So, while I had my head turned, Al Jazira fired its coach for being too harsh or too lenient or perhaps too Belgian, Baniyas owned up to the fact that it owed significant chunks of money to a couple of players, and David O’Leary, the Irishman who coached in Dubai last season, is going to […]

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One last look back on villages in southern France as we made the long journey back to Abu Dhabi … On our last day of exploring the countryside, we went through the tiny town of Blomac, and found it wanting … and then we fought through the traffic that seems to girdle the roads around […]

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We reached the hotel in Barcelona at 5 p.m., after a four-hour journey from southern France. With air travel back to Abu Dhabi in the morning. What to do in, say, six hours in one of Europe’s most interesting cities? Simple: La Rambla, tapas and sangria.

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An odd day, and not just because it was Leap Year Day. The UAE swamped Lebanon in a World Cup qualifier, and 10,000 Lebanese fans went home more or less unhappy, even though the UAE defeating Lebanon should be a “dog bites man” event — which is to say, vaguely interesting, depending on the size […]

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When you cover an event, as a journalist, your point of reference is the team you are following. Even in defeat. Well, of course. The default intellectual setting for fans as well as writers is not “their team won, and why” … it is “our team lost, and how come?” When the UAE lost 3-1 […]

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David Trezeguet. You may have heard of him. Played for France’s World Cup champions in 1998. Spent a decade at Juventus and scored 138 goals. Also got the golden goal (remember the short history of that arrangement?) in the 2000 European championships, winning it 2-1 for France over Italy. Well, Trezeguet is 34 now, and […]

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The National’s department has been honored by the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) with top-10 awards for daily, Sunday and special sections from 2011. This used to be known as a “triple crown” but apparently a website category has been created, and papers now seek a “grand slam.” (Maybe we will enter the website category, […]

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It must be strange to be a citizen — an Emirati — in the UAE. Foreigners outnumber you almost 7-to-1 in your own country. The latest population statistics indicate that only about 1 million of the 8 million people here are citizens. Thus, being able to gather with your own for important events must be […]

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In a small country, the “small stuff” in sports counts for a lot. If you have a small population or a poor one, odds are pretty good you aren’t going to have a lot of success in regional — never mind global — sports. And that explains why the Under 23 soccer game tomorrow between […]

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Fans (of a certain age) of the U.S. soccer team remember what this was like. The national team would play a game against a small nation from far away, and the crowd would be lousy … and perhaps a majority of the people there would be partisans of the visiting nation. I distinctly remember the […]

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