesn’t have the same meaning among Arabs and Muslims … but also noting that this culture, like apparently every culture on the planet, […]

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The good news: Colton High School had three of its alumni selected in the NFL draft last month: Allen Bradford, Shareece Wright and James Smith, something no other high school managed this year. The bad news: In the fall of 2005 all three of those elite players were on the same team … which lost […]

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