Not even Brazil lost this badly. Manchester United 7, LA Galaxy 0 — as reported in The National by our correspondent in Pasadena, Gregg Patton. Wow. The Galaxy probably is the marquee franchise of Major League Soccer, with the four MLS Cup championships, and all … but all that was left of them after their […]

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A lot of sports editors around the world today weren’t exactly surprised that, with the end of the World Cup, not a whole lot is going on … but it still represents an unpleasant reality. A limited number of scheduled events in the near future. It is the case in the UAE, and it is […]

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Deadline! Journalists love it and hate it. We love the rush. We hate that it probably will shorten our lives. (Or, less dramatically, get us in trouble for missing it.) We will be dealing with deadline for the World Cup final tomorrow.

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For a while, there, I feared for the republic. Any criticism of the U.S. national soccer team was met by outraged rebuttals from fans and soccer bloggers-cum-reporters. They were unwilling to countenance the notion that the U.S. effort in Brazil was anything but The Best Possible Outcome or that Jurgen Klinsmann was anyone other than […]

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From the 1994 World Cup through the 2010 edition, the U.S. national soccer team became increasingly American. Played by men born and bred to the game in the U.S. By the time South Africa 2010 rolled around, every man who made the starting XI for any of the four games the Americans played — and […]

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A few days back I posted an entry about how I doubt I will be able to cheer for the U.S. national team at the coming World Cup, because I have developed an animus towards Jurgen Klinsmann, the coach who dumped Landon Donovan. That provoked some reaction, some of it more than a bit tart. “We don’t […]

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One of the most fascinating concepts in sports is the spectacular collapse. A team is way up (Dodgers over Giants, 1951; Yankees with a 3-0 ALCS lead over the Red Sox in 2004) , a sure thing, no problem at all, a fat lead … and then a break in momentum, a turning point, panic […]

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So, watching the boxscore from the Oklahoma City Thunder versus Memphis Grizzlies playoffs game tonight, with the Clippers to come next … and I had a flashback to the media work room at Staples Center in Los Angeles. And the anxiety produced when the game before the game dragging on too long.

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I suppose the people involved with any news website come to know their audiences. And how unpredictable, capricious and utterly inexplicable they can be. Why no “hits” on this local story? Why scads of hits on this non-local or semi-local story? At The National, for instance, we can get a nice number of page views […]

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I was in the office today when this story exploded. Which is what stories do in the era of Twitter. They turn into flaming meteors the size of New Jersey which slam into the news cycle, crushing everything else. When the 144-character primary news source (that would be Twitter) gets hold of a story it […]

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