Maybe someone has written this. So I won’t call it an original idea. Just something I haven’t seen yet that has occurred to me in the past hours. Something to try to explain the inexplicable: LeBron James and his return to Cleveland.

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“Germany 7, Brazil 1” likely will be the Brazil 2014 match that sticks in the mind. Ahead, even, of the final. Barring the bizarre, on Sunday. It prompted me to think about “big-game blowouts I have known” … and that took me almost directly to the Super Bowl, and its former (deserved) reputation for producing […]

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Two weeks ago, I would have described myself as a Cristiano Ronaldo partisan in the great global struggle for hearts and minds and jersey sales pitting Ronaldo and his Spanish league rival, Lionel Messi. Casual fans of world football almost always prefer one or the other. And along with that usually goes casual allegiance to […]

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So, Brazil and Germany in the semifinals tonight. Perhaps the most anticipated match so far of the 2014 World Cup. Between them, eight World Cup championships. Brazil pretty much ordered to win their sixth, on home soil; Germany good enough to win the whole thing, too, even if they trailed Ghana in the second half […]

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For a while, there, I feared for the republic. Any criticism of the U.S. national soccer team was met by outraged rebuttals from fans and soccer bloggers-cum-reporters. They were unwilling to countenance the notion that the U.S. effort in Brazil was anything but The Best Possible Outcome or that Jurgen Klinsmann was anyone other than […]

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This comes up every four years. Or every four years after the U.S. national team has, at least, made the second round of a World Cup. Like this time around. “Is soccer about to make a breakthrough in the U.S.?” Will it be mentioned in the same breath as football and baseball and basketball? Or […]

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Soccer is a young man’s game. Watching it, as well as playing it. Well, it is if your time zones are not quite lined up. Another week of Brazil 2014 could leave me with severe sleep deprivation, if not a sort of “never left the city” jet lag. The issues with Brazil, when based in […]

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For the first three weeks of this thing, pundits, long-time fans, small children, terrorists … everyone was jostling to be the first to declare this “the greatest World Cup”. Seems like a couple of prominent columnists have already written that twice. Unbeaten Costa Rica! Unbeaten Colombia! Unbeaten Mexico tying Brazil! The U.S. and the final […]

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This has been perhaps the queerest part of the entire U.S. national team’s World Cup campaign. These exclamations from fans that “we got lots better in four years!” Let’s consider.

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Considering the game of soccer involves lots and lots of variables, with 22 moving players and a referee and a couple of assistants, and weather conditions potentially changing from one minute to another … it was quite remarkable that in the World Cup we witnessed an episode that, far more than most, could be isolated […]

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