Been a while since I had the nerve to hold myself to a ridiculous plan to report on a sports event, to spend X-number of hours on the road — or in the air, or both. This was back before I got old and my nerves frayed. I have written about several of my hare-brained […]

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At this moment, only one story commands the attention of European sports fans. And that would be the misguided attempt by a dozen of the continent’s best-known clubs to break away from the European Champions League and form their own elite competition — which they plan to call the Super League. Twelve clubs have announced […]

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I have lived outside the United States for most of the past 12 years and I can vouch for this: Over that much time your sports interests mutate. Perhaps significantly. Some sports pretty much disappear from your mind. Thinking all high school sports; just can’t keep track of any of them, so I lost track […]

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For a month, maybe two, it looked like one of the most competitive Premier League battles in recent history. In the early going, to scan the upper half of the league table was to find several names few would have expected. West Ham, Everton, Tottenham and Leicester City all had their turn at the top […]

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It was a preposterous bit of “news” in the offices of The National newspaper, based in the United Arab Emirates. Diego Maradona had signed a two-season contract to coach the Dubai club Al Wasl FC of the UAE Pro League. (Sure, and Pele was going to come with him as an assistant.) However, as that […]

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The new (to me) slogan attached to the U.S. Men’s National Soccer Team is kinda cute. “THE FUTURE IS US.” All caps and a period, see? So “US” can be a pronoun as well as the US in the abbreviation for “United States”. It is a temptation to blurt out a rejoinder to that: “AND […]

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Maybe it’s me. But I didn’t find 55 days of government-ordered Covid-19 quarantine, in our home in France, to be all that bad.

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At the highest levels — say, in the English Premier League — soccer is played on immaculately groomed fields of vibrant green. The reality is that you should not study the grass too closely unless you are a connoisseur of the dark art of spitting. Throughout the history of the game, players have been spewing […]

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Sports may not be the be-all and end-all we came to count on. Many of us have only recently grasped that, as sports content disappeared from our TV diets, shoved aside by a microscopic but deadly bug known as Covid-19, or the Coronavirus.

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The biggest story in world football since the most recent Champions League final (May, 2019) … was Liverpool’s dominance of European soccer. Before their game at Watford last night, Liverpool not only was being called “the best club football team in the world”, and they had some staggering numbers to back up that assessment. Unbeaten […]

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