Not something that happens every day in world football. The government has a meeting and a minister decides to dissolve the domestic professional league. Bang. Gone. It is one of those “what did you say?” moments. When you hear something so completely unexpected, your brain doesn’t grasp it right off. Or refuses to. That moment […]

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If I were asked to compile a top-10 events that most interest Emiratis as a group… I’m not sure I could do it. Well, I could come up with a list, but I’d be bringing completely random concepts off the top of my head by the time I got to No. 5 or 6. “Shopping […]

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The rumors had been that Fabio Cannavaro might be one-and-done as a player in the UAE’s Pro League. The man may have been Fifa Player of the Year as recently as 2006, but the little Italian looked pretty much done this year while playing for the Dubai club Al Ahli. He wasn’t awful, exactly. He […]

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Radio is a curious medium. So retro yet so oddly compelling, if you can be troubled to turn off the TV and shut down the laptop and just let the words wash over your brain. My grandmother was a huge fan of the radio. Whenever I visited her home, she would be puttering around in […]

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One day I looked up … and seemingly every young guy in UAE soccer is rocking big hair. Let’s link you to some of them.

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I am not a big hockey fan. I’ve covered parts of three Stanley Cup finals, the Kings-Canadiens in 1993, the Ducks-Devils in 2003 and Ducks-Senators in 2007, and found the experience interesting enough … but I generally will not make a point of watching a final that does not involve SoCal teams. That changed tonight […]

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We had a plane at 8:25 p.m. back to Abu Dhabi, which gave us far too much of a day to kill. Instead, we got more than a little done, which pleased us. We began with something that seemed so pedestrian as to be almost a joke … only to find that the Basilica Cistern […]

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  Day 4 in Istanbul, when we are again inclined to recommend it to friends and family. We stopped doing the hard-core tourist stuff today, visiting famous sites, etc. Instead, we just rode around the city via the tram … suffered through (I did, at least) a bazaar … killed another bottle of white at […]

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Day 3 in Istanbul, and the city rallied. Or maybe I did. I loved it on Day 1, had major issues with it on Day 2, and on the third day … Things went just fine. No touts threatened to kill me. That was an improvement. The weather was mild. The meals weren’t expensive. I […]

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  Day 2 in Istanbul did not go quite as well. It began at the Hagia Sophia, a 1,400-year-old church-mosque-museum … continued later with a tout for a nondescript sandwich place cheating me … and moved on to a carpet tout threatening to cut off my head and/or call the police. I suppose it wasn’t […]

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