This has gotten nutty. Everything Fifa does as an international body is kinda wacky, but they are topping themsevles day by day. The latest: Fifa is calling on presidential candidate Mohamed bin Hammam and fellow executive committee member Jack Warner to speak at an investigate hearing into possible bribery. This has to do with the […]

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I talked to Carlo Nohra today about the upcoming Fifa presidential election. Nohra is the chief executive of the UAE domestic soccer league and a very bright guy, and he also worked several years with Mohamed bin Hammam, who is Sepp Blatter’s opponent in the election. I will be doing a piece on bin Hammam […]

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I love bobbleheads. Have I mentioned that? I have a bobblehead of David Eckstein on my desk here at The National in Abu Dhabi. Whenever I bump the desk, Li’l Eck gives me a little nod. It may be the only baseball bobblehead in a city of more than 1 million people. Thanks again, Michelle, […]

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Ten games all kicking off at 4 p.m. in England. Five teams facing potential relegation. It’s almost too much to follow, if you are trying to keep up the image of actually working — at work. All I know at halftime of those 10 games is this:

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For my weekly commentary that runs with the two-page “Pro League package” in The National … I had decided to do a roundup of “what others said about Diego Maradona coming to the UAE.” I expected that the most famous footballer of the past two generations would get all sorts of special attention. I was […]

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This was the big story today, and The National was all over it. Diego Maradona, “El Jefe Loco,” as I preferred to refer to him while I was writing the countdown to South Africa blog, has signed a two-year deal to coach the UAE Pro League club Al Wasl, starting with the 2011/12 season. First, […]

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In about a three-hour span today, Manchester United clinched its record 19th English top-flight league championship … and Manchester City secured its first significant trophy in 35 years by winning the FA Cup final. And how does any of this make it a big day in Abu Dhabi? Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed, brother of the […]

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We at The National did a story on this today … acknowledging that Friday the 13th is often considered to be an unlucky day in the Western world … noting that it doesn’t have the same meaning among Arabs and Muslims … but also noting that this culture, like apparently every culture on the planet, […]

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A co-worker of mine, a decade-plus ago, liked to announce, with mock solemnity, when things seemed completely out of control as we plunged towards the Armageddon of deadline: “Everything is falling into place …” Of course, often we had no particular plan, and how it came together was rather random. But his pronouncement inevitably made […]

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A curious yet predictable part of the “Osama Bin Laden whacking” was the immediate chorus of people who wanted “proof” that he was dead. One of them is a colleague of mine at The National, who in an op-ed piece that ran today said just that: “I would like to see some proof …” Well, […]

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