The country has one professional sports league of significance,  and it’s the soccer Pro League, which is 12 teams spending significant amounts of money to try to win a domestic championship and perhaps last for a while in the Asian Champions League. Your basic soccer competition. Except with a bit more upheaval. If you thought […]

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Did an over-and-back to see the UAE national team play Iraq in the second game of Group D competition at the Asian Cup. As I may have mentioned yesterday, the night before the match, I had been struck by a sense that this would be an important game. For good or ill. I became convinced […]

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We decided tonight that I will go to Doha tomorrow to see the UAE play Iraq in a key Asian Cup game. It’s the second match in Group D play. The so-called Group of Death (every tournament has to have one). The UAE can’t clinch a spot in the second round, nor can it be […]

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I love the World Cup. But I’ve covered it. Four of them, actually,  from Italy 1990 through Japan/Korea of 2002. Grand event. But if we think in terms of “doing something I haven’t done before”, these are the two soccer events I would like to see, in person: 1. The Africa Cup of Nations. 2. […]

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North America is the only major continent that doesn’t have a really fun continental soccer championship. Probably because the U.S. and Mexico dominate things so thoroughly … well, of course that’s it. Where’s the fun in that? Mexico or the U.S. have won nine of the last 10 championships, with Canada slipping in there in […]

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A surge of social activity marked the end of the year. Yeah. What got into me? On Thursday night, we went to one of the 2-3 really nice French restaurants in the city, named Bord Eau, located in a big (too big, really) room in the Shangri La Hotel, and then we welcomed (as opposed […]

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I believe many of us like to think we’re glass-half-empty people. Doesn’t a sort of world-weariness make us seem, oh, more sophisticated? More realistic? Cock-eyed optimism … doesn’t the “cock-eyed” tell us all we need to know about optimists? Certainly, in the news biz, where we document famine and pestilence and death and destruction, optimists […]

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(With fixed link!) When you work at a newspaper, you don’t need to hear what your readers say. I mean, it could be healthy and informative, but most of the time all of us know what we did or didn’t do that made the newspaper not as good as it could have been. We know […]

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Just noticed this story on The National website, here in Abu Dhabi. I’m not even sure it made the print edition of the paper. After TP Mazembe of the Congo lost in the Club World Cup championships game, according to the Agence France-Presse story, some fans rioted in Lubumbashi, the hometown of the Mazembe club as […]

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(UPDATED, with thoughtful comment below on Concacaf/MLS.) Inter Milan won the Fifa Club World Cup tonight, and that absolutely falls into “dog bites man” on the news-o-meter scale. Inter’s opponent in the final here in Abu Dhabi was TP Mazembe of the Congo, a team spending $10 million on players this season, or about what […]

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