The nadir was Wednesday morning, July 18. As I rolled out of bed, this is what was in the “scoreboard” bar of the espn.com homepage: –The final score of the baseball All-Star game. –A result from an NBA summer league game. –And two scores from the WNBA. Yes, which still exists. And that was it. […]

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No one will ever accuse France of not sufficiently celebrating its second World Cup championship. Quicker than you can say “Kylian Mbappe”, every piece of national-team apparel seemed to have that second star on it. For those not familiar with the “star” system in international football, a team is entitled to wear on the jersey, […]

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Russia 2018 is over. It was France 4, Croatia 2 in the championship match, and the final whistle had barely been blown before some pundits were suggesting it was the best World Cup final in the history of the event. Granted, six goals is a good place to start. That is as many goals as […]

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A twist on a post from last week. I wanted a France-England final to the 2018 World Cup, and I think most soccer fans did, too, and I posted to that effect. The headline to that one was: Croatia Needs to Get Out of the Way Since I went unheeded by Croatia, which came back […]

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Most of the 2018 World Cup has been entertaining. Or at least interesting. Not often we get to see the likes of Iceland, Morocco, Egypt and Panama in the tournament, and see what they are all about. A case can be made that many of the traditional powers had crummy tournaments — and we are […]

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I have no personal beefs with Croatia. I was there once, for part of a day, as a member of the U.S. journalists’ traveling party heading for the Sarajevo Winter Olympics, in 1984. We flew from New York to Zagreb, and then organizers put us on buses to downtown Zagreb, where we were seated at […]

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I never played soccer as a child. Never saw a match. Didn’t own a soccer ball. Never knew anyone who followed the game. The extent of my pre-adult exposure to soccer probably was occasional videotape on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; presumably World Cup highlights; lots of Pele. By the early 1980s, I was the […]

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England and its relationship to its soccer team has mostly been unhealthy since, say, 1966 — when England won its first and only World Cup championship. During the 30 years that I covered international soccer, 1986 to 2015, I saw England and its team muddle through the same scenario every four years. It was an […]

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What a curious match Brazil versus Belgium turned out to be. It was a sort of soccer experiment: “What would happen if 11 crazy-fast Munchkins with elite technical skills … met up with 11 mostly big and beefy guys with decent technique but marginal speed and quickness?” The soccer scientists perhaps could have chosen a […]

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Belgium is a pretty anonymous country, considering where it is located — bordered by France, Germany and The Netherlands, and just across the water from England. That’s a pretty busy neighborhood, with four countries tourists love to visit. And then there is Belgium. I probably am not unique in this: I have spent a fair […]

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