Have I written about this? Or just hinted at it? You may have heard that Brits have a different word for about half of all concepts Americans would express in “English” (boot instead of trunk, bonnet instead of hood, tip instead of Dumpster, rubbish instead of trash, lift instead of elevator, ad nauseum) — which […]

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By the time the UAE national football team made the final of the Gulf Cup, last week, I concede I was wondering what sums of money might be directed their way if they won it. I recalled that the president of the country gave each player on the Under 23 team Dh500,000 (about $136,000) when […]

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Never thought I would find an instance when something a Taliban spokesman said about hostilities in Afghanistan made sense … but with the considerable help of Britain’s Prince Harry, they have done it. Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, in remarks published in Britain on Monday, said he had killed Taliban militants […]

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Subtitled: “Misadventures in building your tour event’s field.” The Abu Dhabi Golf Championship got a fair bit of attention before it began, for two reasons, as I noted a few days ago: It included the world’s two highest-ranked players, Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods. And then it went horribly wrong.

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If we stipulate that the Abu Dhabi Grand Prix, which goes off in November, is a very big deal, with international appeal, and the Mubadala World Tennis Championship gets some notice, too, we perhaps are looking at one other event in the city which has a global audience, or the potential for one. And that […]

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The Gulf Cup. Technically, I suppose, it’s the Gulf Cup of Nations. Played every two years. Probably very few people, even serious soccer fans, know about this tournament. But is huge in the UAE and environs. And tonight the UAE senior side, augmented by the rising stars who played at the 2012 London Olympics, defeated […]

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Not much more to be said about this. Aside, maybe, from “What took you so long?” Two other thoughts:

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A person leaves town … switches states .. crosses an ocean … and eventually his sports preferences morph. It’s one of those things that you don’t realize until you do a sort of internal check. “Which teams’ results do I follow? Which have I stopped tracking? Which teams can make me feel a little better […]

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It is rare to see a woman at a soccer match, here in the UAE. Rarer still, by far, is to see an Emirati woman. A citizen, that is. So the notion that as many as 25 Emirati women took advantage of a chance to fly over to Bahrain (at Football Association expense) for the […]

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Alabama 42, Notre Dame 14, in the BCS title game. For college football. I don’t know what the point spread was, but I would have taken Alabama if they were giving anything less than 17. I’m pretty sure I read this somewhere, that this would be a bad game — oh, yes, on this blog, […]

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