In the Old World, the idea of “shootout as lottery” seems deeply ingrained.
When Real Madrid and Bayern Munich went to a shootout tonight in the semifinals of the Champions League, one of the British commentators on the English-language broadcast of the game, on the Al Jazeera network, trotted out those exact words.
“Now it goes to […]

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We live in a soccer culture, here in the UAE. But even after 2.5 years of being immersed in it, I do not have fully formed opinions on many of the world’s biggest teams and leagues.
I have discovered, however, that two teams are beginning to bug me. And No. 1 on the list?

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I love the President’s Cup final.
It’s a major domestic soccer game, the local version of England’s FA Cup final. But what I really find fascinating is how big this is with the Emirati populace.
This attracts regular guys in big numbers, but it also attracts many of the most prominent sheikhs in the country — in […]

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The level of soccer in the UAE is often denigrated by the sport’s local cognoscenti.Both foreign and domestic.
They seem to believe it should compare to top European leagues, which is unrealistic given that each team is limited to four expatriates, and the rest of the squad comes from an Emirati male population of about 500,000.
Imagine […]

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The UAE is close to Iran. Uncomfortably close.
The erratic and bellicose behavior of the Ahmadinejad regime is a cause for consternation in the West. Might Iran have nuclear devices? Could Iran strike Israel with a nuke-armed missile?
Those questions hit much closer to home, here in the UAE, because Iran is much closer to home: It […]

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Something about Diego Maradona prompts people to break into song.
Late last year, an Irish group named the Corrigan Brothers recirculated a song they had done a few years earlier entitled: Ooohhh Diego.
Now, some Emiratis and fans of the UAE club that El Diego coaches, Al Wasl, have an Arabic-language tribute song entitled Maradona in Dubai. […]

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An advantage to working at a morning newspaper on the west coast of the United States:
Pretty much the whole sports day was over by the time we reached our deadline. We had complete news packages.
Not much terra firma is behind California in the time-zone map, aside from Alaska and Hawaii. So the total “day’s global […]

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When the Al Wasl club of Dubai and the UAE Pro League announced in June that they had hired Diego Maradona to be their coach … I wrote that “this will not be dull.”
Got that one right. But that was shooting fish in a barrel.
El Diego, FIFA’s co-player of the century (with Pele), is never […]

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A common misconception among people back in the U.S. is that we are not aware of what happens in the country’s major sports.
We are not swimming in a sea of chatter about what is going on in the NBA and NFL, and we do lose track of some of what happens back home (college sports, […]

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The UAE football team that won in Tashkent and clinched a place in the 2012 London Olympics …
The president of the country, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed, today awarded each player with 500,000 dirhams. Which converts to $136,000.
Which is real money for winning a match you already really wanted to win.

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