Leicester City FC can secure an astonishing Premier League championship this weekend, with a victory at Manchester United. And if not then, by winning one of its final two matches. English media have been doing celebratory Leicester stories (like this one and this one and this one), and even the New York Times has discovered […]

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As an American living across the pond, having a secondary news source to, say, the New York Times, is pretty much essential. If for no other reason than to keep track of the English Premier League — which may be the one sports competition we covered in Abu Dhabi that I will remain interested in, […]

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Well, it’s good news in my view of the world, anyway. We don’t have to be negative all the time, do we? Let’s do a list to celebrate some of the uplifting or inspirational or remarkable. For one day, anyway.

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U.S. soccer coaches and fans have often wondered who was going to win the ball and who was going to score, but one part of the field they never worried about was the man between the posts. Until now. The long line of often unbeatable U.S. goalkeepers may be at an end. The two veterans […]

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It’s been that kind of season for the Leicester City soccer team, a club that has never done much of anything but now leads the English Premier League by five points with nine matches to play. Leicester (pronounced “LESter” by the English, despite all those other letters) looked a cinch to be relegated a year […]

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I am a semi-serious Arsenal fan, over these past six years, and the club drives me crazy. I can only wonder how it feels for those who have been cheering on — and wincing at — the club since said fans were in diapers. Arsenal, would-be contenders for the Premier League championship nobody seems to […]

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Talking about the weekend that just passed. The one after the Super Bowl but before pitchers and catchers report. It is a weekend, in American sports, anyway, that has pretty much nothing that matters. Or it seems that way to me. A former colleague and I had a bit of a discussion on this — […]

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In a 20-team soccer league, how often do the top four in the standings meet one of the other three on the same day — two-thirds of the way through a 38-game season? We must assume someone involved with England’s Premier League, which is increasingly interested in American-style statistics, has looked up the answer to […]

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For 2.5 years I sat across from an Englishman who detested Ashley Cole, who at the time was a left back with Chelsea. My coworker inevitably would get around to paraphrasing the quotes from Cole’s biography, My Defence, in which the player said he was “trembling with anger” in the summer of 2006 when his […]

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Back in the UAE, we paid a significant amount of money to get English Premier League soccer, despite usually being limited to one game in English when as many as six were going on and getting little more than highlights in the games we didn’t see. We figured the situation would be worse in California. […]

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