Not getting enough exotic news in your reading diet? Check out this blog post from our friend and former colleague Suzie Ahn, who is working with the Peace Corps in Benin. In Africa.

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Two consecutive days of it on this blog. Let’s go for three. For the Tuesday a.m. newspaper I did a column about the 1993 Asian World Cup qualifying tournament, which was held in Doha. An event I actually covered. (Gannett News Service; the good old days; stuff like that happened.) It was wild, six countries, […]

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This is a topic not one person in 100 understands, including most journalists who work inside the office. The logistics of writing sports — how you get to the venue and how you file on deadline. It’s logistics. Lots of it. And these logistics dominate your thoughts and darken your dreams and engage your adrenal […]

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Did an over-and-back to see the UAE national team play Iraq in the second game of Group D competition at the Asian Cup. As I may have mentioned yesterday, the night before the match, I had been struck by a sense that this would be an important game. For good or ill. I became convinced […]

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We decided tonight that I will go to Doha tomorrow to see the UAE play Iraq in a key Asian Cup game. It’s the second match in Group D play. The so-called Group of Death (every tournament has to have one). The UAE can’t clinch a spot in the second round, nor can it be […]

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When you move into a new place, don’t you always wonder who lived there before you? Often, it can be difficult to figure out, if the place were carefully cleared out and cleaned up, maybe repainted, washed, even new carpet. (Though nobody carpets their houses here; not the nailed down kind of carpet, anyway.) We […]

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I love the World Cup. But I’ve covered it. Four of them, actually,  from Italy 1990 through Japan/Korea of 2002. Grand event. But if we think in terms of “doing something I haven’t done before”, these are the two soccer events I would like to see, in person: 1. The Africa Cup of Nations. 2. […]

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I love this kind of stuff. I’m not completely into numbers, but I do tend to count things. To measure things. Scores stick in my head. Historical dates. (December 16, 1944, the first day of the Battle of the Bulge. June 18, 1815; Battle of Waterloo.) We have a batch of fun numbers coming up […]

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Funny. I’ve been exposed to so much soccer in the past three years, I might actually go to Galaxy games as a fan, now. Though I would rather get paid to cover them, of course. Anyway, the club recently has been making news pretty much all over the spectrum involving some names well-known in the […]

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I wrote about the BCS championship game for the Monday editions of The National. Keep in mind, probably 90 percent of our readers are unclear on the concept of American football … never mind college football … not to mention the states of Oregon and Alabama. (How many Americans know where Sussex is? Or the […]

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