What soccer fans love? Winning. What soccer fans love most? Winning … with style. This explains the lasting popularity of Brazil in the World Cup. Of Barcelona in European soccer. Even if reputation at times is left behind by reality, soccer fans want entertainment, and that is rep Brazil and Barcelona carry. That is the […]

[Read more →]

They wear green and gold instead of red, white and blue, but I am constantly reminded of American soccer when I watch Australian soccer, which I will be doing for a few weeks because Oz is hosting the quadrennial Asian Cup tournament. I am reminded of U.S. soccer for several reasons. Australians call the game […]

[Read more →]

Lorem ipsum is a famous dummy text. Random words, Latin-looking, that designers use in page mockups. (Not to get too wonky about it, but “studies show” that when designers are creating new looks, real text often distracts non-designers who are looking at a page. They begin reading real stories, instead of looking at how marvelous […]

[Read more →]

An appealing aspect of the UAE is how compact it is. Both in terms of area and population. The country is the 116th biggest in the world, in size, just behind Austria; if it were a U.S. state it would rank 40th, behind Maine). And the population is maybe 9 million, putting it 91st in […]

[Read more →]

So, Steven Gerrard replaces Landon Donovan with the LA Galaxy. Pretty much how it works out, yes? Landon goes off to do charity work (really, I think he will) … and Major League Soccer replaces him with Liverpool’s golden oldie midfielder, a guy who looks like the most boring soccer dad in your neighborhood. A […]

[Read more →]

The UAE is mad about “Guinness World Records.” The National reports on one or two per week, it seems. Many of them silly. I remember when the “Guinness Book”, as it was known decades ago, was fun to read. “Tallest man.” “Fastest train.” “World’s Biggest Waterfall. Things like that. Fairly common things. Now, we’ve got […]

[Read more →]

A business story. Ugh. But the business of the UAE is business. Commodities and services and tourism and all the rest of it. The National has a 12-page business section, broadsheet, and the biz crew has no trouble filling it. Something is always going on. The big biz news story for months now has been […]

[Read more →]

Not long ago, Abu Dhabi was a very horizontal city. The typical downtown building was about six stories high. The typical building away from downtown and the beach was about three stories. The tallest building in the city, when it was completed in 2006, was the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority Tower, on the Corniche, at […]

[Read more →]

A fairly significat chunk of what sports journalists do is cover scheduled events. Games. Press conference. Interviews. Unscheduled news generally sets off some scrambling. A hiring, a firing, a change in policy, a violent opinion — we expect that sort of unexpected, but it requires extra effort. What we do not expect is scheduled events […]

[Read more →]

Running the sports section of The National is a bit of an out-of-body experience for an American. The Big Three of American sports are baseball, basketball and football. The Big Three of sports in this part of the world are cricket, rugby and football — football, as in soccer. We run cricket off-day stories here. […]

[Read more →]