This is just an astonishing concept, even in the modern era.
Someone has compiled a video showing every one of the Barcelona-record 234 goals scored by Lionel Messi. (Who set the club record yesterday.) And limited it to 14 minutes of video.
Here is the link to that video, which I first saw on Twitter from the […]

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As a Baby Boomer whose life was heavily influenced by the Cold War, I wanted to go to Moscow before the Soviets went out of business. But events conspired to keep it from happening.
I was to have gone to the 1980 Moscow Olympics, but then came the U.S.-led boycott over Afghanistan (them, again), and I […]

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When you’re on the high side of the big five-oh, you get a little more stingy with the “I’ll never forget that!” declarations. At this age, you have a pretty good notion you’ve long since forgotten an awful lot of “unforgettable” stuff.
But this setting, this game, this result … was so exotic, so unexpected and […]

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It wasn’t the worst example of me leaving behind something important in a cab. But it is in the discussion.
A few months ago, I left my wallet in the cab driven by our regular guy, Leonard. That made for a few minutes of panic before we got him on the phone and he said, yes, […]

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To work in a British-English newsroom, like The National, is to regularly hear expressions unknown in the United States.
One of the handier is “minus-one,” used when referring to media activities on the eve of a match. That is, it’s about the match, but “minus-one” day on the calendar.
It is when coaches come out of their […]

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Yes. I am in Tashkent. As in “Uzbekistan, capital of.”
The places that the game of soccer can take a person! It may be the greatest gig in sports writing.
A “dateline” is what American journalists call the name of a city/town (and sometimes its country) that is placed at the very start of a story. That […]

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So, while I had my head turned, Al Jazira fired its coach for being too harsh or too lenient or perhaps too Belgian, Baniyas owned up to the fact that it owed significant chunks of money to a couple of players, and David O’Leary, the Irishman who coached in Dubai last season, is going to […]

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An odd day, and not just because it was Leap Year Day.
The UAE swamped Lebanon in a World Cup qualifier, and 10,000 Lebanese fans went home more or less unhappy, even though the UAE defeating Lebanon should be a “dog bites man” event — which is to say, vaguely interesting, depending on the size of […]

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When you cover an event, as a journalist, your point of reference is the team you are following. Even in defeat. Well, of course. The default intellectual setting for fans as well as writers is not “their team won, and why” … it is “our team lost, and how come?”
When the UAE lost 3-1 to […]

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David Trezeguet. You may have heard of him. Played for France’s World Cup champions in 1998. Spent a decade at Juventus and scored 138 goals.
Also got the golden goal (remember the short history of that arrangement?) in the 2000 European championships, winning it 2-1 for France over Italy.
Well, Trezeguet is 34 now, and clearly near […]

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