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 the UAE […]

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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 99-percent […]

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Wow. This seems to be over in the blink of an eye.
Landon Donovan’s last game with Everton, during his second two-month loan spell to England’s Premier League, is a FA Cup game with Blackpool today. And he may not even play because he has been ill, David Moyes, the Everton coach, said on Friday.
Everton has […]

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I was still a little hazy about this, before I got to the UAE. Because in the United States, the idea of one sports league competing for at least three championships in one season … is ridiculous.
One league, one champion, right? Simple.
But that is not how they roll in nearly every serious soccer nation. They […]

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I was in Tommy Lasorda’s office at Dodger Stadium for the infamous “Kingman’s performance?!?” rant of May 14, 1978.
It was a Sunday afternoon, and I was not the Dodgers beat writer, and I can imagine I was covering the game only because we were giving a day off to our regular guy.
Anyway, Dave Kingman of […]

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The things you learn on Twitter. Well, from links posted on Twitter. With 140 characters, you can’t divulge much information on the site.
In this case, it was a link to a site ranking sports teams globally by the number of their Facebook followers.
And guess who was No. 4. (Did the headline tip that, perhaps?)

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I have several recurring dreams. In one of them, I am on the ground, and for some reason I look up in the sky to see a plane in trouble. In my dream, I seem to be the first person on the ground to have noticed this, and I watch the plane come down from […]

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Super Bowl Sunday is, in the Middle East … Sunday. The first day of the work week. Nothing super about it, unless you’re an American or a Canadian or one of those rare non-North Americans who are interested in the NFL.
In the UAE, the big story in world football today (after the Chelsea-Manchester United game, […]

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Time for a little reminder of the best play from the best Super Bowl.
Sure, you could search it, but since I have the link right here, you can look at it with one click.
I wrote about Super Bowl 42 (Giants 17, Patriots 14) for The National, declaring it the best of the big games, and […]

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Seventy-four are dead in Egypt, according to the government, after violence between soccer fans of the Cairo club Al Ahly and the Al Masry club of Port Said.
This is by no means the first instance of dozens of deaths at soccer matches in the past three decades. In a three-piece package in The National for […]

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